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des used, combined with what little we know where the serum Brandenmore gave Amber is concerned, and all our questions would be answered.”
Together, they would have the ability to save Jonas’s daughter’s life and to help decipher all the encrypted files scientists had left over the decades of Breed research and the mating phenomena.
One without the other wouldn’t work.
“We also have Gideon to worry about.” Jonas sighed as he looked up the hall to the suite he and his family occupied. “He knows by now where Liza and Claire are. He’s probably already one step ahead of us.” He turned back to Stygian. “And he couldn’t care less about Amber or what it would do to her parents to lose her. All he cares about is killing Honor Roberts, Faith Corrigan and the Bengal Breed who was a part of those experiments with him.”
“He won’t get her,” Stygian growled, praying to God he was strong enough to keep Liza out of Gideon’s reach.
Jonas nodded, clasped his shoulder then turned and continued up the hall.
Stygian watched him go. Jonas’s shoulders were as straight as always, his head as arrogantly lifted as it had ever been. But Stygian could feel the weariness dragging at the director, as well as the fear.
If they lost Amber, then Jonas’s mate, Rachel, would never be the same. Hell, no one who had ever met that child would ever be the same.
Two years old, bright as hell, loving, generous. The heart Stygian sensed within the toddler was one that shined with such compassion that seeing her pain, feeling her fear, could humble him as nothing else he had ever known.
This particular spell caused by the serum she had been injected with had lasted longer than any other. At the most, until recent weeks, the spell would last a few days to a week and then the child would pull out of the weakness and pain and once again she would be her bright, childlike self.
This time, she was growing weaker, the pain at times so strong that Stygian could sense it even across the distance between Jonas’s suite and his own.
There were times he swore he could feel the toddler’s tears.
And there was nothing he could do to help her. He held Honor Roberts in his arms every night and listened to the nightmares that plagued her.
Her pleas that the pain stop, the terror that filled her as she begged that “they” not harm her again was killing him. All he could do was hold her through the dreams that he sensed filled her with horror and pray she would remember them when she awakened.
And she never did.
She never remembered them and he never mentioned them, because his animal instincts reined in the words each time he began to mention them to his mate.
Returning to the suite, Stygian followed the scent of his mate to the suite they shared and stood in the connecting doorway, just watching her as she stood in front of the heavy curtains that blocked the small balcony outside.
“How could they do it?” she asked softly, though she never turned from the view of the curtains. “How could anyone change something so basic as a teenager’s memories, her hopes and her dreams?” Her voice became softer, her pain became deeper. “How could they steal that part of a person and give them someone else’s?” She turned to him then and the tears that glistened in her eyes, the dampness on her cheeks, broke his heart.
“Tell me.” Liza sobbed then, her breathing hitching as she wrapped her arms across her breasts and fought to hold back the rage that would have had her screaming. “Tell me how they could do it, Stygian? How could science have reached that peak?”
She couldn’t fight the truth any longer. She couldn’t fight the knowledge that even if she wasn’t Liza Johnson, then she still had no idea who she was.
Or what she was.
If she had been one of Phillip Brandenmore’s experiments, then only God knew what he had done to something as basic as her very DNA.
“Science hasn’t reached that peak.” He finally sighed. “Your DNA can be altered but never completely changed. A Core Level DNA test, as we discussed before, isn’t the answer either. Because those core genetics can, in certain instances, be changed but nothing can change it back. As for the memories, I can’t explain those, Liza.”
Miserable, so frightened of what was coming, it was all she could do to hold back the shudders that would have worked through her. Terror waited on the fringes of her control, just waiting to strike, to take over her mind with all the shadowed, barely remembered nightmares that haunted her sleep.
“It happened the weekend of that wreck.” She had pinpointed that much at least. “I remember waking up in the hospital, and there were bandages on my face. Dad said the wreck had damaged it, but I remember thinking then, sensing, that he wasn’t being honest—not completely. And when they removed the bandages, there was a second that I didn’t know the person staring back at me from the mirror they gave me.”
She remembered that.
As Stygian took her in his arms, Liza remembered that moment as clearly as she would always remember that first kiss she had shared with Stygian.
Staring in the small mirror, she had seen her eyes, her hair, her face.
Her nose was too rounded, the arch of her brow hadn’t been right. There had been something odd about the shape of her lips and the sharp, high cheekbones. But there had also been the knowledge that there were several scars marring her body that were too old to have been caused by that wreck.
“Stygian.” Her lips trembled as more tears escaped her control and slid from her eyes. “I’m scared. I’m so scared.”
