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She flicked him a look, watching as he leaned back in his chair and drank his coffee silently. He hadn’t said much since she came out of the shower; his lazy tiger personality was fully in effect though. The gleam of amusement in his eyes, the quirk of a smile on his sensual lips. His long, black-and-gold striped hair fell to his shoulders, framing the fallen angel features perfectly.
He really was too good-looking for any woman’s peace of mind.
Her emotions, her attraction to him and this unexplained hunger were getting the best of her. She had to escape. Now. Before he broke her. Before his promises and his insistence that she trust him broke through her woman’s heart.
Today, she had to escape.
“So where’s your brother?” She lifted the cup and sipped again, staring at him over the rim as she attempted to distract his attention from her.
“My brother?” His brow arched perfectly. Damn, she wished she could do that.
“Cabal,” she intoned mockingly. “You two are normally shadows of one another. ”
“And what makes you think we’re brothers?” he asked curiously, setting the cup back on the table.
Scheme breathed in deeply. “You forget, the Council had your full file, Tanner, not just the remnants that survived the lab’s explosion. I know you and Cabal are identical twins. You don’t have to lie to me. ”
He crossed his arms on the table and leaned forward slowly. “And how extensive are your files?” he asked.
She shrugged easily. “Somehow, the files in the Council’s database were destroyed. Most of what Father has is from memory only, which isn’t extensive. But I remember reading the file when I first took over the job as his assistant. ”
His eyes narrowed. “The files were destroyed?”
“You didn’t know?” She arched her brows in question. “I assumed the Breeds had found a way to get a spy into the main headquarters of the Council databases. Most of the files on the Breeds were destroyed several years ago when a virus was implanted into the network. The Council is still trying to recover from that one. I applaud whoever managed it. ”
She had managed it, along with Jonas’s help. The headquarters in Sweden were considered impenetrable, their computer and backup networks impossible to infiltrate. But they had done it.
His eyes narrowed. “We had no idea how extensive the damage was. ”
“It was catastrophic. ” She sighed. “Somehow, someone implanted a virus that corrupted every file with the Breed extension. An explosion at the secondary facility that housed the disc backups took care of those as well. We assumed it was a Breed assault. ”
Jonas was even more closemouthed than she had given him credit for. Once he had managed transferring the Council file databases, he had implanted a virus so insidious that it had taken the Council computer geeks months to catch it. By then, every Breed file they possessed, as well as backups, had been corrupted. The explosion at the secondary facility had been a stroke of genius as well.
“So there’s nothing left?” he asked softly.
She shrugged again. “There were hard copies of some files, though those contained very little information. Mostly training stats, genetic source, and so forth. Many of the photos are lost forever though. They’re still attempting to put their files back together. ”
Tanner’s lips pursed. “We knew about the explosion, and the virus, but we had no idea how extensive the damage was. ”
“Of course you knew. ” She smiled. “I remembered your file though; I read it several times after you were appointed the head of Public Relations at Sanctuary. You and Cabal were created as twins, then separated after the first year for training purposes. If I read correctly, he wasn’t as cooperative as you were with the training. ”
Her chest clenched at the thought of how uncooperative he had been. Cabal had been horribly abused at the German lab in which he had been confined.
“He was nearly dead when we found him,” he stated. “Which makes me wonder why you’re asking about him. Your father was the head of the committee that decided life or death, Scheme. His signature was on Cabal’s cancellation papers. ”
“Mine wasn’t,” she pointed out.
She hadn’t known of the cancellation orders that had gone out that month. If she had, she would have made certain that one was shredded. The mode of death had been particularly horrific.
“I found him in that pit,” he suddenly snarled. “Half-dead, surrounded by
the Breeds that had been thrown in there with him, their bodies already decomposing. He had almost bled out from the strikes those knives had made at him. ”
The only thing that had saved Cabal was the fact that the soldiers had overfilled the pit with Breeds. The smooth stone walls were fitted with deadly sharp daggers that struck in a random pattern. The fact that he had evaded a deadly thrust was a testament to his training. He had managed to calculate the timing and direction of each thrust as other Breeds died around him.
Her father had helped design that pit. It was first implemented as a training pit; the random thrusts of the dagger-sharp blades were used to train and test the Breeds on their ability to sense where and when danger would strike. One or two Breeds at a time in the pit and the blades did little damage. But once it was determined that as a training tool, the pit was ineffective, then it had been used instead as a means of mass murder. It was quite effective in that.
“He survived,” she reminded him, steeling herself against the knowledge of the horrific crimes committed against the Breeds.
