by Lora Leigh
theart.”
“They why not explain it, Dad?” Chelsea rose slowly from her seat as well. “Because it’s obvious the two of them”—she nodded toward Liza’s and Claire’s fathers—“aren’t going to explain a damned thing.”
Terran grimaced, his hand lifting to rub at the back of his neck as he glanced at the other two men, his expression uncertain. Finally, he gave a brief shake of his head as his expression turned resigned.
“I’m out of here,” Chelsea bit out, the fact that she was at the end of her patience more than obvious. “I’ve had it to my back teeth with the half-truths and manipulations going on here.” She turned to Liza. “When our parents decide to be honest with us and tell us what the hell is going on, I hope someone lets me know.” She stalked from the room, the door slamming closed behind her.
“Is she safe?” Liza asked Stygian softly as her friend slammed out of the room.
“She’s safe.” The growl in his voice sent a chill racing up her spine.
She didn’t dare glance back at his expression, not while she was watching the trepidation in her father’s eyes as he glanced behind her.
“Gentlemen.” Stygian stepped forward then. “Leave.”
The order was given in such a primal, furious tone of voice that Liza flinched.
Liza’s father glowered back at him. “This meeting isn’t over.”
“It’s over.” As he spoke, the door opened and Flint entered with Dog, Mutt, Mongrel and Loki. Behind them walked in Jonas Wyatt.
“What’s going on here?” Liza asked Stygian, her voice low.
“This room is tied into Breed security.” Lowering his head, he answered her in a tone that she doubted anyone but she could hear. “Jonas has been watching.”
“Did you bug my laptop, Stygian?” While she had his attention, had him close enough to ask where no one else could hear, she took the opportunity.
“I would never betray my mate.” The forbidding tone of his voice was almost enough to make her nervous.
It was a warning—she didn’t dare question him further, and she didn’t dare disbelieve him.
The animal he was so related to was clear in his voice, the dominance and arrogant strength shadowing it.
No, he hadn’t betrayed her, she could bet her life on it.
CHAPTER 20
Liza watched with a frown as Jonas and her father stood, staring each other down.
Both men were incredibly strong-willed, each with an innate arrogance that no doubt grated on the other.
They were two men who would never get along. They would rarely see eye to eye.
And one was about as stubborn as the other.
Jonas wouldn’t leave Window Rock until he had answers, one way or the other.
If her father knew those answers involved his daughter, then hell would freeze over before he’d tell Jonas a damned thing.
Unfortunately, in the meantime, a little girl was suffering and she and Claire were on a roller-coaster ride they couldn’t seem to stop.
“I believe, Mr. Johnson, you were asked to leave.” Stygian stepped around her, placing his body in a protective position in front of her.
“This is ridiculous, Stygian,” she muttered.
Turning his head and pinning her with his gaze, his lips formed the words, “Trust me.”
She sighed. She trusted him fine, it would just be nice to know what the hell was going on, and to make sense of her father’s and Ray Martinez’s attitudes.
“Liza, you know I would never hurt you,” her father stated as she watched him silently.
No, he would never hurt her physically, but emotionally, she was learning, was another thing.
“Dad, that’s exactly what you’ve done.” Tears thickened her voice, humiliating her, making her feel like the child he obviously believed she was.
“Your feelings are hurt, but I’d much prefer your feelings or your pride singed versus the alternative,” he stated cryptically.
“And that alternative would be?” It was Jonas who spoke up as her father, Ray and Terran moved to leave the room.
Audi stopped, his expression tightening, gray eyes flashing in anger. “The situation you’ve provoked, Director Wyatt. You’re placing her life in danger,” he bit out, unable to hide the anger in his voice. “You and your refusal to allow the past to die.”
“Audi, stop,” Ray snapped, his voice low.
“My refusal to allow my child to die?” Jonas snapped back, the liquid mercury of his gaze shifting dangerously. “We asked for your help when we arrived, yours and President Martinez’s. You refused. I will not leave here until I have the answers I came to find.”
“We don’t have what you want,” her father snarled, surprising her with the frustrated fury in his voice.
“And you think your training can actually dissipate the lie you fucking stink of every time you’re questioned on this.” Jonas was suddenly on him, his voice raised, all but nose to nose, fiery anger and a dangerous warning echoing in his tone. “Let me tell you who you are dealing with, Mr. Johnson. You are dealing with a Breed whose senses are far superior to those that obviously trained you to lie to a Breed.”
Panic tightened through her.
Why?
Liza could feel the fear rising in the depths of her soul, a sense of such horrible panic that the premonition seemed apocalyptic.
“Tell me, Mr. Johnson, exactly what are you hiding?”
She wanted to scream.
Liza had to fight to hold back a cry of denial, a furious demand that Jonas stop, that he leave, that her father hold his secrets as he had always done.
Her heart was racing in her chest, the blood thundering through her veins with such force that she would be amazed if everyone in the room couldn’t hear it.
“Easy.” Stygian’s voice was so soft, so low, she wondered for a moment if she heard it. “Your secrets are safe.”
She heard him. Everyone’s attention was on Jonas and her father, so no one saw him lower his head or heard the words he whispered at her ear.
“Audi has kept your secrets this long, Jonas won’t draw them from him. I give you my word.” Once again, so low, so quiet, it reached her ears only.
Her heart rate eased.
Stygian wouldn’t lie to her. He wouldn’t give her his word unless he was certain.
“I’m keeping many secrets from you, Director Wyatt,” her father stated sarcastically. “Many. But I assure you, if I could give you any information, any clue in your efforts to save your daughter, then I would do so.”
The look of pain that flashed across Jonas’s face was so overwhelming, so deep, that Liza would have given anything in that moment to help him.
“I have a daughter,” Audi said as Jonas moved back slowly. “And I know the pain you’re going through. If I could help your child, you wouldn’t even have to ask.”
“You’ve been asked to leave,” Jonas’s voice was grating now. “Please do so.”
Stepping back, he watched the three men. His expression was stone cold, but his eyes raged with agony.
Watching as her father, Claire’s and Isabelle’s left the room, Liza then turned her attention to Jonas.
His head lowered as he slowly shook it and said softly, “He said if he could give me what I needed, not that he didn’t have it.” He turned his gaze to her. “He would willingly burn in the fires of hell for you, wouldn’t he?”
Her father would never sacrifice her for Jonas’s daughter. That knowledge swirled around them, struck at her heart and caused a single tear to slip free of her eyes.
“Dad forgot to take my laptop,” she said, unable to bear the pain in his eyes or the fear she couldn’t fight any longer. “If you can bypass the new security Dad set up on the database with it, then you’re welcome to it. Perhaps it will be easier with the laptop itself rather than just tapping into it.” The last she said with painful mockery as she picked up the briefcase and handed it to him. “While you’re in there, if
you could ignore the journal file, I’d appreciate it. I tend to collect passwords, though no one is really aware of the habit.” She stopped and then stared at Jonas as the panic rose inside her again. “No one is aware of it but one of the chiefs of the Six who suggested I do so.”
“Passwords?” His voice was thicker, the harsh sound brutal in its intensity as he accepted the laptop.
“Yeah. Passwords.” She refused to feel guilt. She was terrified of the choices she was making, but she wasn’t going to be frightened.
This had gone too far. If there was nothing to hide, then what she was doing would hurt no one. “Like my father’s security key to access the database. I want your word it will be used for nothing else, Jonas, and you’ll destroy the file once you’re finished.”
“I swear to you that no matter what is found, the only information I’ll use is any that will help my daughter, or those who were involved in the Brandenmore experiments.”
There was a warning in his eyes. If she was one of those girls, he wouldn’t walk away from it.
She consoled herself with the fact that the only access codes she had ever “collected” were those that weren’t harmful: the Genetic Database codes. Her parents’ personal Internet codes and those into their home computers.
Ray’s home Internet access code was there, but only because Liza and Claire often worked at his house when Claire spent the weekend there. Even the code to her father’s laptop, the one he used to keep information needed for the security of the Nation, was in there. She prayed Jonas was as true to his word as she had always heard he was.
If she was who she hoped she was, then there was no harm to be done.
No information regarding the Navajo Breed Underground Network could be on the networks or computers that would be compromised. If it was, then perhaps she should have never been told that such information was forbidden to be written down, or placed on a computer.
Relinquishing the laptop to him, she pushed aside the panic and the fear of what would be found. She couldn’t live with herself if she ever learned she could have saved Amber Wyatt’s life.
“Jonas, whatever his faults, whatever his secrets, my father loves me.”
“Would you submit to a Core Level DNA test?” Jonas asked then.
Core Level. The deepest genetic testing available and the only level that a recessed Breed could be identified at. It was also the only level at which proof of genetic tampering could be proven.
“You believe my father had my genetics tampered with?” she asked him. “That technology is only now a thing of science fiction, Director Wyatt.”
“And Breeds were only a part of science fiction one hundred years after the first one was created,” he said gently.
Liza clasped her hands together, her fingers holding to each other in a fierce grip as she fought to control fears that had no name and panic that had no reason.
“No DNA tests, Jonas.” It was Stygian who rejected the idea.
As Liza fought to hold control over the shadowed screams that had her lips trembling, Stygian gripped her hip as he stood behind her and faced his director.
A spasm of what Liza could only describe as agony crossed Jonas’s face before he glanced away from them for a moment. Turning back, he nodded slowly before focusing those strange eyes on her.
“Thank you for the help, Ms. Johnson.”
“Jonas, I need to discuss a few of your new security measures before you leave,” Stygian stated as he slowly released her.
“Talk on the way back to my suite,” Jonas breathed out roughly. “Amber had a difficult night and I’d like to get back so Rachel can rest.”
That hard knot of searing guilt gripped Liza’s chest as Stygian moved past her and followed Jonas out the door.
Left alone, Liza drew in a hard, deep breath before covering her face with her hands and fighting back the sobs rising in her chest. As she did, the memory of what she had told Stygian three nights before raced through her mind.
“You will destroy me—”
She had just given Jonas Wyatt the means to do just that, she feared, and she had done it for the man she had given her heart to.
As strong, as fearless and filled with honor as he was, she couldn’t allow him to see her as weak as she knew she was.
She was terrified.
“Why?” Jonas asked as they stepped into the hall and started moving toward the presidential suite.
“Contact Dash,” Stygian urged him as he caught the director’s arm to draw him to a stop. “I need Cassie here.”
He didn’t know why, he had no idea why his instincts were certain the DNA tests were the wrong answer, yet Cassie, the eerie little waif who saw ghosts, was the right one.
“Dash refuses to bring her out.” Jonas’s lips pulled back in a frustrated snarl. “Do you think I haven’t already tried that?”
“Try one more time, Jonas,” Stygian urged him. “You know how Dash and Cassie work. Dash will refuse at her request because she’s waiting on something. Tell him to tell her it’s time. Tell her I need her here, Jonas. My mate needs her.”
Once, when Cassie had been a little girl, she had stopped him as he moved across the backyard of the Ruling Pride’s home. She’d looked up at him, solemn and eerie, and told him the day would come when he would need her to help his mate—his mate would make a choice that would require her help. Cassie’d promised she would be there for him.
That time had come.
Staring back at him, Jonas sighed wearily as he nodded his assent. “I’ll contact Dash.” His expression turned questioning then. “Are you sure this is what you want, Stygian? If she sees Liza as anyone other than who she is, she won’t hold back, you know that.”
He knew it. He hated it, but he knew it was the only answer.
“A Core Level DNA test isn’t going to convince Liza of anything, and if her genetics were wiped and replaced, there will be no way to know for certain who she was before the wipe,” Stygian warned him. “Cassie will see more than DNA. She’ll see her fears, a memory, a nightmare or whatever the hell it is that Cassie sees that will pull those memories free if she is Honor or Fawn.”
“She’s Honor Roberts, Stygian,” Jonas said then, his gaze heavy. “I can sense it. I feel it. That woman is Honor Roberts, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt she can help us save Amber.”
Jonas stared back at Stygian, hating what he knew he was putting his enforcer through, hating what he knew that young woman he claimed as his mate would soon go through.
“I’ll protect her, Stygian,” he swore with a desperation that burned inside his soul. “I swear to you, if need be, I’ll give my own life to protect her if I’m right. I’ll do whatever it takes because I know together, she and Fawn Corrigan are all that can save Amber.”
“How?” Stygian snarled in frustration now, unaware until this moment that the question raged inside him. “How can they help her, Jonas? They were children. They would have no idea the makeup of that drug.”
“Honor Roberts had a photographic memory before she entered that lab,” Jonas hissed, hope suddenly burning in his eyes. “The reason the Genetics Council wanted her back after they released her to her father was because of the anomalies her Council-controlled nanny noticed. She’d developed a photographic memory and was often left with the coded notes and diagrams the scientists used while developing the serums they tested there. Judd and Gideon developed the photographic memories after the tests began. Each of the three would make certain, day by day, that they saw the notes and files on the tests and the serum used. Fawn Corrigan never saw the codes that we know of, but that nurse told us what she never told the scientists: Honor, Judd and Gideon would write out or draw what they saw, and Fawn would translate it. She could crack a code without a key, Stygian. She could decipher all the files we have, all the notes, everything we haven’t been able to crack where those experiments are concerned. With Honor’s memories of their particular serums and experiments, her memory of the co
des used, combined with what little we know where the serum Brandenmore gave Amber is concerned, and all our questions would be answered.”
Together, they would have the ability to save Jonas’s daughter’s life and to help decipher all the encrypted files scientists had left over the decades of Breed research and the mating phenomena.
One without the other wouldn’t work.
“We also have Gideon to worry about.” Jonas sighed as he looked up the hall to the suite he and his family occupied. “He knows by now where Liza and Claire are. He’s probably already one step ahead of us.” He turned back to Stygian. “And he couldn’t care less about Amber or what it would do to her parents to lose her. All he cares about is killing Honor Roberts, Faith Corrigan and the Bengal Breed who was a part of those experiments with him.”
“He won’t get her,” Stygian growled, praying to God he was strong enough to keep Liza out of Gideon’s reach.
Jonas nodded, clasped his shoulder then turned and continued up the hall.
Stygian watched him go. Jonas’s shoulders were as straight as always, his head as arrogantly lifted as it had ever been. But Stygian could feel the weariness dragging at the director, as well as the fear.
If they lost Amber, then Jonas’s mate, Rachel, would never be the same. Hell, no one who had ever met that child would ever be the same.
Two years old, bright as hell, loving, generous. The heart Stygian sensed within the toddler was one that shined with such compassion that seeing her pain, feeling her fear, could humble him as nothing else he had ever known.
This particular spell caused by the serum she had been injected with had lasted longer than any other. At the most, until recent weeks, the spell would last a few days to a week and then the child would pull out of the weakness and pain and once again she would be her bright, childlike self.
This time, she was growing weaker, the pain at times so strong that Stygian could sense it even across the distance between Jonas’s suite and his own.
There were times he swore he could feel the toddler’s tears.
And there was nothing he could do to help her. He held Honor Roberts in his arms every night and listened to the nightmares that plagued her.
Her pleas that the pain stop, the terror that filled her as she begged that “they” not harm her again was killing him. All he could do was hold her through the dreams that he sensed filled her with horror and pray she would remember them when she awakened.
And she never did.
She never remembered them and he never mentioned them, because his animal instincts reined in the words each time he began to mention them to his mate.
Returning to the suite, Stygian followed the scent of his mate to the suite they shared and stood in the connecting doorway, just watching her as she stood in front of the heavy curtains that blocked the small balcony outside.
“How could they do it?” she asked softly, though she never turned from the view of the curtains. “How could anyone change something so basic as a teenager’s memories, her hopes and her dreams?” Her voice became softer, her pain became deeper. “How could they steal that part of a person and give them someone else’s?” She turned to him then and the tears that glistened in her eyes, the dampness on her cheeks, broke his heart.
“Tell me.” Liza sobbed then, her breathing hitching as she wrapped her arms across her breasts and fought to hold back the rage that would have had her screaming. “Tell me how they could do it, Stygian? How could science have reached that peak?”
She couldn’t fight the truth any longer. She couldn’t fight the knowledge that even if she wasn’t Liza Johnson, then she still had no idea who she was.
Or what she was.
If she had been one of Phillip Brandenmore’s experiments, then only God knew what he had done to something as basic as her very DNA.
“Science hasn’t reached that peak.” He finally sighed. “Your DNA can be altered but never completely changed. A Core Level DNA test, as we discussed before, isn’t the answer either. Because those core genetics can, in certain instances, be changed but nothing can change it back. As for the memories, I can’t explain those, Liza.”
Miserable, so frightened of what was coming, it was all she could do to hold back the shudders that would have worked through her. Terror waited on the fringes of her control, just waiting to strike, to take over her mind with all the shadowed, barely remembered nightmares that haunted her sleep.
“It happened the weekend of that wreck.” She had pinpointed that much at least. “I remember waking up in the hospital, and there were bandages on my face. Dad said the wreck had damaged it, but I remember thinking then, sensing, that he wasn’t being honest—not completely. And when they removed the bandages, there was a second that I didn’t know the person staring back at me from the mirror they gave me.”
She remembered that.
As Stygian took her in his arms, Liza remembered that moment as clearly as she would always remember that first kiss she had shared with Stygian.
Staring in the small mirror, she had seen her eyes, her hair, her face.
Her nose was too rounded, the arch of her brow hadn’t been right. There had been something odd about the shape of her lips and the sharp, high cheekbones. But there had also been the knowledge that there were several scars marring her body that were too old to have been caused by that wreck.
“Stygian.” Her lips trembled as more tears escaped her control and slid from her eyes. “I’m scared. I’m so scared.”
She was suddenly terrified of what was coming, of what memories could spill free when Liza Johnson accepted, to the very depths of her soul, that she no longer existed, and released whoever was trapped inside.
“No.” That growl, it was pure, wild Wolf—a low rasp of danger as primal and fierce as any animal that walked on four legs. “No fear, Liza. Trust me. Trust me to guide you through this. To hold you when it hurts, to protect you if there’s danger.”
In a few short steps he was before her, hands gripping her shoulders, holding her firm, capturing her gaze as flares of brilliant blue gleamed in the black background of his gaze.
“Trust me, Liza, I’ll protect you.”
Lips trembling, her chest tight with the need to cry, Liza laid her head against his chest.
She needed to hear, to feel the beat of his heart.
She needed the warmth of him wrapping around her, holding her, providing a haven in a storm of spiraling emoti