“You cover my back and I’ll cover yours.” She glared back at him fiercely. “But I won’t be leaving, and I won’t drop what I’m doing here.”
“Just what the f**k are you doing here?” His voice rose, not a lot, but a lot for Cabal, who normally kept his tone calm, even. “Besides endangering your own life.”
“Getting the story,” she informed him coldly.
“Why?”
“What do you mean ‘why’?” she exclaimed. “The killer sent me information, Cabal. Should I just ignore it?”
“What are you going to do with the information or the answers once you get them?” he asked her, his expression fierce. “You know we’re going to cover this up, bury it as deep as possible. Why write a story that will never see print, Cassa? Why do that to yourself?”
Why? She stared back at him in confusion. She knew the answer, but it wasn’t one she could give him.
“What if you’re wrong about covering it?” she whispered.
“What if someone else finds out? Or the killer sends the proof to another reporter? You’ll need the answers. You’ll need someone to write a story that will show your side of it, and cast a better light on the Breeds.”
“That can be accomplished without putting you in danger,” he stated. “Why are you here?”
“I want the answers,” she bit out angrily. “I need to know why.”
He shook his head. “You need to absolve yourself. That’s the reason you’ve done this all these years. It’s the reason why you’ve always fought to see the Breeds as heroes and victims rather than the killers we were created to be. It’s why you put yourself in danger time and again for the Breeds. You can’t make up for what Watts did.”
Cassa flinched. The pain of his statement traveled through her until she was amazed that she was standing on her feet. It was like a punch of agony centered in her soul that spread out through her entire being.
She couldn’t make up for what she had allowed Douglas to do. For what she hadn’t realized he was doing. She’d known that all along. Known that there was no absolution, no forgiveness for the crimes he had committed. The crimes she had unknowingly committed in trusting the man she had been married to.
There was no way anyone else could forgive her either. There had been two dozen Bengal Breeds. To her knowledge they had all died but one. Cabal. The most fierce, the most dangerous of them all.
“That has nothing to do with this,” she argued, aware that her voice as well as her argument was weak.
It was no more than she had thought herself. She fought to make the world see what she saw once she had gotten to know the Breeds. Men and women fighting for survival. It didn’t matter what they had been created to be. What mattered was what they were, honorable, strong.
“It has everything to do with this, Cassa,” he growled as he jerked a pair of jeans from a dresser and pulled them on. “You think putting yourself in the line of fire will make anyone see you differently?”
Cassa whirled around so he wouldn’t see the pain in her face. It was exactly what she had hoped. That the Breeds, should they ever learn the extent of what Douglas had done, would believe that she hadn’t been a part of it. She had hoped that it would ease the hatred she feared Cabal felt for her.
“Whether they see me differently or not doesn’t matter,” she said quietly as she turned back to him and fought to bury the pain deep enough that even his Breed senses wouldn’t detect it. “What matters is how I see myself. And I wouldn’t like what I saw in the mirror every morning if I just walked away from this.”
She walked away from him instead. She didn’t bother to stalk out of the room; she didn’t think she had the energy for that. She just walked away, returned to the living room and the clothes scattered across the floor.
Her clothes as well as his.
Shaking her head at her own feeling of failure, she hurriedly dressed before picking up the pack she carried as a purse and leaving the cabin.
The walk was going to suck, but it wouldn’t suck near as bad as staying here and staring into his eyes, knowing that nothing she did, no matter how much she loved him, would ever make up for what her ex-husband had done. Or for how much he blamed her for the chance that Douglas had had to deceive the Breeds.
The air was chilled, the late winter weather moving in hard on the mountains as the temperature began to drop. It would be a long, cold walk back to town. But it couldn’t be any longer, or any colder, than the past that stretched out behind her.
CHAPTER 17
He followed her. Cassa had expected it. He was her mate. He was her hormonal, biological match. She would have snorted at that thought if she weren’t so pissed off at him.
The walk back to town was a chilly one, but it gave her a chance to think, a chance to put things in perspective a bit more than she had already. Not that she had anything worked out, because she didn’t.
When he pulled up next to her and the passenger door of the Raider slid open, she turned, looked at him for a long moment, then slammed the door closed.
She was here for a story; she wasn’t here to be psychoanalyzed by a Bengal that had no idea the torment she had lived through because of his suffering. And she wasn’t here to fight for the heart of a man who obviously didn’t want to open his heart to her.