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Liza had to fight to hold back a cry of denial, a furious demand that Jonas stop, that he leave, that her father hold his secrets as he had always done.
Her heart was racing in her chest, the blood thundering through her veins with such force that she would be amazed if everyone in the room couldn’t hear it.
“Easy.” Stygian’s voice was so soft, so low, she wondered for a moment if she heard it. “Your secrets are safe.”
She heard him. Everyone’s attention was on Jonas and her father, so no one saw him lower his head or heard the words he whispered at her ear.
“Audi has kept your secrets this long, Jonas won’t draw them from him. I give you my word.” Once again, so low, so quiet, it reached her ears only.
Her heart rate eased.
Stygian wouldn’t lie to her. He wouldn’t give her his word unless he was certain.
“I’m keeping many secrets from you, Director Wyatt,” her father stated sarcastically. “Many. But I assure you, if I could give you any information, any clue in your efforts to save your daughter, then I would do so.”
The look of pain that flashed across Jonas’s face was so overwhelming, so deep, that Liza would have given anything in that moment to help him.
“I have a daughter,” Audi said as Jonas moved back slowly. “And I know the pain you’re going through. If I could help your child, you wouldn’t even have to ask.”
“You’ve been asked to leave,” Jonas’s voice was grating now. “Please do so.”
Stepping back, he watched the three men. His expression was stone cold, but his eyes raged with agony.
Watching as her father, Claire’s and Isabelle’s left the room, Liza then turned her attention to Jonas.
His head lowered as he slowly shook it and said softly, “He said if he could give me what I needed, not that he didn’t have it.” He turned his gaze to her. “He would willingly burn in the fires of hell for you, wouldn’t he?”
Her father would never sacrifice her for Jonas’s daughter. That knowledge swirled around them, struck at her heart and caused a single tear to slip free of her eyes.
“Dad forgot to take my laptop,” she said, unable to bear the pain in his eyes or the fear she couldn’t fight any longer. “If you can bypass the new security Dad set up on the database with it, then you’re welcome to it. Perhaps it will be easier with the laptop itself rather than just tapping into it.” The last she said with painful mockery as she picked up the briefcase and handed it to him. “While you’re in there, if
you could ignore the journal file, I’d appreciate it. I tend to collect passwords, though no one is really aware of the habit.” She stopped and then stared at Jonas as the panic rose inside her again. “No one is aware of it but one of the chiefs of the Six who suggested I do so.”
“Passwords?” His voice was thicker, the harsh sound brutal in its intensity as he accepted the laptop.
“Yeah. Passwords.” She refused to feel guilt. She was terrified of the choices she was making, but she wasn’t going to be frightened.
This had gone too far. If there was nothing to hide, then what she was doing would hurt no one. “Like my father’s security key to access the database. I want your word it will be used for nothing else, Jonas, and you’ll destroy the file once you’re finished.”
“I swear to you that no matter what is found, the only information I’ll use is any that will help my daughter, or those who were involved in the Brandenmore experiments.”
There was a warning in his eyes. If she was one of those girls, he wouldn’t walk away from it.
She consoled herself with the fact that the only access codes she had ever “collected” were those that weren’t harmful: the Genetic Database codes. Her parents’ personal Internet codes and those into their home computers.
Ray’s home Internet access code was there, but only because Liza and Claire often worked at his house when Claire spent the weekend there. Even the code to her father’s laptop, the one he used to keep information needed for the security of the Nation, was in there. She prayed Jonas was as true to his word as she had always heard he was.
If she was who she hoped she was, then there was no harm to be done.
No information regarding the Navajo Breed Underground Network could be on the networks or computers that would be compromised. If it was, then perhaps she should have never been told that such information was forbidden to be written down, or placed on a computer.
Relinquishing the laptop to him, she pushed aside the panic and the fear of what would be found. She couldn’t live with herself if she ever learned she could have saved Amber Wyatt’s life.
“Jonas, whatever his faults, whatever his secrets, my father loves me.”
“Would you submit to a Core Level DNA test?” Jonas asked then.
Core Level. The deepest genetic testing available and the only level that a recessed Breed could be identified at. It was also the only level at which proof of genetic tampering could be proven.
