AllFreeNovel
Share Us
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.
