“Don’t turn our mating into a battle, Cat,” he warned her, his voice deepening to a guttural growl.
“No, you’re turning it into a battle, not me. Even worse, Graeme, you want to weaken me, you want to destroy what you made when you created the therapy to save me. And I’ll be damned if I’ll stand for it. I’ve spent too many years waiting for my chance to be free. I will not put my head down and pretend to be weak ever again. Not for you. Never for you.” She couldn’t bear it. The very attempt would kill her.
Jerking her wrist from his hold, she all but ran into the house and up to her room.
He had to go to his precious meeting, well, she had a meeting of her own to attend. She’d worked too hard for this day, when she could keep the promise she’d made to the girl who’d shared those cells with her. The promise that one day her parents would find her. Jonas refused to allow it and Honor’s mating with a Wolf Breed placed her under certain constraints where the Bureau of Breed Affairs was concerned.
Cat wasn’t ruled by the Bureau, by Jonas nor by Graeme.
Honor still hadn’t fully awakened and the protective spirit of Liza Johnson that ensured Honor’s identity was hidden was still far too protective. Only one thing would ever force Honor to break through that dark labyrinth within her own mind to take control of her life once again. The parents who loved her enough to send her away rather than see her returned to the research center. Parents Jonas had yet to contact, and Honor had yet to awaken enough to remember fully.
Cat had never had parents. No mother who loved her and cried for her, no father who searched tirelessly for her or watched the faces of every female her age, hoping to see the child he’d lost.
This meeting, like all the battles she’d fought in the past years, she would do without Graeme. He couldn’t include her in even the plans or meetings regarding her protection or her life? What could even make her imagine he’d help her with this? He wouldn’t.
And if he did, the one thing she’d bargained with General Roberts for, she would never see. The files Dr. Bennett had submitted on Gideon’s recapture and the tests performed while he was there. Something had changed him. Changed him so drastically that, as he said, sometimes he felt he would drown in blood.
To understand her mate, to know why he’d become so much harder, she had to know what had happened when he was returned to the research center. What created the monster that had raged for years after his escape, and what had enabled him to regain his sanity?
She knew everything else. Every move he’d made since he’d disappeared the night he’d rescued her and Judd from the soldiers escorting them to the kill facility. Every move made in the past year, she knew about. But what had happened in the center for the year Dr. Bennett had held him, she had no idea. Jonas wouldn’t tell her. If Orrin had known, he wouldn’t tell her. But General Roberts could acquire that information. And she had something he wanted bad enough to ensure he brought it to her. The daughter he and his wife had never stopped waiting for.
The woman the world knew as Liza Johnson was the child Honor Roberts, the friend Cat had lost forever in a Navajo ritual that had stolen her memories, her very identity, for years—so many years, that who she was as a child perhaps no longer even existed. But who she had been to her parents, who her parents had been to her, would never be lost, Cat suspected. And possibly it was all that would enable Honor to step back into her own life and take her place, fully, with her own mate.
Cat only hoped that perhaps, at some point in the future, she could take her own place. That maybe Graeme would soften enough to realize that Mating Heat was love. Without one, the other could not exist.
? ? ?
The Six Chiefs of the Navajo moved into the sweat lodge behind two of the Unknown. Each of the warriors carried the still, silent body of a young Breed female—both females so unique, and so important to the Breeds as well as the Navajo, that the very land itself called out for their preservation.
As the procession moved into the steamy room, the herbs and potent medicines used to awaken and to guide the spirits began to scent the moist air.
In the center of the lodge two large flat stones sat between six mounds of steaming rocks. The damp heat from the steaming rocks wafted over the hard stone bed that one young woman was placed upon. Orrin Martinez stepped back and stared sadly down at the unique creatures the chiefs had been called to aid.