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“You heard of Ria,” he answered for her. “Which means you have ties into Sanctuary. Ties you shouldn’t have.”
Her gaze flickered over his shoulder, to Jonas.
“She turned herself into the Bureau six months ago, Mercury,” Jonas told him. “I’ve had her working as an undercover agent in certain sectors since then.”
That was Jonas. Always making use of a tool, no matter how flawed it was.
“And you didn’t tell me she had been found?” He didn’t take his eyes off her. He watched her, as he would a snake, while he watched the lies darken and lighten her eyes.
“She’s not your mate.” He heard the shrug in Jonas’s voice. “Her scent isn’t a part of you, and when I had Ely run the mating tests, they showed nothing. There was no reason to inform you.”
Mercury nodded slowly. Reining in the fury, pulsing, pounding in his head, wasn’t an easy thing. The animal was roaring in his head, demanding that he go to his mate. His true mate.
“That isn’t true,” Alaiya snapped. “The mating was there in the labs.”
Mercury pushed her away. “The need to fuck was in the labs,” he snarled back at her. “The lust was there, for the only female of any strength.”
“Then explain the tests,” she cried out, fists clenched, jealous fury pouring off her like body odor. “The tests they did. The same ones the tabloids are screaming over. Everyone else may think those rags are full of crap, but I remember the test results, Mercury. I remember them and I remember how
possessive you were each time they allowed you near me. It was mating heat. The same as the matings I’ve read about since working with Jonas.”
He shook his head. “I don’t care about those tests, Alaiya. This heat is for one woman. My mate. For Ria.”
“Breeds only mate once,” she hissed, her face flushed in anger.
“We didn’t mate,” he reminded her before turning to Jonas. “I want her secured for further questioning.” His gaze locked with that of his commander. He recognized the animal in Jonas as well now. And he smiled. The secrets Jonas held weren’t that far beneath the skin, and animal sense met animal sense in an acknowledgment of strength.
Jonas nodded slowly. “I’d already decided that when she arrived tonight claiming to be your mate.”
The timing was perfect. At the moment, the three strongest Breed males were not at that party. They were distracted, and Mercury was in full feral displacement. He could feel it. Under any other circumstances blood might have flowed.
But the animal was more experienced now, more mature, more intelligent. And the man knew freedom. A freedom the animal hungered for.
“Secured?” Alaiya growled. “I will not be secured. I came here for you, Mercury. You went insane when you thought you had lost me. How can you say I don’t matter?”
He turned back to her, his eyes going over the perfect figure dressed in the perfect clothes, and she didn’t hold a candle to Ria.
“How do you know what happened in those labs?” he asked her softly. “It’s top-level information, Alaiya. You couldn’t have gotten it unless you had a contact within those labs.”
The battle to stay sane now was one he was going to lose soon if he didn’t leave her. If he didn’t get to his mate.
He swallowed, his knees nearly weakening with the taste of the mating hormone. It reminded him of Ria, tasted as though it were infused with her scent, with the sweet desire he’d licked from her body more than once.
The thought of sharing it with her, of watching her burn with him, was making his cock thicker, harder than it had ever been.
As he spoke, a Breed unit stepped into the corridor. Four silent Breeds, their eyes on Alaiya, knowledge of their orders in their eyes. They would make certain she was held until she could be questioned.
He moved to pass Alaiya, nothing more imperative than getting to Ria.
Damn her, she had dared to walk away from him. To leave her mate with another woman. He’d show her the error of that quickly.
But even as that thought passed through his mind, still his heart melted for her. She had loved him enough to let him go without recriminations when she thought his mate had returned. When she thought the mating heat Dane had smelled on him was for another woman.
She was stronger than he. He would have never let her go.
“Mercury.” Alaiya’s hand gripped his arm, over the material of the jacket he wore. “I never forgot you. Never.”
He stared down at her, and for once he saw the truth in her eyes. For all her weaknesses, there had been parts of Alaiya that had been funny, intense, that had once given him hope that she would be a worthy mate to walk by his side. But he had found a woman that called to both the animal as well as the man. Ria had saved the most elemental part of him. She had called it forth. And she controlled the beast.
