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In past years the growing tensions between America and its allies over America’s laws of providing unquestioned Breed asylum had been growing slowly and stories of the steadily increasing cruelties in the evaluations were strengthening. Helena Graymore had even been accused of providing such Breeds safe transportation from those European countries and secreting them into America.
Those accusations were vehemently denied, but Graeme assured Cat they were indeed true.
Now landing atop the temporary offices of the Western Division of the Bureau of Breed Affairs, Cat had to tell herself once again, that Graeme knew what he was doing. Her parents couldn’t help but love her, he’d sworn.
• • •
She’d prayed that was true, because in learning she had parents, she already loved them. It would be devastating to learn she was a disappointment to them in any way.
• • •
Kenneth Graymore wanted to pace the office that Director Breaker had shown him and his wife to. The richly appointed room was more of a large sitting room. A comfortable sofa and two wing-backed chairs sat facing a radiant fireplace that would give a real wood fire a run for its money in ambiance and warmth. To one side of the sitting area was a dark wood dining area and food-warming station. To the other side a pool table as well as several video game stations.
Soft, thick carpeting covered the area and heavy specially developed curtains one of the Graymore companies had produced to protect against electronic intrusion were pulled firmly over the large windows that looked out over the desert behind the third floor of the renovated warehouse.
Sitting with his wife on the sofa, his arm curled firmly around her shoulders he stared at the picture she held of the young woman they were about to meet.
Helena had cried and raged for weeks after Foster had come to them, a friend they had believed dead for over a decade, to tell them the story of the child they believed died and the experiments that ultimately saved her life and endangered it further.
She looked like her mother. Catarina and Helena could have been sisters, nearly twins, they looked so much alike. She was the mini-me Helena had laughingly called the baby before her birth. The horrifying truth that their pediatrician had known of the genetic defect their baby carried and hadn’t treated it as it could have been treated in vitro, enraged him. That particular problem could be cured before birth if caught in time, but not after birth. To enable Phillip Brandenmore to acquire a child with such a problem and experiment upon it, the defect had been covered up in the fetal tests and hidden as though it hadn’t been detected.
Dr. Foster hadn’t hid the truth from them when he came to them. He’d given them the files, answered their questions directly and his own tears had fallen when Helena had collapsed into horrified cries at the knowledge of the pain their baby had suffered. Had it not been for the two Wolf Breed bodyguards that accompanied, one he claimed was his wife, Kenneth would have killed him with his bare hands.
Benjamin Foster hadn’t been a friend, more an acquaintance, but he too had conspired with Brandenmore, albeit by force, but still, he’d never warned them or in any way tried to let them know their child was alive and suffering.
“She’s all grown up,” Helena whispered, not for the first time. “They changed her, Ken, made her a Breed. What if she doesn’t like us now? What if she thinks we’re weak?”
Their pride in her and her ability to survive knew no bounds. That baby that had stared at him so imploringly in those first days of her life, so weak and ill, in pain and looking to him to fix it, would have to fault him now for the horrors she’d faced. They had accepted the news that she had died. They had taken a lifeless babe whose face had been covered with a likeness of their own baby, and buried it as their own. They hadn’t questioned it. They had trusted their doctors, trusted their own senses when their baby supposedly died in their arms.
“We love her anyway, Helena.” He knew they did, they always would, no matter what she felt for them. The grief would be unbearable. The weight of it would be crushing, but they loved her, no matter what she might think of them.
“She’s suffered so much,” Helena said then, once again, not for the first time. “We didn’t protect her. She would have to blame us for not protecting her.” The sob that escaped her and the tears that fell down her face broke her heart.
“Helena, all we can do is love her,” he repeated his answer, just as he had for the past week. “She’s still our daught
er, a part of us, and we love her more for her incredible strength and will to love. She has every right to blame me, protecting her was my responsibility, not yours. A daughter always loves her mother though. She’ll love you, sweetheart. She won’t be able to help herself.” He kept his tone encouraging and confident, filled with that inner strength he knew she responded to. This woman was his rock, she always had been. Without her, he would be completely lost within the world.
How Catarina would feel about him, he wasn’t so certain. She had every right to hate him, to blame him for not seeing the truth. There had to have been signs. Something he had missed that he should have seen, simply because she was she was his and Helena’s child, a part of his heart and soul. When they had lost her a light that could never be replaced in their lives had been extinguished.
“Oh, Ken.” Helena turned to his chest, one arm circling his waist to hold him closer. “None of this was your fault, and no one has the right to blame you. It’s just been so long, and she doesn’t know either of us, she believed she had no parents at all. And now she’s so strong, a part of history in a way. I think I fear she won’t see us worthy somehow. Won’t see me worthy.”
She was the most worthy person he knew besides their daughter.
“She’s our daughter,” he said softly. “With your compassion and pureness of heart, and I’m sure a bit of my pure bullheaded stubbornness. And she needs a mother, Helena. Every girl, no matter her age, needs her mother.”
“And her father.” The voice had them jumping to their feet and turning to the door, the pure sweetness of it, so reminiscent of her mother’s, shocking them both.
“Catarina,” Helena whispered, awed, so filled with hope and love.
“What of a father?” Catarina asked again as he held to the hand of the Breed that had arranged the meeting. “Don’t they need their fathers as well?”
His throat was tight was joy, with tears, fury against the forces that took her and amazement that she stood before them now.
He cleared his throat, fighting to make it work.
“I don’t know,” he said, his tone hoarse, sounding almost broken. “But fathers need their little girls, no matter their age. No matter the years that separate them. We need our daughter,” he affirmed then. “They took the light when they stole you. We need it back, baby.” His voice broke, choked, and a single tear slipped past his control. “We need you back.”
• • •
