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Ely paced her quarters. They were small; she had preferred small. Until now. Now the walls seemed to be closing in on her, and fear was driving spikes through her brain.
And she was crying. She wiped the tears away before wrapping her arms across her breasts and pacing the room again.
Jonas had taken blood. He had come to her himself, by himself; at least he had done that. He had said something about codeine. Breeds couldn’t take codeine; she knew that. She would have never requisitioned codeine for any Breed. She didn’t even give it to humans.
And something else. She shook her head, trying to remember the medical name for it. All she could remember was the lab tag name for it: They called it Mental. Simple. To the point. Because it messed with a Breed’s mind. She would never order that either.
What had he said? She lifted her head, clenched her hands over it and snarled.
This was Mercury’s fault. The feral displacement. Jonas’s loyalty to Mercury was going to get them killed.
He had to be confined.
There was a cell beneath the labs, padded, where the Council had kept the Breeds they had experimented on when they owned the estate.
A cell and a special lab.
She stopped, staring into the past, sightless. That lab—the memories of another lab identical to it were horrifying. And she couldn’t block them. Breeds strapped down on tables, their bodies paralyzed by the drugs pumped into them, their chests open, and she watched. The heart, the lungs, the internal organs protesting the agonizing pain each Breed was enduring.
Blood coated her hands as she stared at the scalpel she was holding, then into the eyes of the Breed staring back at her. Rage. Inhuman rage reflected in his icy blue eyes. Pinpoints of gold flared in them, like stars, ricocheting with rage.
A growl tore from her throat, then a throttled scream. No, she wouldn’t do that to him. Just the cell. That was all. They could treat displacement. She knew how. She would treat him.
But first she had to get past the Breed stationed at her door.
She moved to the small kitchen, jerked a bottle of water from the fridge and popped back a handful of aspirin. Her head was splitting. It felt as though someone were digging it out with a blunt instrument.
She pressed her fingertips to her temple and fought the pain. She had to think. That was all. She was the smartest and the brightest of any Breed created in her lab. She was taught how to be covert, how to fight. How to kill.
She stilled slowly. Mercury was doing this. She knew he was. Somehow, he had managed to convince Jonas and Callan that he wasn’t a danger to Sanctuary. And they were punishing her.
Her breath hitched on a sob. They were punishing her. That’s what Jonas was doing. He was punishing her for trying to protect the others. He was manipulating everyone. Mercury’s displacement was suiting some plan of his, that was the only thing that made sense. And this time, he was going to destroy Sanctuary.
Unless she did something to stop him.
CHAPTER 26
The animalistic part of a Breed had attitude. It was almost a requirement. An animal trapped inside a human, influencing the human’s psyche, thought patterns, hormones, actions and reactions.
Ria had managed to keep her animal contained to a point. It had been there. Unlike Mercury, she had known it was there. She had just managed to control it, to keep it from stretching free. Until mating heat.
The mating heat phenomenon was still a mystery in many ways, even to her grandmother, Elizabeth Vanderale. Elizabeth had been studying it for over a century, in herself as well as in the few mated pairings that had resulted within Leo’s pride. And even she didn’t have all the answers.
Ria wished she had some of the answers the next afternoon, after she redressed in the labs. Her flesh still felt seared by the examination she’d been forced to endure. Silently. She hadn’t even been able to bitch about it, because Mercury was pacing like an enraged lion on the other side of the curtain.
“He’s intense,” her grandmother Elizabeth commented lightly as Ria stepped out from the changing room, clad once again in the black leather pants, high-heeled black boots and white, soft-as-silk and conforming-as-hell sweater she had worn with them.
Elizabeth didn’t look like anyone’s mother. In over a century, she’d barely aged the ten years she should have.
“Yes, he’s pretty intense.” Ria glanced at the screen, watching his shadow as he paced, and Elizabeth’s gaze swept over her clothes again.
“You’ve changed,” Elizabeth said softly. “In the few short weeks you’ve been here, you’ve finally come out of your shell.”
Ria shifted uncomfortably, trying to look everywhere but at Elizabeth.
“I didn’t betray you,” Ria finally whispered. “Jonas guessed.”
“Jonas could smell the familial scent.” Elizabeth nodded. “His sense of smell is exceptional, even for a Breed. Rather like Callan’s son, David. But, Ria, you’ve never betrayed us, and we’ve never suspected you would.”
