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Jonas would challenge outright. He would never allow a breakdown in authority. And that was what was happening. Someone had waited, watched, and while Callan was occupied with staying alive and then healing from his wounds, they were moving in to disable the power structure the Ruling Cabinet had in place.
He could sense it. He could feel it, but with his rank stripped now, he had no idea how to identify who or what.
As he entered the thick forest growth, Lawe and Rule fell in place beside him. They turned to face the cabin, all three silent for long moments.
“She’s not my mate.” He answered the question he had seen in their eyes.
Lawe grunted at that.
“Whatever,” Rule snorted. “I don’t know about this mating bullshit, Mercury. Seems to me there aren’t any rules to it. You act mated.”
And there had been a few odd moments that he had felt a bond, an unbreakable something that he couldn’t put his finger on.
“Jonas contacted me ten minutes ago,” Lawe murmured. “He’s pulling Shiloh back to Sanctuary before he arrives here. It seems there’s a problem at home base.”
“What kind of problem?” Mercury swung his gaze to his friend, watching as Lawe leaned against a tree, his expression implacable, his eyes burning with a hard, savage light.
“He’s going to explain things when he gets here, but notice had gone out that Callan has reinstated your rank. He’ll be bringing your uniform and weapon when he arrives.”
Mercury shook his head. He didn’t want the rank, he realized. Jonas would have found a way to force Callan to reinstate it. It meant nothing to him that way.
“There’s something going on,” he said quietly. “There are too many anomalies.”
“Meaning?” Rule gripped his weapon, his gaze sharper now.
Mercury shook his head. “I can see the threads of it, sense them, but I can’t put my finger on where they’re going. Ely has targeted me, though, and she’s never done that with another Breed. She needs me out of the way. Or someone does.” It just didn’t work for him that Ely would be in on any kind of deception, but he knew it was possible. It was even probable.
“Ely?” Lawe straightened and started back at him in disbelief before he shook his head and suspicion began to fill his eyes as well.
“We need to be careful.” Mercury stared back at the cabin, and thought of the woman inside. “Ria’s not here just to decide whether or not to stop Vanderale funding. The files she’s going through have nothing to do with funding, and everything to do with outgoing transmissions. Ely’s managed to separate me from Sanctuary, but not as far as she could have without Jonas standing in her way. When Jonas arrives, I want you at the meeting.”
“And Ria?” Lawe asked. “Will she be in on it?”
He turned back to Lawe. “She’ll be there, or there will be no meeting.”
She wasn’t his mate. But he didn’t have to mate her to know she belonged to him.
Ely stared at the test results as she sipped at a bottle of water and felt the anger burning in her mind. She was sitting here, putting together the proof for what she was trying to convince the Ruling Cabinet of, and a part of her already knew they weren’t going to listen to her.
Mercury was a strong enforcer, and not just in physical strength. His animal qualities were more a part of him than anyone suspected. The Council drugs may have recessed the more violent qualities of his animal, and the senses he had once possessed, but he was still intelligent, and cunning. That animalistic intelligence was by far his most dangerous trait, because it was stronger than other Breeds’ she had run across since the rescues.
If it hadn’t been for the feral fever, he would have been trained to lead and to command. He could have possibly been a stronger alpha than even Callan. As hard it was to believe that there could be a stronger alpha.
She pushed her fingers through her hair and fought the rage burning behind her eyelids, fought the screaming warning her own animal was sending through her head. She had never felt like this, and she knew the pressure was beginning to get to her.
Reaching around, she rubbed at the back of her neck, fighting the headache that seemed to spread there.
Shaking her head, she opened a bottle of over-the-counter pain medication and washed two down with the water before turning back to her computer.
She put a tight hold on the anger, forced it back and forced her mind to work on the analysis of the fluids she had taken from Mercury.
There was something in the semen that she knew was off, something odd. The saliva as well. His blood was corroded with the feral adrenaline, and that terrified her. The images of the videos taken in the labs where he had killed so horrifically continued to run through her mind.
His hands, the nails thick and curved like claws, had punched right through a man’s chest. The bloody mess of the man’s heart had still been in Mercury’s clenched fist when he drew back. That heart had been ground into the trainer’s face before Mercury ripped his head from his shoulders.
That shouldn’t have been possible. To just rip flesh and muscle, cartilage and spine away in such a brief span of time and toss the head away.
She shuddered, imagining Callan or, God forbid, Jonas taken apart in such a way.
