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She could still remember the shock, her utter rejection of the idea that he would leave her. She’d been convinced they’d killed him. That Dr. Bennett had ordered his death.
Until the night he’d jerked open the doors on the van taking her and Judd to be euthanized, she’d been certain he was dead, that there was no way her G would ever desert her.
But he had. He’d left them. The truth was there in the wild green eyes and Bengal stripes bisecting his face. And because he’d attempted to rescue them, he was dying.
The bullets he’d taken to his chest had created horrifying wounds. Judd had fought to stabilize him, then been forced to inject the weakened Bengal with a small amount of the Council paralytic to still Graeme’s struggles, which the guards carried in the event one of the breeds they were transporting became too violent.
He’d cursed them as Judd attached the crude lines between Cat’s vein and Graeme’s. He’d cursed them, threate
ned them, then, staring in her eyes, he’d assured her he’d kill her. He’d peel the meat from her bones if she didn’t make it stop.
I love you, G. She’d whispered those words without crying, her twelve-year-old heart breaking at his fury. I can’t lose you.
I never loved you. You were my experiment . . .
He’d sliced her soul open when he’d told her he didn’t love her. Sliced it open and left it bleeding with an agony she hadn’t been able to comprehend.
Yes, he’d proved he didn’t love her, that he’d never loved her. The mark he’d left as her alpha had tormented her, the pain of her disobedience had weighed in her for years. Until she’d managed to convince herself that she’d managed to destroy it. A lie. She’d known all along that mark would linger as long as the breed mutations lived inside her.
When Cat had awakened the next morning and found, once again, G was gone, she’d given Judd her loyalty, but he’d already had that anyway. When he’d held his hand out to her silently, his gaze filled with such regret, she’d taken it and acknowledged to herself that she had no one . . . she couldn’t even allow herself to depend upon Judd. Damned good thing, because months later an attack, the six shadowy warriors who rescued them, and a group of six Navajo spirit men, had changed the course of her life.
At least until now.
“You’re right, you’re not the one I knew as G,” she whispered into the silence. “My G would never have left me so alone and frightened and in such danger. You always were Graeme. You should have told me then who you were. I’d have allowed you to die as you wished.”
Turning out the kitchen light, she moved slowly through the large open room to the staircase, taking each step with such weariness that reaching the top seemed to take forever.
She left the bedroom door open, left the balcony door open and crawled into the bed. Dragging the blankets over her shoulders, she lay, staring into the darkness, dry-eyed, aching and wondering why it still hurt so damned bad.
After all, she hadn’t been under any illusions, hadn’t fooled herself into believing he’d felt any differently than he’d claimed to feel that night. So why did it hurt so damned bad now?
REEVER ESTATE
“My G would never have left me so alone and frightened and in such danger. You always were Graeme. You should have told me then who you were. I’d have allowed you to die as you wished.”
But he wouldn’t have died.
The wounds were bad, he gave them that, some of the worst he’d ever had. But Dr. Foster had created him, and just as they had perfected Cat’s genetics, Foster had perfected his. And his brother’s.
Those genetics, the DNA that created the Breed as a whole, had ensured any wound was immediately isolated and all the body’s strengths and power went to healing it.
He would have healed, it just would have taken longer. And he would have retained his sanity. By giving him Cat’s blood without the serum Dr. Foster created to counteract the newly emerging hormone in her blood, he’d been driven mad. She was a child, still a baby, and far too young for the mating hormone showing up in her system. Far too young to mark a fully adult Bengal Breed that wasn’t quite sane to begin with. Nothing had mattered but stopping the transfusion. When he couldn’t stop it, nothing had mattered but ensuring she never searched for him. He had to keep her away from him until she’d had time to become a woman, to allow both her human and Bengal genetics to mature.
Reviewing the surveillance video of the house as he perched on the steel cot in the middle of a small cavern beneath the Reever estate, Graeme paused in the careful stitching of his thigh to glance at the video.
He could see her face, so stark and pale, her eyes filled with such bitterness, and felt his chest clench at the knowledge of the pain he’d caused her.
She actually believed he’d left her alone and unprotected? That it was possible for him to ever do so? There was still a part of him that was amazed she hadn’t laughed at him when he claimed he didn’t love her. She’d always seemed to know and to understand him so well. Yet, she’d taken his words at face value and believed he’d left her alone.
Shaking his head he finished the old-fashioned stitches, spread a healing cream over the wounds then bandaged it carefully.
He’d heal quick enough, but the slices into his flesh had come far too close to the artery. He’d bled like a stuck pig before reaching the tunnel that ran from the main estate to the small house nearly a mile away. Thank God, he hadn’t walked the distance that night. While the motorized buggy had made its way through the tunnel on auto, he’d managed to put pressure on the wounds to keep the loss of blood at a minimum until he reached the med room he’d created in one of the smaller caverns.
The tunnels and caverns ran for miles beneath the Reever estate. He doubted even Lobo knew where all the tunnels exited and exactly how many caverns existed beneath the large main house and its grounds.
Graeme knew, though, and he’d made excellent use of many of them. Electricity, stolen from the main grid running underground less than a mile from the estate’s walls, now lit the tunnels he’d deemed most important as well as the caverns used for research, medical supplies and the store of medications he’d begun putting together.
Lobo had given him free access to the tunnels and caverns, and Graeme made use of them as he saw fit. He didn’t trust the current climate of Breed-human relations, but hell, he didn’t trust humans, period, in most cases. He’d learned the folly in that at a very young age. He could count on one hand the number of humans he trusted and not use all his fingers.
