“Dawn,” Dash said warningly, his voice darker, more commanding.
“Oh yeah, that whole respect thing.” She shrugged her shoulders as she shoved her hands into the back pockets of her uniform pants. “Sorry ’bout that, Dash. I must be low on sleep or something.” Or tolerance. Forgiveness. Or maybe it was understanding she was low on. Understanding how her brother, the man she had depended upon totally, could have betrayed her as he had. She watched the wariness that flashed in his beautiful golden eyes, the regret and the anger. In Wyatt, she saw only cold silver eyes staring back at her from a savagely remorseless expression.
“I’m busy right now,” she told them both. “So if you just wanted to say hi, consider it said and I’ll go back to the party. It’s really great. My uniform is all the rage.”
She swallowed back the pain, the incredible fury at the knowledge that these two men had stood with Seth in that office in Sanctuary. That they had shown him that disc, the images of the child that she had been, the animal those labs had turned her into.
Callan grimaced, his canines flashing as he pushed his hands through his hair and glanced at Dash. There was a flash of retribution in his eyes.
Seeing him dressed in a silk business suit, his heavily muscled body flexing dangerously beneath it, Dawn knew she should be wary. Callan was normally a patient pride leader, but he didn’t tolerate disrespect at all. And that was too damned bad tonight.
“Dash, you aren’t needed right now.” Callan flicked his gaze to the Wolf Breed. “I’ll take care of this.”
Dash crossed his arms over his chest and stared back at Callan. “I’m her commander here, Callan, that supersedes your authority over her outside Sanctuary,” Dash pointed out to him.
“Then I’m telling you to leave,” Jonas growled. “I am your superior.”
Dash laughed at that. “If you want to try me, Jonas, we can go head-to-head right here, I’m all for it. But it’s not something you want to do.”
“And all this flexing of male Breed muscle is really swoon worthy,” Dawn injected sweetly. “But completely juvenile. Can I get back to the party now? Seth promised me a dance, you know.”
“We’re going to talk,” Callan snapped. “Now.”
“We have nothing to discuss, Pride Leader Lyons,” she informed him coldly. “The time for talking to me is, oh, I’d say about ten years past.”
As she stared back at her brother, she found herself, amazingly, wanting to cry. There was a difference between battling tears and wishing one could shed tears. In this case, Dawn wished she could shed the tears and maybe, in the process, ease the agony filling her as she stared back at him.
Jonas didn’t matter; he was just a prick and everyone knew it. A calculating, manipulating, game-playing son of a Council member. That was what everyone knew him to be, so there was no foul there. A Breed could expect him to do something so utterly evil. But Callan. Callan, who she thought loved her, she couldn’t make sense of at all.
“Dash shouldn’t have told you,” Callan sighed, shaking his head. “Not yet.”
“Really?” She blinked as though in amazement, when she wanted to scream at him in fury. “Perhaps he should have told me sooner, Callan. Then maybe, just maybe, my mate wouldn’t have gotten over me. Maybe he wouldn’t have slept with other women instead of me.” Her voice rose before she snapped her teeth together in fury. “Oh, how calm and regretful you were before I came here,” she whispered.
“Telling me that my mate, my f**king mate, slept with other women. That he would marry another. That hedeserved a life outside me.” She was shaking now. She jerked her hands from her pockets, and before she could stop it her finger was pointing at him accusingly. “You nearly cost me everything I hold dear with your bloody interference.”
“Or did I save your sanity at a time when you could ill afford to divide your strength between a mate demanding your presence in his bed, and the strength you needed to deal with what Dayan did to attempt to destroy you?” he asked. “Tell me honestly you could have slept with him, Dawn, and I’ll accept your judgment of my actions.”
She hated that tone of voice. The grieving resonance, the pain in his eyes as he stared at her. The way his fists clenched at his side.
She remembered the day he had found those discs. How he had drawn her into a room alone, closed the door on the others and laid them slowly on the table as she stared at them in horror. A tear had slid down his cheek. A single tear as he asked in a voice savage with raw emotion why she hadn’t come to him.
Dawn shook her head now, as she had then. “I don’t know. No more than I knew when I came here how I would respond. But since that question has been answered to everyone’s satisfaction now, perhaps it could have been then.”
“You were still waking us with your screams almost nightly,” he snarled. “You couldn’t bear to be in the same room with the man without shaking in fear, and you ask how I could do such a thing to you? How could I not?”
“Because it wasn’t your call,” she snarled right back at him. “He was my mate. He wasn’t a ravening monster that had no self-control. You should have trusted him. And you should have given me the chance.” Her fists clenched as the rage threatened to engulf her. “You took my choice, Callan. And that was wrong. You took my mate when I ached for him, when I needed him. And you took my choice.”
Just as it had been taken so many times before.
“That smirking son of a bitch. He was so arrogantly cocky, strutting around Sanctuary as though he owned the place and watching you like a hungry dog. You were too fragile. He had no control then, Dawn. He had nothing but his hunger and his certainty that what he wanted should be his.”
“If that were true, then he wouldn’t have given a damn what you wanted,” she yelled back. “You let your guilt nearly destroy me, Callan. You didn’t want me with Seth, because if I left, then you couldn’t make up for the years thatI , myself and no one else, allowed Dayan to destroy me.”
The room was silent as she finished. She stared back into Callan’s tormented gaze before she turned her attention to a silent Jonas.
He stared back as expressionlessly, as coldly and unmovingly, as an iceberg. She respected him, but she didn’t particularly like him. There were very few who did.
“I wanted to protect you, Dawn.” Callan exhaled roughly. “I still want to protect you, but not to the extent that I would have held you back from your mate if I thought for a second that being with him wouldn’t have traumatized you worse at the time. I did what I felt I had to do.”