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He had waited on her for far too long. He had dreamed of her far too many nights to risk losing her because of a matter the two parties should have been cooperating on.
He had ached too deeply for her. Always knowing she awaited him, always knowing she was out there somewhere, perhaps even as lost within the darkness as he was. Looking into the stars and wondering when the loneliness would end.
As he stood outside her room at dawn, inhaling the scent of the candles and finding her unique scent within it, he’d felt something in his chest tighten painfully. Because that scent of fear was still there. Whether it be nightmares or memories, there was something his mate feared. That fear was something he had to take out of her life. He simply would not allow it to be a part of her life any longer.
She was his now, just as he was hers.
And tonight, he would ensure that nothing, or no one, ever had the chance to destroy it.
Chapter Four
So many times I fought back tears, felt incomplete and feared you weren’t there.
Her uncle and her grandfather feared that the Breeds had finally arrived to track down the three individuals they had been hiding for more than a decade. Isabelle knew very little about the events that summer. She had been only a child herself and still dealing with the death of her mother and Chelsea’s antics.
Isabelle had barely been thirteen. Her mother had been dead for six years, but the loss of the gentle, loving woman she had been had devastated Isabelle and Chelsea for years. In ways, they still hadn’t recovered from the loss.
Their father had dealt with it by disappearing more often, searching almost continually for the sister who had been lost when he’d been a child himself.
He hadn’t found the sister or proof of her death—what he’d found instead had been a teenage boy and a young girl. Several months later another young girl had shown up and then disappeared within hours.
It had been so long ago that Isabelle couldn’t even remember what they had looked like. They had been at her home for only a matter of hours in the deepest part of the night. Isabelle had only seen their faces for moments. Pale, suspicious, resigned faces. As though they had made their peace with the world and whatever fate awaited them. The part of the night that had always found Isabelle awake and staring into the darkness had also been the time of night that others prowled the darkness. Others who came for the children took them away and ensured they were never seen or heard from again.
She had stared into the darkness after leaving Malachi the night before until she had found herself nodding off to sleep by the wide windowsill.
The night had always called to her, even as a child. Pulling her from sleep, it seemed the darkness whispered on each breeze that slid past her home, and on those currents of air she swore she felt the haunting cries of the coyotes singing through the air.
Was Malachi the reason she had always felt an affinity to those wild, often hated creatures?
The People knew the coyote, though. They knew him for the prankster he was, for the deceiver, but they also knew him for the vital part of the night that he commanded.
He wasn’t all bad. He was equal parts human and supernatural being with all the faults and fallacies that came with them. At least, in legend.
Her lips quirked as she left the meeting, leaving the players in the game being conducted to deal with one another on their own. She had done her part. She had watched Commander Rule Breaker each time he pushed for what he wanted and each time he was denied. And each time she had written the same opinion.
He had expected it.
He had known her uncle and her grandfather wouldn’t relent in turning over the genetic identifications of each of the registered human and Breed members of the Navajo Nation.
Genetic typing had begun when the Breeds had first made themselves known thirteen, nearly fourteen years before. When the Navajo Council had realized the number of their missing daughters who had been kidnapped to aid in the creation of the species, they had immediately set out to ensure they could identify which of the emerging Breeds were their own.
The Navajo weren’t the only Native Americans to have contributed, though. The members of the scattered tribes spread across the United States had sent in blood, genetic identification and all the details that went with it. Just in case. Just in case Breed blood could save a chief or a medicine man, a child or a warrior or a mother. Just in case a daughter returned and children born of her stolen eggs, or a child born of her body, came searching for her.
In case the daughter didn’t return, and the grandchildren did.
Isabelle knew that was her grandfather’s dream. That one day something of the daughter he had lost would return to the Nation seeking the blood ties the Martinez family and the Navajo Nation represented.
As Ashley had done, along with her sister, Emma.
They had come searching, and had found a family they hadn’t known existed for them. Small though they were, and as hidden as Ashley and Emma could keep them, still, the ties were there.
And Isabelle was finding a tie of her own, she thought as she returned to her room to change clothes.
Malachi.
He hadn’t been at the meeting, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t been thinking about it.
He was all she could really think about.
