Rule Breaker: A Novel of the Breeds (3 page)

For now, though, all he could do was try to make her warm and comfortable and await the family flying out to her. A loving family, he hoped. Parents who would try to help her repair the wounds this night would leave on her gentle heart.

As he watched her, watched the ghostly lion sheltering her, he had a feeling nothing could repair Gypsy’s wounds, and he was afraid of what her parents’ arrival might bring, regarding their acceptance of her.

Son of a bitch, he wished he’d gotten there sooner.

Wished he’d had Mark McQuade’s location ahead of the Coyotes who had killed him.

As he watched Gypsy McQuade, he realized just how heavily the regret that he hadn’t been fast enough lay inside him.

It was a futile wish, because it was now something he couldn’t change. Jonas didn’t dwell on things that couldn’t be changed.

He moved on to things that could be.

And though it was the hardest thing he’d done in his life, he turned his back on her after giving the female enforcer a silent order to stay by her side.

This night was over.

He hadn’t been fast enough, he hadn’t tracked McQuade in time. When he returned to the Bureau, he’d ensure that all their equipment was updated with the best the government and the corporations ordered to provide for the Breeds could pay for.

The next time, he’d be ahead of the Genetics Council’s lapdogs.

The next time, he wouldn’t face the fact that he’d failed in the shattered eyes of a girl who would never forget the nightmare of her brother’s death or her own near rape.

The next time—

Jonas sighed as he walked out of the cavern. God help him, he didn’t want there to be a next time.

CHAPTER 1

N
INE YEARS LATER

She was his fix and he’d been long months without his fix.

Too long.

This time, she would know he was there. He’d waited. For six years, since the night she’d shown up at her eighteenth birthday party dressed in leather and dancing like a seductress, he’d waited.

He’d been there every year for her birthday since the night her brother had died nine years before. Actually, he made certain he was there every few months just to check up on her, but the night of her birthday, he made damned sure he was there. Not to bring a present; he never did. Just to make certain she was safe, that she was taken care of and that she wasn’t living on the streets, as it was reported her mother often threatened to send her.

The hell of that night, over nine years before, still haunted her.

Hell, it still haunted everyone who had been there. But Gypsy had paid more than anyone else. And she was still paying.

Staring across the bar, his gaze caressing the gentle lines of her face, he willed her to sense the caress. To sense his presence. To feel the hunger that had begun growing since the night she’d turned eighteen, the night she’d entranced him with the grace and erotic promise in her absorbed face as she’d given herself to the music.

Standing across the large room, the gyrating mass of dancers between them, her head turned slowly, her gaze seeking the sensation of whoever watched her. When her eyes met his, he watched the transformation.

Green eyes darkened, dilated. Arousal flushed her sun-kissed face as a sudden, vulnerable pain flashed across her expression. It was gone just as quickly, to be replaced by a hint of uncertainty, of want and hunger that he knew she believed she could never appease. Not if she intended to continue to pursue the shadowed course her life had followed for the past nine years, since the night she had lost the one person who held her uppermost in his life.

Most young women were raised knowing that their mother, father, even both, were there to protect her. That one or the other would ensure she was cared for. For Gypsy, that one person, that parent who had loved her above all others, had been her older brother. The brother who had died in the desert, drawn there by the Coyotes who had taken his sister, who had threatened to destroy her in ways Mark McQuade couldn’t have imagined unless he took her place.

Surely the brother knew neither of them would escape? What had made him go into that desert believing his sister would return from it unscathed?

Whatever the reason, Mark had died and Gypsy had spent the past nine years trying to atone for a death she hadn’t been the cause of. A death she was told repeatedly had been her fault.

The time for Gypsy to pay for sins that were not her own was over, he decided. Just as it was time to draw free of the past, to save one fragile infant’s life and ease the hell a friend and his mate were enduring.

In that moment, as her gaze touched his, as he watched the heat and the hunger rising inside her, he made her a silent promise.

Soon, very soon, the games of the past nine years would be over and he’d ensure the shadows that lurked about her would come to light. While he was at it, he’d appease a hunger he was entirely certain was not, could not be, Mating Heat.

Because Mating Heat couldn’t be allowed.

Rule Breaker, Investigative Commander of the Bureau of Breed Affairs, refused to allow himself a mate.

He refused to allow any woman to die beneath the cold, merciless blade of scientists determined to learn the secrets of a mating that nature was still determined to play with . . .

He shook the thought away. Before he could move to possess what he’d waited for for six years, he first had secrets to reveal, a game to end and a Bengal Breed to slowly draw into the fold of the Bureau of Breed Affairs. Years of searching for the Breed called Gideon, and he’d finally arrived in the one place Rule had been pushing him to.

The danger Jonas’s daughter faced and the hell of a past research project, would see the end of its secrets. He would either see the brutal truths hidden among four victims of that horrible project revealed, or the possible death of an innocent child and the slow destruction of a man he respected above all others but his brother.

It would end here, he promised.

But what would happen to him, who or what he would have to fight for, once it was over . . .

T
WO MONTHS LATER

Jonas stared down at his sleeping daughter, his hands clasped together as his wrists rested on the rail of her crib. For the moment, he could almost convince himself that she was going to be fine.

Almost.

Rage festered inside him. His daughter was being killed right before his eyes, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t stop the serum she had been given seven months previously from doing as the scientists predicted: It was killing her.

Just as it had killed its creator, Phillip Brandenmore, weeks after he’d injected Amber.

It had rotted his brain from the inside out, killing him slowly, painfully.

God help him, he couldn’t allow that to happen to Amber. It would destroy her mother, his mate.

It would destroy him.

Pulling back from the crib, his arms dropping to his sides, he gazed around the room, not for the first time, searching for some shadow, a spirit, something, some sign of a presence that could answer his questions.

Fairies, Cassie Sinclair called them. Jonas knew them to be spirits, psychic remnants or broken dreams.

And no such spirit or remnant, psychic or otherwise, walked his daughter’s path.

Yet.

That didn’t mean she had none.

It didn’t mean she had no future.

It simply meant she was far too young to have drawn one to her yet.

Either way, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t keep fighting for her life.

The answers were here, in Window Rock, Arizona, waiting to be unburied, while other secrets were waiting on the day they
could
be buried.

He didn’t see the things Cassie saw and he didn’t see those vague images near as often. But he knew enough to know that the ancient Navajo ritual that had played out in this desert nine years before, three years after the escape of four incredibly gifted creations, would reveal the secret he needed to save Amber.

The question was whether he would uncover the truth in time.

Jonas knew he’d searched every area he could think of. He’d gone over every memory, no matter how unfocused or uncertain, that Liza Johnson had of her previous life as Honor Roberts. He’d especially probed at the hazy, scattered memories of the ritual itself that she remembered. The ancient power that transferred the consciousness of two dying girls into Honor Roberts’s and Fawn Corrigan’s bodies wasn’t as easy to decipher as he’d hoped, even with the help of the guides that sometimes came to him.

The spirits of Honor and Fawn had somehow been put to sleep until the time of the awakening, as it was called. Cassie assured him they were awake now, though, and working quite well with those of the spirits of Claire and Liza when they’d chided her for attempting to interfere.

A recent attack on Liza had revealed the partial memories that now allowed Jonas to piece together some of the missing clues they needed to crack the code that hid the information on the serum Amber had been injected with.

Just some of the pieces. Still, the formula and various notes of the years that the serum had been used on Honor and Fawn had yet to be decoded.

Claire Martinez, the young woman who inhabited Fawn Corrigan’s body, had accepted the fact that she wasn’t who she believed she was. Accepting and awakening were two different things, though. And the secrets the girl was hiding were beginning to bother him. How the hell was he supposed to stand aside and let her continue to search for a way to honorably kill herself?

Son of a bitch, why couldn’t he just fucking walk away from everyone else’s problems and just focus on his own. On his daughter. On his mate.

Because it was all tied together, he admitted.

Woven so closely together that to abandon one would be to abandon the child his heart had taken as his own. And that meant doing what he could to bring Fawn Corrigan, or Claire Martinez as she was now called, along a path that would bring her face-to-face with the Breed sworn to kill her.

Claire had revealed nightmares and some scattered pieces of memories from Fawn’s years in the labs as well. But there were still so many missing pieces and so little time.

Before he could draw the Bengal Judd and the feral Bengal Gideon out, the girls would have to reach inside themselves and find the spirits that slept within them. Liza and Claire would have to accept that the reprieve they had been given from death was at an end, and the parts of Honor and Fawn that still slept would have to accept that it was once again time to face their lives and truly awake.

This had to be finished.

Moving from Amber’s bedroom into the main room of the hotel suite, Jonas strode to the desk that sat at the far wall and took his seat. Activating the holo-board of his computer, he laid his palm against the biometric scanner on the top of the desk and waited for the screen to appear.

When the holographic panel came up, he pulled up several files as he checked the time.

He had five minutes before the meeting he’d called with the newly promoted Investigative Commander, Rule Breaker.

The investigative field of the Bureau of Breed Affairs was growing quickly, requiring Jonas to put his best enforcers into key positions now available.

And into the investigations of crimes against Breeds and Breed Law.

Though soon, Jonas suspected, Rule would be heading the new offices in New Mexico as division director rather than continuing on to another assignment after completing this one.

That knowledge had reminded him of a silent promise he’d made to himself nine years ago as he flew away from the area, and to the broken child who had been left to the care of her family. A family tragically wounded by the death of the young man they had all treasured.

Arranging Rule’s life was something Jonas had sworn to Rule he wouldn’t do.

Hell, he’d even crossed his fingers, just in case, as he’d made that promise.

Maneuvering Seth Lawrence and Dane Vanderale, two of the Breeds’ greatest benefactors, into doing his dirty work for him had required a bit more finesse. If they had even had a distant thought or suspicion regarding his actions, they would have created a Breed Town Crier just to announce it to every Breed far and wide.

Especially Rule.

Narcs.

That was what they were.

The old-fashioned term flashed into his mind.

They were nothing but damned narcs, both of them. If they weren’t extremely careful, he’d show them exactly why they should be very wary. Because Jonas knew things of their futures that neither man could ever imagine.

So far, he was playing nice.

But the day was swiftly approaching for one of them that nice would be a thing of a past.

It was just a matter of time before he learned how to cure his daughter. He could then focus on restructuring the Bureau of Breed Affairs. Once that was completed, Jonas, Callan and Wolfe could rest assured that their vision of the Breeds’ future could continue should anything happen to one, or all, of them.

Then Jonas intended to show his legitimate half brother, Dane Vanderale, exactly why Breeds and humans alike feared him to the extent they did.

He was just completing the final additions to each file that he’d put together when the door to the suite opened and the Lion Breed on duty, Flint McCain, stepped inside.

“Commander Breaker’s here, sir,” he announced.

Jonas nodded back at him firmly. “Let him in.”

Stepping aside, Flint nodded to Rule as he strode into the suite, his neon blue eyes flickering with amusement at Flint as the other Breed lifted his lip into a subtle snarl.

Rule had put his time in guarding many of Jonas’s doors over the past ten years. Jonas didn’t begrudge him a second to torment Flint now.

“Jonas.” Rule stepped to the desk, the years they had worked together pretty much obliterating protocol at this point. “How’s Amber doing this morning?”

It was no secret she’d been deteriorating rapidly in the weeks since the attack on Liza. For some reason the unknown hormone Brandenmore had injected her with had suddenly increased overnight within her little body, after leveling for several weeks.

They’d had hope for a while, that she was fighting off the effects, only to watch her descend again into that world of pain and confusion.

“She’s resting this afternoon,” he answered. “Have a seat, Rule, I have something to talk to you about.”

Rule sat down in one of the comfortable chairs facing the desk, his back straight, feet planted firmly on the floor. Dressed in the Bureau’s black mission uniform—the insignia of his Breed placement, a snarling lion, on one shoulder, his commander’s bars gracing the other—he looked like the expertly honed killing machine he was created to be.

Shoulder-length black hair was pulled back and secured at his nape; neon blue eyes surrounded by heavy black lashes and fierce, sharply defined features made him popular among the female sex, while the corded strength of his body and exacting control made him an excellent commander among his peers.

Pressing the command button to send the files to Rule’s e-pad before deactivating the computer and sitting back in his chair, Jonas watched the Breed silently for long moments.

Rule didn’t even look at the electronic pad he carried on a holster at his thigh. He just waited, perhaps not patiently, but silently.

“Have you been able to find any information on the Unknown yet?” he asked Rule then, watching intently as the Breed gave a negative shake of his head.

“Nothing more than the fairy tale,” he finally answered. “Each generation, six warriors are chosen to protect the heart of the Navajo. No one knows what the heart is, though. They’re gifted with ancient powers and secrets that will aid them in hiding and protecting what’s most important to the People. That’s it. What about your contacts? Have they come back with anything yet?”