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She heard him sigh heavily.
“I’m dying Ely,” he stated. “I wasn’t supposed to die.”
“You killed yourself, Phillip,” she reminded him.
A rough chuckle sounded from him, a wheezing, ugly sound.
“Angels await me,” he sighed.
“Last I heard demons inhabit hell, Phillip.”
“Fallen angels, beauty and grace, the most beautiful of God’s angels. Then man thought he could be God, and create a creature in his image. Beings of beauty and grace. And they betrayed us, as do all beings betray their maker.”
She shuddered at the reverence in his tone and the sense of omnipotence in his words.
“If we couldn’t control the creations, could we become the creations?”
Ely turn
ed slowly.
He was watching her. Sly. Knowing. He knew she was listening to every word that passed his lips.
“Project Omega.” He nodded to the file on the screen. “It came from there. From where her Breed was created. From where he was trained. From where his brother died.”
Ely knew that. Brandenmore had funded that lab. He had researched there. He had tortured Breeds there.
Ely turned back to the files, staring at them. He always talked about the Omega lab. It was his favorite of those he’d worked within and those he’d funded. It was there the mated couples they’d found were taken, and there that the breakthroughs in mating heat had been made.
The answers to the formula he’d injected himself with had to be there. It could save him, and she wasn’t certain she was doing anyone a favor in saving him. But in saving him, they would save Amber as well.
“He controls his animal,” Brandenmore sighed. “Ahh, such training. Such insight into the Breed mentality and creation there, even all those years ago. Insight into the genetics, into training, into the psychology and physiology of each Breed. They were the masters of genetics.”
He rambled and Ely let him. Unobtrusively she turned on the lab recorder rather than relying on security video and audio alone.
And as she pretended to ignore him, pretended not to believe him, for the first time Phillip Brandenmore gave out a few clues, just enough for her to start working on, just a few directions to lead her to the answers she needed.
And, she prayed, at least a clue as to the direction to take to save Mica.
What now?
Navarro paced his suite, the restlessness he’d fought to contain building inside him despite his attempts to hold it at bay. It was like a million electrical pinpricks racing beneath his flesh. Irritating, the reminder that there was more to him than he wanted to admit. That his genetics were those of an animal, a predator. And that predator wanted out. It wanted free.
It wanted its mate.
Recessed genetics were rare in Breeds, or perhaps it was that known surviving recessed Breeds were rare. Most Council scientists had terminated recessed Breeds in the womb if they were detected. If not, then they were usually terminated at birth.
But there were those few who had used the recessed infants for further research. They had kept some, others had been given to adoptive parents and kept under close supervision. Others, like Navarro, lived between the two worlds.
He’d been placed with his birth mother’s parents after his tenth birthday. His nanny had been Council, his bodyguard had been a Council trainer, and his pediatrician had been a Council scientist. And he’d always known, always been aware that each day of his grandparents’ lives hinged on his perfect adaptation of the Breed they wanted him to be.
The Infiltrator. The Breed with the ability to move between both worlds. The human world, and the world of a Breed assassin.
He raked his fingers through his hair, grimacing as he inhaled roughly, searching for the scent of her, the action unconscious, primal. And he couldn’t stop it.
He couldn’t smell her. Not the scent of her or the arousal of her. He was at this moment truly recessed in ways he had never been.
Protection.
