her brother, she found herself, amazingly, wanting to cry. There was a difference between battling tears and wishing one could shed tears. In this case, Dawn wished she could shed the tears and maybe, in the process, ease the agony filling her as she stared back at him.
Jonas didn’t matter; he was just a prick and everyone knew it. A calculating, manipulating, game-playing son of a Council member. That was what everyone knew him to be, so there was no foul there. A Breed could expect him to do something so utterly evil. But Callan. Callan, who she thought loved her, she couldn’t make sense of at all.
“Dash shouldn’t have told you,” Callan sighed, shaking his head. “Not yet.”
“Really?” She blinked as though in amazement, when she wanted to scream at him in fury. “Perhaps he should have told me sooner, Callan. Then maybe, just maybe, my mate wouldn’t have gotten over me. Maybe he wouldn’t have slept with other women instead of me.” Her voice rose before she snapped her teeth together in fury. “Oh, how calm and regretful you were before I came here,” she whispered. “Telling me that my mate, my fucking mate, slept with other women. That he would marry another. That he deserved a life outside me.” She was shaking now. She jerked her hands from her pockets, and before she could stop it her finger was pointing at him accusingly. “You nearly cost me everything I hold dear with your bloody interference.”
“Or did I save your sanity at a time when you could ill afford to divide your strength between a mate demanding your presence in his bed, and the strength you needed to deal with what Dayan did to attempt to destroy you?” he asked. “Tell me honestly you could have slept with him, Dawn, and I’ll accept your judgment of my actions.”
She hated that tone of voice. The grieving resonance, the pain in his eyes as he stared at her. The way his fists clenched at his side.
She remembered the day he had found those discs. How he had drawn her into a room alone, closed the door on the others and laid them slowly on the table as she stared at them in horror.
A tear had slid down his cheek. A single tear as he asked in a voice savage with raw emotion why she hadn’t come to him.
Dawn shook her head now, as she had then. “I don’t know. No more than I knew when I came here how I would respond. But since that question has been answered to everyone’s satisfaction now, perhaps it could have been then.”
“You were still waking us with your screams almost nightly,” he snarled. “You couldn’t bear to be in the same room with the man without shaking in fear, and you ask how I could do such a thing to you? How could I not?”
“Because it wasn’t your call,” she snarled right back at him. “He was my mate. He wasn’t a ravening monster that had no self-control. You should have trusted him. And you should have given me the chance.” Her fists clenched as the rage threatened to engulf her. “You took my choice, Callan. And that was wrong. You took my mate when I ached for him, when I needed him. And you took my choice.” Just as it had been taken so many times before.
“That smirking son of a bitch. He was so arrogantly cocky, strutting around Sanctuary as though he owned the place and watching you like a hungry dog. You were too fragile. He had no control then, Dawn. He had nothing but his hunger and his certainty that what he wanted should be his.”
“If that were true, then he wouldn’t have given a damn what you wanted,” she yelled back. “You let your guilt nearly destroy me, Callan. You didn’t want me with Seth, because if I left, then you couldn’t make up for the years that I, myself and no one else, allowed Dayan to destroy me.”
The room was silent as she finished. She stared back into Callan’s tormented gaze before she turned her attention to a silent Jonas.
He stared back as expressionlessly, as coldly and unmovingly, as an iceberg. She respected him, but she didn’t particularly like him. There were very few who did.
“I wanted to protect you, Dawn.” Callan exhaled roughly. “I still want to protect you, but not to the extent that I would have held you back from your mate if I thought for a second that being with him wouldn’t have traumatized you worse at the time. I did what I felt I had to do.”
His golden eyes swirled with emotion. Anger and regret and power. Callan carried his power easily. His shoulders didn’t bend from it, and he never flinched from what he had to do. Callan was never weak, and he never faltered. And she knew he didn’t regret that long-ago decision he had made. Nothing she said, nothing she felt, would ever change that about him.
“You and Jonas make a good pair,” she finally whispered sadly. “You don’t care about the individual Breed you’re making the decisions for, all you care about is your own idea of what you believe is right for them.”
“That’s not true,” Callan snarled furiously.
“But it is true,” she refuted calmly, yet she felt broken inside. She felt as though she had lost something imperative to her life, and in a way she knew she had. She had lost the brother she knew she could depend on—no matter what, she had believed Callan would be there for her. And she had been wrong.
“I nearly left Sanctuary that first year without Seth,” she told him. “I nearly ran, because I couldn’t bear smelling the scent of him each time he came to Sanctuary and believing he didn’t want me enough to so much as seek me out and say hello.” She shook her head painfully. “You and Jonas decided my life for me, and you nearly decided my death. If Seth had married another, if he had impregnated that cow who’d been trying to trap him into marriage, then it would have destroyed me as nothing else. Is that what you wanted for me?”
“I wanted you whole,” he bit out, pushing his hands through his long hair as he glared at Dash again. “That’s all I ever wanted for you, Dawn.”
“I’m whole now,” she assured him flippantly. “You can fly back to Sanctuary with a clear conscience. Been nice seeing you. Tell Merinus hi.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass,” he growled. “It’s not pleasant.”
“Oh, you think it’s not pleasant?” She rounded her eyes and stared back at him incredulously. “Wow, Callan, should I bow and ask your forgiveness now? I guess you just might have to accept it for the time being, because attacking you isn’t an option. Merinus might hurt me.”
Jonas shifted then. A smooth flow of muscle, not a tensing, but a warning. She turned back to him and smiled coldly.
“I want to be around when you find your mate,” she snarled.
His brow lifted. “I doubt she would give me the trouble it would appear you give those who love you, Dawn.”
“I bet she digs a very deep hole and does all she can to hide from you,” she retorted insultingly. “And I couldn’t blame her. Her life will be nothing but a series of attempts to avoid your calculations. Tell me, Jonas, how did keeping me away from Seth benefit you? It must have, or you would have never done it. Did it keep the money flowing in? Was Seth more charitable when he believed he was protecting his woman than you thought he would have been if he had had her?”
Her fists clenched at her sides as the pain drove spikes of fury into her brain. She knew Jonas. She knew how calculating he could be. One person’s pain wouldn’t be a blip on his radar when it came to the welfare of the Breed society as a whole.
“It was my decision, Dawn. Not Jonas’s,” Callan stated firmly.
She stared back at her brother. She had always admired his strength, his integrity, his determination to see not just the Breeds as a race survive, but each individual Breed survive whole and intact. Until her.
“Why, Callan?” she whispered. “Why would you do that to me?”
Before he could answer, Dawn tensed at the scent of her mate outside the door. A second later the door opened behind her and Seth stepped inside.
“Come to join the party?” She turned to him with a bright smile and a clenching of her stomach. The arousal was there, but so was the pain. “Come on in. It’s just getting fun.”
He didn’t say a word. He moved to her, his broad palms cupping her shoulders as she t
urned, drawing her back against his chest. She felt his heartbeat, his warmth. His scent and his strength wrapped around her, and her breath hitched with the renewed pain that fed into her soul.
“Callan.” She felt Seth nod behind her as Callan glared at Seth, the gold of his eyes flickering with anger.
“You weren’t invited to the meeting, Mr. Lawrence,” Jonas said, his voice dark, controlled.
“My house.” Seth shrugged before Dawn could snarl back at the Breed director. “I didn’t need an invitation.”
Dawn breathed in, her gaze still locked with Callan’s as she moved slowly out of Seth’s embrace. She would face them all on her own terms. She didn’t need a protector, she needed a partner.
“We were discussing old times,” she told him brightly, crossing her arms over her chest as she watched his hands slide into his trouser pockets. “You know, all those nasty little images they used to run you off without telling me about it.” She met his eyes, and it hurt. There was somber acceptance there.
“I had a right to know, Dawn,” he told her. “Callan wasn’t wrong in allowing me to see the hell they put you through. I was wrong to stay away.”
She flinched. Suddenly, for a second, those images were more than just the images of a Breed being tortured. They were her. For a second, the protective shield she had placed between herself and the past slipped, and she was sucked into a rage, a horror, an overriding shame so deep, so agonizing, she had to turn her back on them to hold back a cry.
Just as quickly it was gone, but not before she heard the muttered curse and enraged growl that came from Callan’s throat. In the past, it had been his arms that had sheltered her when she felt broken; now, it was her mate’s arms. They wrapped around her, strengthened the control she was fighting for and returned the strength to her limbs. How had that happened? Those feelings, so intense, slicing away at her entire being? How had they slipped through?
“I’d die for you,” Seth whispered at her ear. “And so would he.”
She shook her head; she knew that. That painful realization was all that had kept her from breaking the day she learned Callan had betrayed her.
She straightened and turned back to Callan.
All the pent-up rage brewing inside her broke free. Years of knowledge, of hatred, of the aching pain that drove her to run until she felt as though she would drop. All the needs, the fears, the pain exploded in her brain until it was all she could do to hold on to the animal clawing at her emotions.
“All these years I thought there was one man’s eyes that I could stare into who hadn’t seen those horrible discs. One man who didn’t know how I begged to a God that didn’t care.” Callan’s eyes widened in shock as the throttled scream tore from her throat. “You let him see. You let him see me become an animal. You let him see how little we mattered in the eyes of the god that didn’t create us and damned sure didn’t adopt us. Damn you to hell, Callan. You had no right.”
And she couldn’t stand here and hurt like this. She couldn’t accept what he had done, not yet, maybe not ever. And the animalistic fury rising inside her couldn’t be given a chance to escape. Never again.
“Dawn, that’s enough.” Seth’s voice was steady, controlled, when she felt anything but controlled.
“Yeah, it is enough.” She jerked the door open and moved quickly from the room. She walked, she didn’t run—but everything inside her was screaming to run. To push herself, to put distance between herself and the pain.
“You will not turn your back on me like this.” Callan grabbed the sleeve of her uniform, pulled her around and stared down at her in snarling fury.
Angry, he was a dangerous sight to behold. His amber eyes glowed almost red; his lips had pulled back to reveal the fearsome canines, strong and sharp, as a feral snarl twisted his lips.
“Why not?” she hissed back. “You turned yours on me when you dared to betray me this way. When you showed another man what they did to me. Not just my mate, Callan, but anyone.” She was shaking, she could feel—something. Something worse than rage, something worse than betrayal, building inside her. “They raped me. They forced me to act like an animal and you let him see it. Hell, why not just send it to those fucking documentary bastards to use and then the world can see it too? Hell yeah, why not? Why fucking care at this point?”
She tore away from him and moved quickly down the hall. She needed to run. She needed to hunt. Those options were closed to her though. As she made her way back to Seth’s room, she knew she couldn’t leave the house. She couldn’t lose herself in the shadowed vegetation that ringed the island, because Seth would come looking for her. He would come looking for her, even though his life was in danger and an assassin was just waiting to get his sights on him.
CHAPTER 14
Seth caught Callan’s arm as the other man tensed to rush after Dawn. He had seen what he knew Callan didn’t want to face. The woman emerging inside her, the one fighting with the past and the child she tried to keep buried.
Quickly, Seth moved in front of Callan and ignored the powerful hand that latched on to his throat, the sharp canines that flashed in lethal warning.
“She’s not yours to protect now,” he told the other man softly, staring back at him in determination.
Callan wasn’t a man he wanted to fight, but he would. The Breeds were damned strong, they had been engineered for strength, for endurance, but Seth had found there were more than a few advantages to the mating heat hormone. In the past ten years, he too had grown stronger, his muscles more adaptable, gaining in strength and endurance.
A decade ago he would have been no match for the pride leader, now, he’d at least give him a hell of a fight.
“She’ll always be mine to protect,” Callan snarled, jerking his hand back as he cast a frustrated glance down the hall. “She’ll run now. She’ll try to hunt. Her senses are compromised and she’ll only end up hurt if that fucking assassin is out there.”
“She won’t leave the house, Callan.”
“And you know this how?”
“Because I’m her mate. She knows I’ll follow her. You hurt her, and she doesn’t understand why,” he told the other man. “I do. But you won’t make her accept it this way. Let her realize it on her own. You’re too much a part of her life for her to turn away from you permanently. Unless you push her.”
“Understand, do you?” Callan’s teeth snapped together furiously. “You’re just as fucking arrogant now as you were then, you cocky little bastard.”
“And you’re just as much the frustrated father trying to make up for things that were no fault of yours,” he shot back. “And now I know where Dawn got her smart-assed tendencies. She’s not a child, and I’m not the big bad seducer trying to break her heart. I’m the last person you have to protect her from.”
He didn’t give the Lion Breed a chance to answer but turned and moved quickly along the hallway, following his mate. The pride leader was stepping close to a line in the sand that Seth hadn’t even been aware existed. A line he had come perilously close to crossing only once before, ten years earlier the day Callan had accused him of attempting to buy Dawn.
Son-of-a-bitch Breeds had more pride and sheer balls than anyone Seth had ever met, and he was getting flat tired of their habit of poking their noses into his and Dawn’s lives.
Callan had let her suffer when Seth could have been there, when he could have tried to ease her pain, tried to be the mate she needed. His guilt and his fears for her had overcome everything else. And Seth understood why, but enough was enough.
He stalked to his bedroom, where he knew Dawn was waiting. She wouldn’t endanger his life, and she knew he would follow her. He would always follow her now, no matter where she went.
He stepped into the sitting room and watched as she flung her utility belt to the couch. He’d heard the comment Patience Foreman had made regarding Dawn’s clothes. He wondered how she would react to the deliveries being made in the morning. The clothes he had always
dreamed of dressing her in. Silks and satins, the colors of the earth and of dawn.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” She turned back to him, her body vibrating with the anger and the hurt rolling through her.
Seth closed the door and locked it before crossing his arms and leaning back against it, remaining silent.
The dim light from the lamp he had left on earlier cast a soft shadow around her, but nothing could dim the fire glowing in her eyes.
“I mean it,” she snarled, and the little feminine hiss of fury had the effect of arousing him further rather than warning him off.
She turned her back on him. Slender, stiff hands propped on her hips as she paced off the other side of the room, glancing back at him with a furious curl on her lip. For some reason, Breeds always thought that flash of canine would intimidate. He wondered what she would think if she knew that the sight of her canines just made his dick hard.
“Don’t you have a party to attend?” she sneered. “Go right ahead and take care of business, Seth. I’ll sit right here where I can’t embarrass you with my uniform and my lack of class.”
He almost snorted at that one. Instead he just tilted his head and watched her. She needed to get the anger out first and he’d be damned if he’d let her do it by fighting with him.
A furious growl left her throat before she clamped her lips shut and turned her back on him. A second later the tension left her shoulders enough that they seemed to slump dejectedly. And that broke his heart. He hurt for her, with her. His little Dawn. She didn’t understand Callan’s love for her any more than she understood how to handle the emotions that only built between her and Seth.
He forced himself to stand where he was, to let her work through that initial fire.
“Dayan made me watch those discs,” she finally whispered, and Seth flinched at the raw pain in her voice. “For years. Years and years, over and over again. He made me watch them. I never remembered what they did to me, but I remember watching those discs.”
Dayan had been insane. Seth thanked God he was dead; it saved him the trouble of fighting Callan for the right to strike the killing blow.
“After the escape, I went to sleep. Callan said I slept for days. When I woke up, I didn’t remember any of it. I remembered the labs, I remembered the beatings and the training and the pain. But I didn’t remember the rapes clearly.” Her voice was at a near whisper, confusion filling her tone. “How do you just forget something that molded you?” She turned back to him then, and the aching pain and loss on her face tore at his soul.
“Sometimes, God gives us strength, Dawn, where we only perceive weakness.”
She sneered at that. “God didn’t create me, Seth. Don’t pull that on me. He had nothing to do with this.”
He shook his head at that. “You can’t convince me of that, Dawn. Would you like to know why?”
“I guess you’re just going to tell me whether I want you to or not,” she bit out resentfully.
“Man can’t create a soul, Dawn, only God can. And you can’t live without your soul. You know that as well as I do. If what you’re saying is true, then the Breeds would be no more than the automatons the Council dreamed of creating, rather than free and fighting to live and to love.”
With those words he moved toward her. She stared back at him, denial and furious pain resonating in her eyes. Those beautiful eyes. Not the amber of Callan’s, but the color of sweet honey touched by fire. And they broke his heart with the shadows that filled them, even as the heat that seemed always present now simmered his blood.
She was a part of his soul now, and he wondered if she even realized how much a part of him that she was, that they were of each other. Earlier, as morning filled the sky and only the dimmest light pierced the bedroom, he had felt it. Felt it as she moved over him, as she purred for him.
“I wanted to come to you without those images between us,” she whispered hoarsely, refusing to shed the tears he knew lay trapped within her. “I wanted you to touch me without remembering that, without seeing another man touching me.”
The shame that curled inside her nearly brought her to her knees now. She had no idea what to do with the emotions ripping through her, the need for something that she couldn’t identify, and a sudden terror that the shadows she could feel pressing against her mind were memories she didn’t want to see.
“And do you think that’s what I saw, Dawn?” he asked her gently, his hands settling on her shoulders before running lightly down her arms. “I didn’t see another man touching you. I saw a monster attempting to destroy something so pure and so innocent that it defies my ability to describe it. And I saw its inability to do so. Because the soul of that child was too strong, and too well protected by the being that gave that soul to her. You’re pure. As innocent as a baby’s breath, and, whether you believe it or not, sweetheart, protected by the most powerful being in the universe.”
Dawn shook her head. She couldn’t believe that. Not again. Not ever again. Because if she dared, then she might trust again, and if she trusted in His help then she might as well trust in a coyote’s.
“Yeah, real pure and innocent,” she sneered instead. “So pure that you ran the second you saw it. Just took Callan’s word for the fact that I was too weak to be a mate. Too damaged to be your woman.”
“He loves you, Dawn. Like a brother. Like a father. Like the man who failed to protect you when he knew you needed him the most, and he was determined not to fail again. Will you punish both of you by refusing to forgive him for it?”
She jerked away from Seth, tossing him a resentful glare as she moved jerkily to the bar and pulled a water from the mini-fridge there. More as an excuse for time than out of any real thirst.
As she drank, she fought the logic he was using against her, as well as the heat beginning to build within her. She wanted to fight that logic. She wanted to fight Seth, Callan and Jonas. She wanted to tell them all to fuck off, to leave her the hell alone. And she couldn’t. She couldn’t because she loved both Callan and Seth too much.
“I should have had a choice,” she whispered as she capped the water and set it on the bar.
She hunched her shoulders against the pain driving inside her like a bitter blade. “Someone should have given me the choice.” The choice to accept her mate, to grow strong beside him rather than without him.
“Yes, we should have.”
He surprised her with his answer. It didn’t surprise her that he followed her, that he cupped her cheek and stared down at her, his gray eyes cloudy, darkening with emotion and with acceptance.
“You deserved the chance to choose for yourself, and I’ll take that blame on my shoulders Dawn. Callan shouldn’t have to. I was the one who walked away when I knew better. I walked away because I was terrified of putting fear in your eyes, and I knew I was too damned weak to bear to see it there.”
And she was weak. Too weak to listen to this. Too hurt and too unsettled by the emotions and the edge of panic she could feel rising inside her.
“Do you see fear?” she snapped back at him.
His lips quirked, sadly, wryly. “I don’t see fear, Dawn.”
She reached up, speared her fingers in his hair, gripped the silken strands and pulled his lips to hers.
“Prove it.”
She licked his lips then pushed her tongue past them as they parted—to argue or to kiss, she didn’t know, and she didn’t care. The mating hormone had been spilling into her system for hours, burning through her, lashing at the control she prided herself on.
She didn’t have to have control now. She didn’t have to wait or suffer in silence. This was her mate, and she was tired of waiting.
“Fuck!” Seth’s head jerked back, but she knew the heat was in him too. She had smelled it on him, she could taste it in his kiss.
“Yes, fuck,” she hissed. “Right here. Right now.”
She jerked his belt loose as he stared at her in surprise, and a second later had the zipper lo
wered. Before he could form the words she saw hovering on his lips, she had his cock free and she was on her knees.
She had been dying to taste him. For years she had dreamed of tasting him, of taking him with her mouth and her tongue, laving the mating hormone over the stiff flesh of his erection just to see the result.
“Oh hell, Dawn.” A strangled groan left his throat as she gripped the hardened shaft with both hands and her head lowered to consume the throbbing tip with her mouth.
Desperate fingers drove into her hair then. Seth’s fingers. They grabbed handfuls of hair and clenched, just enough. Just enough to prick at her scalp, but not enough to cause pain or fear. Just enough to make certain she didn’t release him.