. What I can’t get is the information you were paired with Ms. Johnson to acquire. Are you any closer?”
Stygian crossed his arms over his chest and glared back at Jonas. “What do you think?”
Jonas’s nostrils flared as he obviously fought back his anger. “We don’t have much time left, Stygian. Not just because of Amber. The Council has begun transferring key scientists in both genetics as well as Breed physiology and mating heat to highly secured, secretive labs, while known high-ranking members of their elite guard have been making their way into the desert several miles from here.”
The Genetics Council’s Elite Guard had, through the decades, been tasked with the kidnapping of the higher-profile women whose genetics were deemed essential for various creation projects. They were the best. The most highly trained, elusive and competent abduction specialists in the world.
“There’s more going on here, and more players, than I can keep up with at one time.” Cavalier’s growl was rough, his voice almost ruined as he faced Stygian, his expression bland. “I’ve been tracking transmissions from the soldiers in the desert as well as between President Martinez and his head of security, Audi Johnson. Johnson and Martinez both are discussing the canyon where Liza and Claire went over. They’re talking about whether or not they ‘cleaned’ enough.”
Whether or not they cleaned enough.
Stygian grimaced as anger began to burn inside him. The Johnsons and the Martinezes knew exactly what had been done. They knew how their daughters had been brought back from the dead, and now Stygian wanted to know.
“Their fathers are lying to us,” Jonas gritted out, the silver eyes flashing with merciless fury. “You know it and I know it. With half-truths and carefully worded denials, they’re lying through their teeth. The only way we’re going to get the truth out of them is by forcing it out.”
Stygian gritted his teeth at the knowledge that regarding Liza and Claire’s fathers, Jonas was entirely right. “Where does that leave us?”
“With Liza,” Jonas stated softly, though his expression was determined. “I want to bring Ely and Cassie in, Stygian. Ely can run the samples just as she always does for mating heat, and Cassie can do whatever the hell it is she does. We could get the answers we need. And if we’re lucky, maybe Ely can come up with something using the new mating tests she’s developed.”
Dr. Elyiana Morrey, the Breeds’ head scientist and doctor, worked tirelessly on finding the answers on the why and the how of mating heat. She was certain the answers were in the deepest layers of the genetics strands, and had actually found a way to begin comparing DNA before and after mating heat. Now, she just needed the new mates to work with.
Because mating heat, like all things in nature, like all viruses that developed, never remained the same.
“I’ll discuss it with her…”
“Discussing it would defeat the purpose,” Jonas protested then. “If, as I suspect, a ritual took those memories and replaced them with someone else’s, then warning her warns the safeguards placed on it. Risking that is out of the question. Besides, if she’s aware of Cassie’s identity when she meets her, then she’ll be on guard. That will also steal any advantage we have.”
And it was entirely possible Liza had heard of Cassie. She was friends with Ashley, Emma and Shiloh, and Cassie wasn’t a taboo subject as mating heat was. She could well know Cassie’s abilities to look inside a person and see the secrets that haunted them. Whether they knew they were haunted by them or not.
“You’re asking me to do something no Breed has yet done,” he growled. “You want me to betray my mate by lying to her.”
“I want you to save her.” Jonas breathed out wearily as he pushed his fingers through his hair and grimaced with bitter anger. “Her and my child. If we don’t learn the truth, for certain, one way or the other, then the Genetics Council will take her and learn it for themselves. And if they take her, then you may never find her again.”
That was Stygian’s greatest fear. That somehow, the Coyote soldiers sent for her might actually manage to take her. If they took her, they could disappear with her in ways that Stygian could never find her.
Raking his fingers through his hair, he turned and paced away from the director, refusing to glance at the other Breeds there.
“Amber’s becoming more ill by the week, Stygian.” It was Rule who spoke as Stygian moved to the wide windows on the other side of the room. “The fevers are coming more often and they’re taxing her strength further each time.”
“Liza’s my mate,” he said bitterly.
She was his heart, his soul. They were asking him to betray every part of himself.
“And Amber is a child,” Jonas said softly. “Liza is a grown woman with the ability to make choices to determine her own fate. She suspects, Stygian, we both know she does. She’s doing nothing to learn the truth.”
Crossing his arms over his chest, Stygian stared at the desert beyond the hotel, wishing to hell he’d find a way to keep this from happening.
“We’re going to the crash site at dawn,” he told them. “She wants to know.”
“She’ll fight it. She’s probably fighting it now,” Mordecai said behind him. “But I have a suggestion.”
Stygian turned back slowly. “And that would be?”
“She keeps a personal journal on her laptop. I’ve tried to access it, but she’s not powered it up since she’s been here.”
“And you know she has a journal how?” Stygian growled back at him.
“I was almost in when she shut it down the last time she had the computer online,” Mordecai admitted. “I managed to pull some key words, though, which I used to be certain she may have information there. ‘Dreams,’ ‘nightmares,’ ‘labs’ and ‘pain.’”
Stygian tensed further.
“All you have to do is plug it in, power it up and attach a flash drive, I’ll take care of the rest. You don’t have to steal a password or hack in yourself,” Jonas assured him.
Stygian threw the other Breed a hard look. “And you think that will excuse the fact that I betrayed her? In her eyes or any others’? I’ll always be the only Breed to deliberately break the trust his mate has given him.”
“A mate who refuses to trust you?” Rule growled back at him. “She suspects she’s Honor Roberts, Stygian, just as you do.”
Stygian turned back to them again, the look he shot each of them filled with the mockery rising inside him. “It doesn’t matter if she trusts me or not. That doesn’t excuse betraying her.”
“Distrust excuses many things, my friend,” Rule said, as though reminding him of something he didn’t already know. “But if there’s no trust, there’s no love. What loyalty should any of us have to a mate that refuses to love?”
“What loyalty should any of us have to a mate that refuses to love?”
At that point, Liza rose jerkily from the bed, pulled her gown over her head, collected her robe from the floor and put it on with a furious shrug of her shoulders.
She couldn’t believe what she had heard.
Belting the robe with a furious jerk, she swept from the bedroom and headed for the connecting room.
Where had they lost their minds?
Just to begin with, had they forgotten that the connecting suite was tied into the intercom on the room phone? Stygian had set it up himself, just in case someone, anyone, attempted to invade their suite.
They were listed as staying in the connecting suite, not the one they were actually in. The precaution had been taken to ensure he and Liza had a head start in escaping.
Instead, it had given Liza a heads-up.
A heads-up into the plans Jonas Wyatt had, and why.
Gripping the door to the connecting suite, she pushed it open hard enough that the sound of it slamming into the wall behind it had Jonas, Rule Breaker and Mordecai Savant swinging to the side, their weapons drawing and leveling on Stygian as he jumped in front of her.
Stepping aroun
d him, she faced the other three furiously before pinning Jonas Wyatt with her gaze.
“Have you once come to me and asked me to take a single blood test, or to allow you permission to access the database when you told me you needed it? You have lied to me continually, Jonas. To me and to the Navajo Council. But not once did you ever ask for help.” she said, her voice shaking with her anger as he and the others slowly holstered their weapons.
“Would it have done any good?” Jonas asked.
“If I thought for one minute it would be used for Amber only, then yes, it would have,” she snapped back at him, her fingers curling into fists, fury burning through her. “But as Stygian said, there wouldn’t be a chance, would there?”
“War isn’t pretty,” Rule growled.
“This isn’t war.” She hated this. She hated him. She hated the bleak fury tearing through her. “You would use anyone, anything, to get what you wanted, wouldn’t you, Wyatt? You want to know who I might be, but you still want that database. You still believe it will lead you to Gideon Cross, don’t you?
And the information was in her journal. The chiefs of the Six had actually suggested she keep the information written down somewhere safe, despite her protests. She’d never understood why, nor had she given it much thought in the past months either.
“I’d use anything or anyone to save my child,” he snarled back, the dangerous incisors at the side of his teeth flashing warningly. “Don’t doubt that for a second.”
“And pretending I’m Honor Roberts will do that for you? Ordering Stygian to betray the one person it would destroy him to betray would do that?”
“Is that why you rushed in here so quickly, rather than waiting to hear his answer?” Jonas asked her then, suddenly mocking rather than angry. “Afraid he’d agree to do as I asked, Ms. Roberts?”
“He wouldn’t have done it,” she sneered back at him. “If he were going to do it, he would have done it by now. He’s had weeks to help you betray me and he’s still refused. What more would it take to convince you? What more would it take to get you the hell out of Window Rock?”
“What would it take?” He took a step forward, only to pause at the sudden, fearsome snarl that sounded in Stygian’s chest at the inherent threat in Jonas’s move. “It would take you, Fawn Corrigan and that damned Breed you called Judd. The three of you, and I could draw Gideon in. Then, I would have what I needed to save my daughter.”
“And what do you need to save your daughter?” Liza crossed her arms over her breasts and stared back at him curiously. “Tell me, Mr. Wyatt, what do they have that she needs if you can’t access their memories?”
“Whatever’s left in their bodies of the serum Brandenmore used. The changes that took place in their bodies would be apparent in both you and Fawn, while Gideon and Judd would show the changes to the Breed physiology. That’s what I want.”
As he spoke, terror chased through her.
It was all she could do to keep her expression closed, to contain her emotions and her rage. To contain her fear.
Because as he spoke, she saw herself, but she wasn’t herself. Watching doctors, seeing the printouts lying beside them, reading the information. It made sense.
For only seconds, it was there. A formula, a child’s pain-filled cries and the knowledge that, once again, the tests were going to hurt. Once again, they were going to experience hell.
She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath.
She hadn’t realized that for the briefest second, the pain that radiated through her could be felt by every Breed in the room.
And each of them flinched.
“Enough!” Stygian’s arms were suddenly around her, pulling her against his chest a second before she was able to slip back into that distant, remote place she’d been unable to access since he’d taken her.
“I’m sorry.” She was almost wheezing again.
God, she hadn’t wheezed in so long.
“They can have the damned code,” she whispered hoarsely. “I’ll give them the damned thing. Just get them out of here.”
“The code isn’t what they needed,” he told her, his own voice thick with fury now. “It wasn’t the code. It was this, Liza. It was your pain he wanted to access, and you’re giving him exactly what he wanted.”
But was that it?
Staring back at Jonas, she saw a man tormented. His eyes flashed with enraged mercury, his expression becoming taut as he fought to wipe it free of emotion.
No, her pain wasn’t what Jonas wanted any more than he wanted to see his own daughter’s pain. He just wanted answers—answers and the key to save the child he loved as though she were created from his genetics rather than another man’s.
“Don’t you know I would help you if I could,” she suddenly cried out to Jonas, desperate, terrified of what she suddenly felt rising within herself. “Do you think I would deny her for the hell of it?”
“No,” he said, his voice stark. “Not for the hell of it,” he finally breathed out wearily. “But to avoid hell? Yes, I believe to avoid whatever hell may be awaiting you on the other side, you would gladly walk through the flames barefoot and with a smile.” He shook his dark head, turned to the two men watching them and jerked his head to the door before turning back to her. “I just pray you realize that whatever you’re fighting to escape could well be my daughter’s only hope of life.”
“If that’s true, if she’s dying because Brandenmore gave her whatever he gave the girls he had before, then how did they survive? If it’s killing Amber, Jonas, why didn’t it kill them?”
Her fingers were digging into Stygian’s arm as she demanded the answer, demanded to know the one thing no one seemed to be discussing.
To that, Jonas breathed out with weary helplessness, “I don’t know, Liza. All I know is that from day to day I watch her struggle to live. To breathe through the pain. And every day I see the same question in her eyes. ‘Why won’t you help me, Daddy?’ And it’s killing me as nothing those fucking scientists who created me could have. I promise you that. There’s no hell greater than seeing that in her eyes, hearing her cries, and knowing how helpless I am to save her if death is truly what she’s facing. And if it is.” His eyes suddenly flashed with an icy promise. “If I lose her because of your refusal to face whatever it is you’re trying to escape, then I swear to you, I’ll make damned sure you pay for it.”
Before the sudden, fierce growl that vibrated in Stygian’s chest could finish, Jonas was out the door and stalking back to his own suite.
As the door slammed behind him, it was Liza who flinched. Not from the sound of steel meeting steel, but the realization that there was the very real chance that he was right. If she was Honor Roberts, wouldn’t she be desperate, horribly desperate, to keep from returning to the memories of a hell that had pushed her to reach out for a dead girl’s identity?
Lifting her gaze to Stygian, she watched him, knowing the sacrifices he was making for her. He saw her as his mate. As the woman created for him and for him alone, and for her, he was willing to betray the vows he had made when he went into the Bureau of Breed Affairs as an enforcer. The vow to place all Breeds, their security and their safety, above his own.
Breaking a vow wouldn’t be easy for a man like Stygian.
“I want to go to the desert now,” she told him as she faced him. “I want to go to the crash site. And I want to see where the sweat lodge sat. Now.”
“Liza—” he began.
“No, I want to go now,” she demanded. “I want to know who I am, Stygian. I have to know who I am.”
She had a feeling, though, she already knew.
CHAPTER 16
It didn’t take long for Stygian to arrange the outing to the area where Liza and Claire had taken Ray Martinez’s sports car over a canyon cliff.
After twelve years, evidence of the crash should have been completely wiped away; instead, there were still several signs of the wreck as well as the hastily erected sweat lodge that
had been placed a short distance from where the vehicle had slammed into the opposite canyon wall.
As Liza stepped from the Desert Dragoon and surveyed the damage to the rock wall, she didn’t attempt to fight any memories or sensations that swept through her.
One of the reasons why she was beginning to suspect she was Honor Roberts was the distant fuzziness of the memories of her life before the crash as well as the memories that seemed determined to torment her since Stygian had come into her life.
She remembered parts of her childhood well, especially those things her parents often reminded her of. Picnics at the lake, birthday celebrations, certain amusing or even embarrassing moments in her life. And though the memories were there, they had that hazy, uncertain quality as well. A lack of detail, or even periods of time when she couldn’t recall certain memories at all.
Now, standing to the side of the Dragoon’s multiple lights directed on the stone wall, it wasn’t being in the wreck that flashed through her mind.
It was seeing the wreck.
Staring at the unnatural crack in the stone from the force of the vehicle slamming into it, she felt a flash of light tear through her memories, the ground rocking with the explosion as flames overcame the vehicle, and remembered looking down to see the two bodies that had been thrown clear.
Her father had told her that that memory was the result of having “died” more than once that night.
Three times.
She had died three times. The last time had been in the ambulance as she was being transported to the hospital.
Moving to the canyon wall, her breathing heavy and ragged, she reached out, touched the cool stone, then laid her forehead against it.
What could she feel moving in her brain? In her memories? What in God’s name had really happened that night?
“Where did the sweat lodge sit?” Turning to Stygian, she acknowledged the fact that she had forced herself to ask the question.
“Dog and his team have been trying to rebuild it with the materials that were originally used,” he told her as he led her from the headlights brightening the area to the curve of the stone wall as it continued to slice through the land.
It was just out of sight.
As she followed that curve, the lights of Dog’s Dragoon flared on, spilling over the roughly made wooden structure.
There were a lot of pieces missing, she realized. They were all blackened from the fire that had been used to attempt to destroy them, charred, some more rotted than not. She imagined the missing were mostly ash.
“We found the burned wood in the back of a cave farther down the canyon,” Stygian stated as he stood behind her. “The attempt to hide it was obvious.”
“How do you know it was part of a sweat lodge?” Wrapping her arms across her breasts, she gave herself a chance to acclimate to the building tension invading her.
“The scent of the herbs used were still on the wood, but more so on the stones used for the ritual fire inside. Several of the Breeds in the area work with the chiefs of the Six Tribes and recognized the scent of the herbs immediately when we brought the stones to them.”
The moment her eyes locked on the structure, memories began to slam through her brain.
She remembered walking to the entrance. She hadn’t been alone.
Turning her head slowly, she looked at the bend of her shoulder where a hand had laid. Broad, strong, yet the flesh had been aged. It hadn’t been a young man who had walked with her that night.
How could she have walked to the lodge if she had been thrown from that vehicle? And she knew Liza had been thrown from it. Her father had explained the wreck to her many times over the years. How the chiefs of the Six had been in the canyon that night, meeting in the lodge, so she knew it had been there. How they had run to the site and attempted to give medical aid until the EMTs could arrive.
Not once had it been mentioned that they had been taken, or had been conscious enough to walk, into the sweat lodge.
“The chiefs of the Six were here that night in a sweat lodge,” she said, trying to find an explanation for the contradictions. “They were meeting as they sometimes do to discuss Navajo Nation matters.”
“The herbs used in such instances are different, according to the Breeds we talked to,” he told her softly. “The herbs used in that fire that night were ones that the Breeds had never known the chiefs to mix in a sweat lodge. One of them was a ritualistic herb, used only when their strongest medicine is required.”
She nodded and forced herself to take a step closer to the entrance.
“It’s safe?”
“Would I allow you to enter it without first warning you if it wasn’t safe?” he asked.
She wanted to smile but couldn’t find the lightness of spirit to allow her lips to make the move to do so.
“Do you know, I remember getting in the car with Claire, and I remember driving out here. I remember being so determined to be a rebel. To do all the things our friends were doing so we wouldn’t be considered weak.”
“You could never have been weak.” The confidence that rang in his voice wrapped around her and gave her strength.
“Before the wreck, Claire and I were in our first months of becoming a pain in the ass for our parents. After we awoke in the hospital, it was as though our entire personalities had changed. Even our friends remarked that we were so radically different that it was as though they didn’t even know us.”
She and Claire had also been concerned because it was as though they didn’t really know those who had been their closest friends.
“And it could be explained away the same as the reason for the plastic surgeries and the differences in your features,” he pointed out.
“Because of the wreck.” Inhaling deeply she stepped forward, lowered her head and moved inside the remnants of the sweat lodge.
Reality was like a mirrored mirage that began to shimmer around her. The past and the present were slamming together, attempting to merge and to separate as hazy images flashed before her and then escaped just as quickly.
She and Claire were laid out on the ground, bloodied, broken. There was a sense of urgency in the men who filled the small lodge and stroked the fire hotter, brighter, as the sizzle of water and the scent of herbs filled her senses.
But she wasn’t lying out on the floor. She was watching—herself?
The murmur of voices whispered past her ear, and shadowed images moved about the lodge. Breathing roughly, she felt her senses being bombarded by memories that weren’t memories, but rather misty threads of information that made such little sense. Clenching her fists, she fought to keep her mind open, to hold her fear back.
There was something there, information she needed. Liza could feel it drifting through her mind, just out of reach.
“What the hell happened? Ah God, Liza!” She swung around, expecting to see her father.
His voice was so angry, so agonized and filled with horror.
But he wasn’t there.
Stygian stood watching her silently, his gaze intent, his expressi