The hall wasn’t empty. Waiting for them were Jonas, Lawe, Rule and Mordecai. And they didn’t look happy.
“We have a situation,” Jonas stated, his tone cold, implacable. “We need you for this.”
Cabal clenched his teeth together furiously as he turned to Cassa.
“Like hell.” She pushed in front of him. “I know Breed Law and don’t think I won’t use it.” She stared back at Jonas. “Where he goes, I go.” She shot Cabal a hard, angry look. “It looks like the only way to get the truth out of him at this point.”
Jonas’s brows lifted in surprise as the other members of the team stared back at Cabal in shock.
Cabal kept his expression carefully blank, though he didn’t doubt the arousal pouring through him was clearly detected. Mating heat was surging through his system, pumping in his veins. She was taking her place. She wasn’t asking for it. A part of him was exultant, another part was terrified. He couldn’t protect her if she was in the line of fire. But she was also proving that protection wasn’t what she wanted.
Was this what he had been pushing for all along? he wondered. A mate who would fight to stand beside him rather than behind him?
It didn’t matter, and he wasn’t questioning it at the moment. Later, they would discuss this. Just as they would discuss her penchant for getting information from Dog rather than her mate. If she needed information, then she could damned well challenge him for it.
“Very well.” Jonas shot Cabal a warning look. “We’ll take the elevator to the top floor. The meeting room is set up there.”
The same meeting room Cabal had been headed to when Mordecai had waylaid him in the upper hallway to inform him that Cassa was meeting with Dog.
A meeting Mordecai had set up to repay a debt he owed to Cassa. Cabal understood the repayment, just as he appreciated the loyalty the Coyote had shown in informing her mate of that meeting.
He had accepted certain facts the second Mordecai had informed him that Cassa was meeting with Dog. First and foremost was his own mistake in not working with her. He had thought he could quell that independent nature enough to allow him to protect her. He’d been wrong about that, he admitted it.
Breed society was much different from that of human society. Respect wasn’t given, it was taken. She had earned the respect of every Breed she had worked with but had held back with him. She had expected that respect to be given. She had demanded it in her own way; he had just been too dense to understand. And now it was hers.
Above all else though, he had wanted to save her from the truth of what was going on here, the truth of her own past and the parts that were not as dead as she had believed they were.
“In here.” Jonas led the way into the suite he had taken.
The meeting room was still set up from earlier. Pictures were displayed on a holographic board while several holographic vids still played of previous hunts the Deadly Dozen had been on. The videos had been saved from Council archives that had been discovered in some of the labs that were rescued over the years.
There weren’t many of them, but there were enough to show the horrifying measures the Dozen had taken in catching their prey.
Cassa stopped inside the room, her gaze on the images displayed across the electronic board.
The Deadly Dozen had been rumored to have taped some of their hunts. It was how they sold their services to the Council and the individual labs seeking to reacquire their escaped Breeds.
Actually seeing proof of it was horrifying though. Seeing the Breeds as they fought to run, to hide, to escape a dozen hunters that had lain in wait for them.
She heard the door close behind the four men, and she was aware of them moving around her, watching her as she stared at the images on the screen.
“They were too good,” she whispered as she watched the video for long moments. “There was a Breed with them.”
“Two. They weren’t part of the Dozen,” Jonas stated quietly. “That was always part of the deal. The labs would loan them two Coyotes to help track during the hunt.”
She shook her head slowly. “They led them where they wanted them to go. They watched. Waited.”
“Some of the hunts lasted for weeks, a few months at a time,” she was told. “They stalked their prey.”
Like a safari hunt, she thought. They knew what they wanted, where it was. They knew their prey’s habits and how they tracked, hid. As she watched, she could see that. They knew their prey intimately.
“This particular hunt was one of the first,” Jonas told her, and she felt Cabal moving behind her, his hands settling on her hips, pulling her against him.
The clasp was intimate rather than sexual. Comforting rather than arousing.
“We found this one in a lab in New Mexico,” Jonas continued. “The hunt took place approximately twenty-seven years ago. The Breeds they were hunting were a male and two females from that particular lab. They caught the first female a week before this hunt.”
She sensed what Jonas wasn’t saying. That she didn’t want to know the particulars of that capture. She probably didn’t want to know this one either.