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“I’m sure you’ll find a way to hide the fact that the bad guy doesn’t die in the end,” Cabal muttered. He knew Jonas. The man had the ability to make things work out in his favor.
“You’re going to completely fuck this assignment up, Cabal,”
Jonas bit out as Cabal moved to the coffeepot. “He’s going to kill again, and soon. We both know he will. Do you really want your mate in the middle of that?”
Hell no he didn’t, but he knew there was no way to get her out of it now. Not without making her hate him, making her run. He wasn’t about to force her again, he’d already tried that once. It hadn’t worked then, it wasn’t going to work now.
Cabal prepared the coffee before saying anything more. He didn’t have an argument for Jonas and he knew it. There was no damned way to explain to the other man that Cassa would hate them all if she was pulled out of this.
He’d wrestled with it most of the night. He’d come up with a thousand different ways to pull her out, and he knew that not a damned one of them was going to work.
“Cabal has a point, Boss.” Lawe spoke up as Cabal poured the coffee. “The killer contacts her when he doesn’t contact us. We could use that.”
“You don’t use my mate.” Cabal turned back to him with a snarl.
Jonas’s bark of laughter echoed through the room as Cabal jerked around to meet the other man’s mocking gaze.
“Hell, Cabal, it was no more than you were suggesting yourself,” Jonas informed him angrily. “Get off your mating high horse and settle the fuck down. If we’re going to figure out how to handle this situation from here on out, then I need your head clear, not filled with the need to fight or fuck.”
That was Jonas, blunt to the bitter end.
Pushing his fingers roughly through his hair, Cabal paced to the other side of the room as Jonas moved to the coffeepot. Cocking his head, he listened for any signs of movement from the bedroom and prayed Cassa would sleep just a while longer.
“Have you found anything out?” Jonas finally asked.
Cabal shook his head at the question. “Not enough. David Banks had a meeting in Charleston the day before he disappeared. He met with Brandenmore and Engalls, but we already knew that. The afternoon he disappeared he was supposed to meet with a reporter here in town, Myron James. He never showed up for that meeting.”
Jonas rubbed at his jaw thoughtfully. “We weren’t aware of that before.”
“Sheriff Lacey mentioned that Banks asked her for Myron’s phone number. When I questioned Myron about it, he admitted Banks called and requested a meeting. Said he had some information Myron might be interested in.”
“Any idea what the information was?”
Cabal shook his head. “He didn’t tell Myron, or Myron wasn’t telling me. I couldn’t sense any deceit though. There are secrets in this town, Jonas, plenty of them, but Banks didn’t seem to be privy to many of them.”
“He was a former mayor,” Lawe pointed out. “Mayors get all the gossip.”
“Not all of it,” Cabal said. “The movement that began here about thirty years ago to hide escaped Breeds wasn’t well known. There was only a small group of men and women involved in that. Banks wasn’t one of them.”
“We know all that,” Jonas pointed out.
“What we didn’t know was that Banks was originally part of that group,” Cabal told him. “Myron remembered his father mentioning that Banks was part of the group until they began to suspect that he had betrayed one of the Breeds early on.”
“There weren’t a lot that came through here,” Rule stated. “A few dozen.”
“But compared to those created, that’s a high number,” Cabal pointed out. “A few dozen escaped Breeds during that time would have been a problem for the Council.”
“And the Council would have made it a problem for the Deadly Dozen,” Lawe stated. “They were the trackers when everyone else failed.”
“Because they had connections where they were needed to track escaped Breeds,” Cabal agreed. “Banks was one of the Dozen, there’s no doubt of that. But why wait this long to strike back at the group? And how many of them were located in this area?”
“Most of the escaped Breeds were hiding in this area,” Jonas stated.
That was true. For some reason, the West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky mountains had been the preferred haven for Breeds escaping across the world.
One here, a few there—somehow most of them had made it to the States, and into the few groups within a three-state radius willing to hide them. Few of the groups knew about one another. Many of the Breeds were unaware of other individual groups. It was a matter of safety. If others didn’t know where they were located, or the Breeds in each group, then they couldn’t be betrayed under torture.
“What I’d like to know is how Brandenmore and Engalls managed to capture Breeds in this area and experiment on them without the Council or the groups aiding the Breeds knowing about it,” Lawe growled. “You’d think someone would have put a stop to it long ago.”
