Her eyes widened as he spoke, surprise gleaming in the golden brown depths for a second before her spine straightened.
He knew the moment she decided she could push him, that she could dare him.
“And you felt that was something you should and would handle alone. Without your mate,” she stated. “Yet now that you’ve decided to claim what you feel is yours you believe you can oversee my every breath?”
There was no anger, no fire. The independence and sheer stubborn will he glimpsed in her were terrifying.
“They nearly took you,” he reminded her icily. “They drugged you, incapacitated you and would have taken you, Cat, had I not been close enough to stop them.”
“And you ensured I can’t be incapacitated in such a way again,” she reminded him, still calm, despite the emotions he could feel roiling beneath the fa?ade. “Perhaps you should have taken care of that sooner, Graeme.” Rising to her feet, she stared down at him, the hurt in her gaze nearly more than he could stand to stare into. “But then, there are a lot of things you should have taken care of sooner, aren’t there?”
He was out of his seat just that fast.
Damn her. She had no idea what she was talking about, no idea the hell he’d endured to ensure she was never found, no matter what. No matter her anger that she didn’t have the answers, he’d be damned if he’d allow her to continue to feel this way.
“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.