Terran didn’t ask her not to go. He didn’t tell her it didn’t matter that she wasn’t Claire, he only said she didn’t have to leave.
Once, she’d been a part of the extensive Martinez family. Her cousins, Isabelle and Chelsea, had visited often after she’d moved in with Terran several months before, after Raymond, Claire’s father, was indicted on crimes against Breed Law.
Claire’s mother, Maria; her father, Raymond; and her brother, Linc, whom Cat had been genuinely fond of, had turned their backs on her within days of the charges being officially brought by the Breeds and a date set for a hearing in front of the Breed Tribunal.
Maria and Raymond both had known she wasn’t really Claire. They had been there the night she had taken their daughter’s identity, had participated in the cover-up. Linc, though, she was never certain what he knew and what he didn’t.
“I know, Terran,” she answered quietly as she placed her clothes in the suitcases she’d bought after leaving the meeting with Jonas Wyatt. “It’s better this way.”
Not that Terran and Orrin both weren’t aware of who she had been all along as well. Everyone knew. But no one had wanted to admit that the real Claire was gone, despite their knowledge.
Terran had lost his treasured younger sister to the Genetics Council when she was only sixteen. He and his father—and, he’d believed, his older brother, Raymond—had searched for thirty years for her, only to learn of the horrific death she’d suffered while still a young woman and, with her death, the disappearance of several of her Breed children. One of which had been a girl. And he’d lost his niece, Claire, at fifteen to drugs and a tragic car accident.
This family had already suffered so much.
“Better for who? For you?”
His question surprised her. She paused in placing her jeans in the suitcase and considered it before turning back to him.
“The cat’s out of the bag, literally,” she reminded him, the overwhelming sadness that she could no longer pretend to be the person they loved weighing at her heart. “I can’t pretend anymore. I can’t put my head down and be nice and quiet and sweet while raging inside. My maturing genetics just won’t allow it.”
The frown at his brow grew heavier. “We didn’t demand that you take Claire’s personality as well as her identity when the ritual failed.”
The ritual. That otherworldly episode that had given her so much of who and what Claire Martinez was. Lying amid the steam and the scents of earth, dampened herbs and life itself, she’d felt the spirit of the dying girl whisper through her, determined to protect her with her own identity, with everything she was. Cat had felt herself drift then, into a sleep so deep, so dark, she’d immediately railed against it.
When she’d awakened from that sleep it was to find that spirit still there, watching over her, protecting her when other Breeds were there by effectively hiding any scent or realization to Breed senses of her true identity. For years Claire Martinez had protected her. Until Gideon’s return. Now the awareness of the spirit that had watched over her was gone.
“Claire’s gone. The change was too sudden.” Frustration ate at her now, rising from a well of painful realizations that refused to be hidden. “I lost too much too fast and now I have to figure out where to go from here. I won’t endanger the rest of you while I do that.”
She wasn’t Claire.
Her genetics would begin adapting now that the maturation of her Bengal genetics was beginning. The tigress that had merely lurked within her, only coming out when she called it, was now beginning to merge with her human genetics in a way she may not be able to hide for much longer.
“So you’ll face it alone?” The scent of his anger began to fill the air. “And you expect us to simply accept that?”
She swallowed tightly, her fists clenching in the clothes she’d retrieved from the bed as she turned to him.
“I’m not Claire,” she reminded him, desperate to hear him say it didn’t matter. “I don’t have the right to ask any more than that of you.”
His lips thinned. Something bleak and filled with rage flashed in his gaze before it was gone as though it had never existed.
Rather than speaking the words she needed to hear, he shook his head, pushed his fingers through his graying black hair then turned and headed back to the front of the house.
Cat clapped her hand over her lips to hold back a cry, a shattered sound of disillusionment. She’d been so certain he’d tell her it didn’t matter that she wasn’t really Claire. That she was family anyway. She’d been his acknowledged niece for thirteen years, he’d been part of her protection for just as long. But he couldn’t tell her it didn’t matter.
Because it did matter.
She’d always known when push came to shove, that it did matter.