She was watching Commander Breaker closely with that bland expression. Each time he petitioned for allowances in the investigation and was turned down, she watched him very closely.
What was she looking for?
“She’s as good as you are,” Ashley commented as he kept his gaze on the screen. “She hasn’t shown so much as a hint of emotion or knowledge. I wonder what her scent is at the moment.”
“Hmmm.” His mate.
Pride enveloped him. Whatever her position was with her uncle, she was obviously very very good at it.
Sitting next to Terran Martinez was Isabelle’s friend Liza. As Terran’s legal assistant she made certain the files he needed were always available, and she began doing it with an efficient ease.
She seemed no more than reasonably concerned about the subject, and unaware of whatever secrets the Martinez men were hiding.
“What are they hiding?” Ashley wondered aloud. “Shouldn’t they know by now that we’ll figure out they’re lying, Malachi? I mean really, what’s the point?”
Malachi didn’t comment. He didn’t take his attention from the meeting or those attending it. Ray Martinez would have been far better off to have simply omitted the genetic typing from the registry they kept, if they felt it would endanger them, and allowed the Breeds to go through the rest. That would have allayed suspicion. This way, they were only cementing it, despite their protestations of the people’s right to genetic privacy.
Whatever it was, they were protesting in vain, Malachi knew. Rule Breaker and Lawe Justice hadn’t achieved their ranks by giving up easily.
Keeping his mate out of harm’s way would be easy enough, though. If she knew anything, she would have betrayed herself, as the chief and his advisor had earlier. She had her suspicions, that was obvious, but her reaction hadn’t been enough that he felt the need to appraise Rule of it. There was no sense dragging her into the battles that were beginning to be formed.
She was safe. And tonight, she would be his. He would make damned sure she wasn’t dragged into it any further than her suspicions had already placed her.
He had waited on her for far too long. He had dreamed of her far too many nights to risk losing her because of a matter the two parties should have been cooperating on.
He had ached too deeply for her. Always knowing she awaited him, always knowing she was out there somewhere, perhaps even as lost within the darkness as he was. Looking into the stars and wondering when the loneliness would end.
As he stood outside her room at dawn, inhaling the scent of the candles and finding her unique scent within it, he’d felt something in his chest tighten painfully. Because that scent of fear was still there. Whether it be nightmares or memories, there was something his mate feared. That fear was something he had to take out of her life. He simply would not allow it to be a part of her life any longer.
She was his now, just as he was hers.
And tonight, he would ensure that nothing, or no one, ever had the chance to destroy it.
Chapter Four
So many times I fought back tears, felt incomplete and feared you weren’t there.
Her uncle and her grandfather feared that the Breeds had finally arrived to track down the three individuals they had been hiding for more than a decade. Isabelle knew very little about the events that summer. She had been only a child herself and still dealing with the death of her mother and Chelsea’s antics.
Isabelle had barely been thirteen. Her mother had been dead for six years, but the loss of the gentle, loving woman she had been had devastated Isabelle and Chelsea for years. In ways, they still hadn’t recovered from the loss.
Their father had dealt with it by disappearing more often, searching almost continually for the sister who had been lost when he’d been a child himself.
He hadn’t found the sister or proof of her death—what he’d found instead had been a teenage boy and a young girl. Several months later another young girl had shown up and then disappeared within hours.
It had been so long ago that Isabelle couldn’t even remember what they had looked like. They had been at her home for only a matter of hours in the deepest part of the night. Isabelle had only seen their faces for moments. Pale, suspicious, resigned faces. As though they had made their peace with the world and whatever fate awaited them. The part of the night that had always found Isabelle awake and staring into the darkness had also been the time of night that others prowled the darkness. Others who came for the children took them away and ensured they were never seen or heard from again.
She had stared into the darkness after leaving Malachi the night before until she had found herself nodding off to sleep by the wide windowsill.
The night had always called to her, even as a child. Pulling her from sleep, it seemed the darkness whispered on each breeze that slid past her home, and on those currents of air she swore she felt the haunting cries of the coyotes singing through the air.
Was Malachi the reason she had always felt an affinity to those wild, often hated creatures?
The People knew the coyote, though. They knew him for the prankster he was, for the deceiver, but they also knew him for the vital part of the night that he commanded.
He wasn’t all bad. He was equal parts human and supernatural being with all the faults and fallacies that came with them. At least, in legend.
Her lips quirked as she left the meeting, leaving the players in the game being conducted to deal with one another on their own. She had done her part. She had watched Commander Rule Breaker each time he pushed for what he wanted and each time he was denied. And each time she had written the same opinion.