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“And you think I’m not?” His lips tightened dangerously. “You don’t protect me. Understand that now. You will never place yourself between me and danger, or you’ll not sit on your ass for a week after I get finished.”
A frown jerked between her brows. He was daring to threaten to spank her?
“I’m gonna shoot you,” she mumbled.
Callan snorted, and Dawn wanted to grin at the sound of amusement she heard in it. But she couldn’t grin. She had to blink against the flash of horror that snapped inside her mind. The feel of shackles at her wrists, her ankles. Cold steel holding her down. She jerked before managing to control the reaction.
“Are you okay?” Ely, ever observant, checked her pulse, her hands carefully covered by the thin gloves she had specially coated to examine Breed mates.
Her touch brought no pain, only a sense of discomfort.
“I’m fine.” She shrugged the doctor off. “Go aggravate Moira and leave me alone.”
Ely grinned at the order.
Brutal eyes flashed in front of Dawn’s memory then. Hazel brown, filled with smug satisfaction, with horrible pleasure, as thin lips smiled. A smile of triumph behind a black mask.
“We’re tracking the tranq we found next to your body,” Dash told her drawing her back. “The attacker took the one he used on Moira, but whoever shot at him frightened him away before he could retrieve the one he used on you. We’re hoping we can trace him with it.”
“What shooter?” She wanted to shake her head, but she was afraid to. Afraid any shift in her body would bring another flash of horror.
“Someone shot at your attacker. Someone positioned in the trees, we suspect. We haven’t found a sign of him, or his scent. We hoped you had.”
Dawn blinked back at Dash. “There was another unknown out there?” she asked faintly. “That’s not possible.”
“All guests were accounted for when we got back to the house,” Dash continued. “There were none missing. All our men were accounted for and none of them took the shot. We were rushing to your location when it was fired.”
“He was going to cut me.” The edge of the blade over her face flashed before her mind. “Mark me.”
“We heard.” The ice in Seth’s voice was frightening to hear. She had never heard him so cold, so killingly furious.
“We heard everything on the link,” Callan told her, and his voice was just as dangerous, just as lethal. “When the shot fired, he disappeared.”
“Scents?” She frowned. Surely one of them had smelled something.
“Covered. A combination of subtle alterations that we haven’t been able to pick up on the guests. We haven’t placed the underlying scent yet,” Callan told her.
“Capzasin.” She licked her dry lips slowly. “I could smell it on him, but it was wearing off even then. I recognized the underlying scent.”
She had to clench her teeth to hold back the fear that wanted to grow inside her then, the panic. Ten years of training and still, it nearly escaped.
“Who?” Seth’s single word echoed with the need for blood.
She stared up at him miserably, wishing she could hold back the words, wishing she could hide what she knew.
“Dawn?” Dash’s voice was lower, commanding. “What did you recognize?”
She turned back to him. Better to see his eyes rather than Seth’s.
“The labs,” she whispered, her gaze flicking to Callan. “The eyes, the voice, the underlying scent. It was the soldier…” She inhaled roughly and jerked her gaze from them, her jaw tightening.
“No.” Callan’s growl rumbled from his throat. “He’s dead. They’re all dead, Dawn.”
She shook her head. “H
e’s not dead.”
She knew he wasn’t dead. He had touched her, held her down; she had seen his eyes and his smile and she had known. And beneath the sense-numbing scent of Capzasin had been the scent of a unique rot, an evil she didn’t want to remember.
