Linc might have pretended to be her brother when he was home on leave, but he wasn’t her brother. She was nothing to him.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, still staring at her too intently, a brooding frown pulling at his brow as he watched her. “I was hoping you’d come to the tribunal with us, present a family front. If for no other reason than to preserve your own precarious safety. He protected you. He deserves that much.”
He’d protected her?
She blinked back at Linc before she had to laugh again, mocking amusement nearly choking her as she stared at him.
“Is that what he told you? That he protected me?” She questioned him in disgust as one hand went to her hip in challenge. “He really managed to push those words past his lips without choking?”
“Well, I’ll be damned if anyone found you while you were under his roof,” he claimed, frustration filling his voice. His gaze wasn’t filled with frustration though, it was hard, cold and analyzing.
“Do you really believe that, Linc?” she asked, certain he had to at least suspect the truth. “They have proof that he contacted a known Genetics Council informant just after leaving the meeting where it was proven he not only sold his sister to them, but knew where she was all along. He let her die during one of the most horrifying acts anyone could endure.”
Why had Terran and Orrin kept this from him? They knew the truth.
“The hell they did. Cat, he was accused, not proven.” He was fighting the truth, she could smell it, sense it.
“He was lying,” she snapped. “Everyone there knew he was lying.”
She remembered the scent of Grandfather Orrin’s horror and his slow acceptance that his eldest son had done something so horrible. He’d known Raymond had done just as he was accused of doing. He’d sold his sister and allowed her to suffer to death beneath a surgeon’s scalpel.
“Breeds?” Linc questioned, his voice, his jaw tight with fury. “They smelled his lies? And I’m supposed to accept that?”
“I smelled his lies.” Staring up at him, fists clenched to hold back the claws she wanted to bare, she silently begged him to call her a liar.
He blinked back at her, silent now, his face drawn so tight it could have been carved from marble.
He knew what she was, knew what she had been to his sister, and if he didn’t know she had no reason to lie to him, then he’d learned nothing over the years since she’d come into his family.
“Then why help you?” He didn’t want to believe it, didn’t want to accept it, but at least he wasn’t denying it completely any longer.
“Because he had no other choice,” she pointed out. “His brother and father were part of it. You were part of it and he knew it. He was told it was the only way any part of Claire would survive and he had to preserve the illusion that he loved his daughter. He couldn’t let any of you suspect how he truly felt. If he did, then he risked his secrets being suspected or even discovered. But don’t fool yourself into thinking there was a day of my life in that house that he was ever kind. Unless you were there.”
Linc wasn’t a cruel man. He was a man driven by the need to fight for what was right, for justice. His belief in the Breeds’ right to exist had filled the better part of his life. He’d become involved in that cause even before joining the military. Once joining, he’d been part of several missions not just to protect them, but to completely destroy the Genetics Council.
By essentially spying on Linc, Raymond had learned quite a bit about missions against the Council, which he’d dutifully reported to his masters. The calls had been logged on satellite phone intercepts, but the phone had remained covert until Cat had found it just after they’d learned what Raymond had done to his sister.
“If that’s true, why didn’t you report it?” The need to prove she was wrong was dwindling, she could see, though the need for loyalty lingered.
Raymond was his father. Admitting what the man was wouldn’t come easily to Linc.
“Because he would have revealed who I was, and where I was at a time that I couldn’t have defended myself, just as he often threatened,” she told him softly. “Just as he did once I refused to obey him and back him when his crimes were first suspected.” Bitterness ate at her. “Don’t ever ask me to help him again unless it’s helping him straight to hell where he belongs.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Fury flashed in his expression, in the low, grating sound of his voice. “Why didn’t you come to me?”