Mike was cursing, raging. She could hear tires squealing and she knew, oh God, she knew he was taking her away. Taking her away from Saban and the dreams she hadn’t known she had.
“You bastard!” Fury, rich with terror and mixed with adrenaline, spiked through her mind. Her hands curled back, her nails clawing back at Mike’s face as she tried to tangle her feet with his legs, throwing him off balance.
They hit the street as horns blared and a siren began to scream through the air. As she rolled to her stomach, she felt hands grab her ankles, pulling at them, trying to drag her back as she kicked, screaming, trying to roll, fighting for release.
There were too many voices. Too many hands touching her, and a second later she froze in a terror so thick, so horrible it nearly stopped her heart.
A feline roar of rage split through the chaos of sound as she heard the rapid, staccato bursts of stunners and bullets ripping around her.
One last kick, and she was free of the manacles at her feet. Crawling to her knees, she lifted her head, fighting to see. There were people everywhere. Black uniforms surrounded her. Someone was screaming from behind the barrier of enforcers, and she swore it sounded like Mike’s screams.
“Saban! Oh God, Saban!”
“Stay the hell where you are!” The growling roar from her right had her twisting, searching for him, her mind still dazed, the pain of Mike’s touch still ripping through her senses. But he was there. Through the blur of tears and pain, she saw him, then she felt him, one arm curling around her and pulling her into the mall as the gunfire behind them suddenly ceased.
His eyes were blazing into hers, filled with rage, his expression twisted with it. “If you wanted him that f**king bad, I would have readily released you,” he snarled. “Now keep your goddamned ass here, and I’ll see if I can save the son of a bitch for you.” He turned around, stood aside for the two female Breed Enforcers who crowded into the small area. “Watch her and keep her here if it means shackling her to the f**king door.”
Shock froze her, parted her lips on a cry, and left her staring at his retreating back as he left her sitting there between the street entrance and the mall entrance.
She curled her arms around her waist, and as she fought the pain and the need for his touch, she laid her head against her knees and let the tears fall.
She knew what she had done. Without meaning to, certainly without desiring to, she had betrayed her mate.
THIRTEEN
S aban stared at the mess four Council soldiers made as they bled out on the asphalt of the street outside the black panel van they had been attempting to get Natalie into. The scientist was still alive, a little bit wounded, but he was breathing, and the EMTs seemed certain he would keep living. If it weren’t for the information they needed from him, Saban would have finished the job and put a bullet in his head.
Mike Claxton was sitting on the ground, his head in his hands, a bandage wrapped around one arm and another binding his ankle.
The bastard had been damned lucky. The fact that Natalie had managed to trip both of them had saved his life, taking him out of the line of fire when he, Jonas, and the other Breeds swarmed out of the mall into the parking lot.
Saban braced his hands on his hips and stared at the man and wanted to howl in rage. He could smell the weakness, both physically and mentally, that poured from Mike Claxton. He wasn’t a fitting mate for Natalie; hell, he hadn’t even managed to be a fitting husband to her, and yet she had run to him. He couldn’t even find it in him to excuse her, to find a way to understand it. It simply came down to the fact that Claxton had meant more to her than her own life, than Saban’s life, had. And that broke his heart.
Shaking his head, he moved to the man, then hunched in front of him, his elbows resting on his knees, as he stared at Claxton’s bent head.
Mike’s head lifted. Miserable, damp blue eyes met Saban’s.
“You set this up.” They knew that. He had arranged with the scientist and the soldiers to take her. Claxton sniffed back his tears. “They have a cure for her. Whatever you did to her, it made her leave me, divorce me. She loves me, Breed. Not you.”
The pain of that was like an open, gaping wound inside Saban’s soul.
“I didn’t meet her until the day you came to the house to find me there,” he told Claxton, striving for patience. “Until that day, Natalie had never so much as breathed air that I had passed through. How could I have harmed her or damaged your marriage?”
Claxton shook his head. “They saw you.”
“Did they have pictures? Video?”
The other man continued to shake his head.
“The Council records everything, Claxton. Every investigation, every move they make, one way or the other, is recorded. If they had no proof, then it didn’t happen.”
“You drugged her,” he bit out, his voice rising as he glared at Saban. “She divorced me.”
“You cheated on her with her assistant teacher,” Saban said cruelly. “You broke trust with her. You betrayed her. You refused to allow her to make her own decisions, to be herself, because you were too frightened she would learn the truth. And when she did, you blamed her.”
Saban had had the investigation done. His sister, Chimera, had sent the information via the eLink, carefully organized, brutally concise, days before.
“She would have forgiven me.” Claxton swallowed tightly, but his demeanor shifted slightly, lost the aggression and became pathetic rather than furious. “Eventually, she would have forgiven me.”