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Turning, he left the room, the door closing behind him as Cat felt the strength drain out of her.
It was too much.
Too many upheavals, too many losses and revelations.
She wanted to escape. She needed to escape.
And she had no place to go, no way of surviving if she ran as she longed to run.
And God help her, but she longed to run.
• CHAPTER 10 •
Dealing with Jonas was something she just couldn’t do.
The next morning she was up, showered and out the back door by daybreak. The small pack she carried on her back held water, fruit, two peanut butter sandwiches and a weapon.
She strapped her knife to her thigh, over the black pants she’d hurriedly pulled on the night before to rush downstairs before Graeme could torture his enemies. The black shirt overlay a racer-back tank top while hiking boots covered her feet.
With any luck, she’d have an hour to run before Graeme caught up with her. She had no doubt he’d catch up with her, just as she had no doubt he was aware she was leaving the grounds.
She wasn’t a prisoner. She hadn’t allowed herself to be a prisoner since she had escaped the research center where she’d been raised. Where Graeme had turned her into the Breed with the potential to be his mate.
The bitterness that had spilled from her the night before had surprised her. As the pleasure of his touch had heated her, spreading through her senses and sending a sensual letha
rgy through her, she’d wanted nothing more than to lie back and to give herself to him.
In that moment, she’d felt him, felt that primal connection she hadn’t felt with anyone since the night she’d renounced him as her alpha.
She’d been a child. Broken, betrayed one time too many, and lost within herself without the only person she’d depended upon all her life.
Her G.
It was different. What she felt now wasn’t a child’s love and adoration. What she’d felt the night before was a hunger she’d never felt before. Hunger for a man she could feel seeping inside her, becoming a part of her. No, he’d always been a part of her. But she could feel him taking more of her now, and she couldn’t deal with that.
Running through the chill of the desert morning, the wind racing over her face, she tried to tell herself she could fight it, she could deny it. That the sensitivity of her flesh could be ignored, that the hunger for his touch could be denied. That she wasn’t his mate.
She belonged to herself.
Didn’t she?
As she ran, the need to escape the chaos her life was becoming rose inside her with a fury that left her at a loss for how to deal with it. For thirteen years she’d allowed her life to be dictated by the need to hide from those searching for her. Always aware that if she was captured, if she allowed that to happen, then Judd and even Honor were at risk as well. The weight of that responsibility had always been with her whenever she’d longed to escape the hatred and malevolence of the Martinez household.
How had Claire, the somber, far too serious young woman whose life she’d stepped into, borne it for the fifteen years she’d been raised in that house?
What had caused Claire to drive the car she’d stolen from her father that night over a cliff with her best friend beside her, resulting in a tragic, near fatal accident for both Claire and Liza, Cat had never really known. Even Claire hadn’t remembered why she’d done so. Before she’d disappeared entirely, her essence absorbed completely into Cat as part of that ritual twelve years ago, Claire had remembered very little from her life before that wreck.
What Cat was certain of, was Raymond Martinez had something to do with it.
As the sun burned the chill from the morning, Cat watched from a vantage point at the base of one of the stone towers that rose from the desert floor as the Bureau’s heli-jet landed outside the grounds of the house Lobo Reever had allowed her the use of.
Graeme would know she wasn’t there. Thankfully, he hadn’t followed her. Not that she knew of. She hadn’t sensed him behind her, but that didn’t mean anything. If he had followed her, he was leaving her alone for the moment at least.
He was the only one leaving her alone though. No more than minutes after sitting back to enjoy the view she sensed the advance of two Breeds. It wasn’t their scent that alerted her first so much as the sense of invasion, and manipulation.
“Nice place.” It didn’t take long for them for step into view and to disturb the beauty of the morning. Jonas Wyatt and Rule Breaker. She just didn’t need this right now.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
