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“This vendetta you have against me will stop, Cat,” he ordered, the demand in the low, harsh growl impossible for her to miss.
Surprise flared in her gaze then. “Vendetta, Graeme?” she whispered. “You believe my need for answers is a vendetta? Some attempt to avenge whatever slight I might feel?”
“Isn’t that exactly what it is?” What more could it be? He’d walked away from her; he understood her anger for that at the time. She was an adult now, she should understand that the need for her protection meant far more than her hurt feelings.
“You trained me to fight at your side,” she reminded him with bleak knowledge. “You trained Judd and me both to ensure we were able to aid you in our own protection.” Tears gleamed in her eyes now. “That wasn’t what happened, though, was it? I’m sorry, Graeme, I don’t know how Judd feels, but I feel as though both of you threw me away and I don’t know if I can make myself forget it.”
• • •
Cat stalked from the kitchen, rather surprised that Graeme allowed her to go.
The dream, or whatever the hell it had been the night before, had left her unsettled. She couldn’t get it out of her mind nor could she forget the accusation that she had never left the research center.
She wasn’t stupid, she understood what Claire what saying, but merely rejected the idea of it, Cat assured herself as she moved to the small library/office off the foyer of the house. She didn’t have time for this. She didn’t have time for the second-guessing and soul-searching that each day with Graeme seemed to bring.
She loved him so desperately, but it wasn’t the research center she couldn’t escape. It was the knowledge that he had left her there. For months she had believed he was dead. That he had been so frightened that he had stolen the teddy bear she had been so attached to because he was frightened. Only to learn that he had left her and he had taken the only other comfort she’d had in her young life, that damned teddy bear.
Where are you, Claire? she snapped furiously, throwing herself into the large leather chair behind the desk. Come out and play now, dammit, while I’m awake.
There was no answer and she was growing used to the fact that the one friend she had believed she could depend upon was gone. And one day, she would be completely gone, Cat knew. Whenever the prophecy from that ritual came due, it was possible both of them would lose their lives.
The awakening would bring death. The words Orrin Martinez had whispered just after the ritual when he believed both Cat and Claire to be held in a deep sleep, had never been forgotten by Cat.
But she’d been awake for the better part of the thirteen years since she’d been given Claire’s life and she hadn’t died yet. But neither had she revealed herself until now. She didn’t want to die, but she couldn’t live as Claire Martinez any longer either. Especially if it meant allowing Raymond to continue to destroy the women of the Nation that the Council deemed experiment-worthy, such as Raymond’s sister, Morningstar.
The bastards. They would burn in hell, every damned one of them, for the destruction they’d wrought in the past. What would happen to Raymond and the Jackals who’d been taken into custody by Jonas she wasn’t certain, but she knew it wouldn’t be pleasant.
Tonight, after she’d met with Honor’s parents, following through with one of the promises she’d made to herself the night of that ritual, she and Graeme would have to fight this out. If she had to give him an ultimatum, then she would do it. He would come up with answers or she would leave.
Where had he been for the four months before he’d arranged for her and Judd’s transfer, and what had happened to him when he’d been returned to the research center several years later? She knew why he’d lashed out at her as he did. She would have never stopped searching for him if he hadn’t hurt her so deeply. Nothing Judd had said or done would have convinced her to leave without searching for Graeme the next morning if she hadn’t believed she was hated by the Breed that meant so much to her.
Perhaps she’d known that then as well.
Moving from the desk to the glass door that opened to a private patio, she stood in the entrance and inhaled the scents of the desert around her.
She hadn’t offered to give General Roberts the location of his daughter for free. She’d demanded all information on the two Breeds confined with her and Honor during the time they’d been at the research center, as well as the complete file on the reacquisition of the Bengal Breed Gideon.
She hadn’t dared ask Jonas for it, but General Roberts was another story. His connections while his daughter had been in the research center had been strong. Afterward, she knew he’d stayed in contact with one of the few lead research techs Graeme had left alive after his rampage. That tech remained alive because he’d been in Washington delivering evidence against the center to the Bureau of Breed Affairs. Jonas still had him in hiding for fear Gideon would strike out at him.
“You know Graeme’s completely pouting again.” Khi Langer, Lobo’s stepdaughter, stepped around the side of the house, her vivid blue eyes not nearly as amused as she would have had Cat believe.
Dressed in riding pants and a snug sleeveless white silk shirt and knee-high black boots, she looked as though she would be more at home on an English estate than at the Reevers’ desert home.
“I wondered how long it would take you to visit.” Cat sighed. “Ashley’s already given her warning, I don’t need another from you.”
She’d known Khi was Graeme’s little sidekick for months.
The bastard. He’d allowed this woman to aid him, yet he’d never given Cat that option, even now. She knew of his little midnight sorties into the desert each night as he patrolled for Council soldiers in the area. But had he invited her to patrol at his side?
Hell no, he hadn’t.
“Ashley’s been a little intense since she tried to stop that bullet with her heart,” she snorted with a slight edge of anger. “Not that she was ever less than intense, she’s just more so now.”
Strolling along the short walk from the pool area to the little shaded, brick-lined patio off the office, Khi kept her eyes on Cat. What was she searching for? Cat wondered curiously.
“I’m not here to warn you, anyway,” the other woman assured her when Cat remained silent. “I wanted to make certain you didn’t need anything. A shoulder to cry on, perhaps, or a willing ear to listen to you curse that arrogant mate of yours. Of course, we could sit and diss men in general.” Smiling, Khi plopped into one of the overstuffed chairs placed beneath the covered pergola. “I always enjoy that.”
She wasn’t lying, Cat observed silently, but there was an air of secrets that surrounded Khi that had always made her wary.
