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“And you have no right to destroy a good man’s life with something you can’t go through with, Dawn. You’ve seen the images. Fine, you know what’s in them. You still wake up Sanctuary with your screams when you dream of it, and you still haven’t remembered the events that those discs are made of. You’ve run from Seth for ten years; now you expect him to fall in with your wishes, despite his belief that the first time he takes you, he’s going to throw you back into that hell. Aren’t you asking too much of him? He’s a strong man, but I don’t think he’s that strong. I couldn’t be that strong.”
Dawn straightened her shoulders and refused to break his gaze. Her soul cringed at the words falling from his lips and she could feel something breaking inside her heart. Because of what others had done to her, her mate couldn’t bear to take her?
“This is none of your business.” She felt as though she would crumble to the ground with the effort it took to force those words past her lips. “You can’t order me from here. If Seth wants me gone, then he can lodge a complaint with the Breed Cabinet and go through the proper channels to get rid of me.”
She forced herself to walk calmly, sedately across the room, past Dash and to the door.
“Dawn, Seth is going to hurt you,” he said behind her, his voice heavy with that knowledge. “Mating heat isn’t controllable. When he takes you, he may not be able to stop if the past rises against you and sends you back to those memories. And then I’ll have to kill him. I won’t be able to stop myself. You’re family. Don’t do this to your entire team. To yourself or to your mate.”
Her lips twisted bitterly as she turned back to him. “What makes you think that I don’t want to remember what they did to me?” she asked him heavily. “That I don’t want to be a mate to Seth? What makes you think that for ten years my heart hasn’t broken a little more every day without him? And what gives you or Callan the right to make these decisions for me?”
She stared back at him, seeing in his eyes the lack of confidence they all had in her. All these years she had fought, strengthened herself, forced herself to fight past her fears of just being in a room with another man, for this? So no one could even give her her due and see that in so many ways she had succeeded.
“I’m not a child. I’m not the daughter that you still bloody Breeds over flirting with, nor am I still the broken little girl Dayan created. And as God is my witness, I don’t know if I can ever forgive either of you for interfering in my life this way. Not you, Callan or Seth. I don’t need any of you to make my life decisions for me.” She snarled, the anger beginning to burn, not flame. It was burning. It was a hot, bitter coal in the pit of her stomach that sent pain tearing through her entire being. “Fuck off, Commander Sinclair,” she gritted out. “And tell Pride Leader Lyons and Director Wyatt they can both do the same. Because if I leave here, I won’t be returning to Sanctuary ever.”
She jerked the door opened and stepped out of the room before slamming it behind her and moving quickly along the hallways to make her way from the house.
Turning toward the main hall, she saw Caroline’s door open and Seth step out of it. He was pale, sweating, and the woman’s scent hung on the air around him like a stink that sickened her gut.
She stopped in front of him, staring back at his harsh face, into his brutally stark gaze.
“You’re a coward,” she whispered. “Even more so than I ever was.”
She didn’t give him time to answer, but brushed past him, making certain she didn’t touch him, that she didn’t tempt the feral fury brewing inside her by allowing that woman’s scent on her own body.
She left the house and joined her team to ensure her mate’s protection. The mate that didn’t want her.
Cassie stepped from her bedroom and turned her eyes to her father as he pulled the sat phone from his belt and, she knew, prepared to call Callan.
“Stay out of it.” The words slipped past her lips as she watched him, watched him frown back at her darkly.
She could feel Dawn’s pain like a lash of psychic energy whipping around the island. It was so great, burning so bright, it seared at the edges of her mind.
“Cassie—”
“Dad, Callan can’t protect her any longer. Dawn’s awakening. You can’t make her go back to sleep or you’ll kill her.”
He closed the phone slowly.
She rubbed at her arms as she stared around the room. The fairies were so few now. Or the ghosts, as others called them. They were so dim, and the one that had carried her through the most hellish years of her life was rarely present at all.
But there was one. The small, huddled shape of a child. The child Dawn had left behind so long ago. Ghosts were the energy of those lost souls that had left their mortal bodies. Cassie knew she also saw the forms of other beings. Parts of people and Breeds who were lost or left behind, denied by the living beings that should shelter them.
It was that part of Dawn that followed her like a bleak little shadow, begging for shelter, begging to come out of the cold nightmares that held it.
“She promised me,” that little being whispered. “She promised me, and now she ignores me. You have to make her see. She has to keep her promise or we’re all lost.” That child that Dawn refused was dying. And if the child died, then Dawn would be no more than a shadow of what she was now.
“Cassie, she’s not as strong as the others.” Dash sighed. “You know that as well as I do.”
Sometimes her father understood her. He always accepted her and trusted her. Tears filled her eyes as she felt the conflicting urges rising inside her. The good and the bad, she called it.
The wolf and the wicked coyote. And he loved both.
She turned back to him as a tear fell. “You have to let her fight this battle. If you don’t, she’s dead to us.” She looked at the fog that made up the child. “And if that happens, then one day I’ll be lost as well.” She turned back to him, her lips trembling as her own nightmares rose within her mind. But she knew her demons, met them each night and remembered them each time she woke. “If she doesn’t remember, then more than just the child she refuses to remember will die.”
She watched as he slowly slid the small phone back into its clip then opened his arms to her. She ran to them, ran to the security, the safety and protection he had given her, without question, most all of her life. He was her rock. Her father. More a father than any man who could share her blood, and she knew he had seen and sensed the terror inside her.
As his arms closed around her protectively, she let another tear fall, for Dawn. She wished Dawn could know this security as well.
