“Did you betray your mother?” she asked then, the tears that thickened her voice unbidden, and hated—by them both. “Were your actions the ones that caused her and her mate to die?”
“My inability . . .”
“I’m the brother who betrayed your mother,” she retorted furiously then, the agony that raged inside her like her own beast shocking him with its strength. “Do you hear me, Rule? I’m the same as that gutless coward—”
His lips covered hers.
The kiss, filled with fury, with pain, with the need to cut off the agonizing torment of a child made to believe she was a monster, was infused with the hormone that filled the glands beneath his tongue with a suddenness he hadn’t heard of.
Anything to hold back the words she would have spilled between them. The knowledge that his mate couldn’t differentiate between an innocent girl’s actions and a depraved Coyote’s use of them.
Tearing his lips from hers, he stared down at her, watching as the tears she should have shed remained locked in her soul and flailed at his like the barbed whips the lab soldiers had used against him when he was just a cub. She didn’t shed the tears, but they dripped down her soul, gouging into it and leaving wounds that bled night and day. The sobs she held inside shuddered through her body, causing her to flinch repeatedly in barely perceptible little jerks that tore past her control.
“Say such a thing to me again and I swear to God I’ll make sure you regret it,” he warned, furious that she believed such a thing. “Never ever, Gypsy, let me believe you are even considering such thoughts inside that far-too-complicated little brain of yours, or the battle you’ll have with me is one you never want to face.”
Her lips trembled, then hardened.
“Go to hell, Breed,” she retorted flatly. “Better yet, get out of my hell and leave me the f**k alone.”
Leave her the f**k alone?
His hand moved, a quick reflex action that had him grabbing the curve of her ass and jerking her into the cradle of his thighs.
He’d be damned if she would defy him this way. He’d be damned if she would ever allow another such thought of herself to see the light of day, let alone the dark of a nightmare as long as he lived.
His lips curled over the sharp canines at the side of his mouth, a rumbling growl of dangerous intent sounding in his chest and echoing around them as her eyes widened before her lashes flickered nervously.
He was one second from tearing the clothes from her body and showing her, proving to her exactly why she never wanted to push him to such an extent again. His free hand was only a heartbeat from jerking open her jeans when the vibrating ping of the comm device lying on the counter went off with a distinctively coded sound, a warning he knew he couldn’t afford to ignore.
“Get away from me,” he all but whispered, though the deep animalistic sound of his voice sent a sharp wave of submissive wariness instantly striking at her senses. “Get away from me now, mate, and pray to God that by the time I finish this, I can forget the fact that you’re not just trying to destroy us, but you’ve already by God all but destroyed yourself, and that I will not tolerate.”
With that, he jerked away from her, reached out and snatched the link from the counter as he turned for the exit and stalked through it, placing the link competently in his ear and barking out a “What the f**k is going on?” to the Breed unlucky enough to send out the imperative summons.
“The McQuades have just been arrested for bringing another device into the hotel after requesting a private meeting with Jonas,” Lawe stated furiously as an enraged snarl could be heard in the background along with raised voices. “This time it was video and audio programmed with an electronic nano-nit. Jonas has just f**king lost his mind. Claws are out, and I need some f**king help here.”
Rule slammed the door behind him as he raced from the room, carrying his boots rather than taking time to actually put them on.
A nano-nit was serious.
The tiny, almost-too-small-to-be-seen electronic robot hitchhiked on the back of audio or video devices to the desired location, where it was only activated once the parent device was. It then worked its way from the device to attach itself to an electrical source to power up before following the current and homing in on the specific electrical identifier it was programmed to infiltrate.
A nano-nit was all but impossible to detect, the reason why Jonas had everything that came into the elevators scanned for audio or video before it reached the eighth floor. By doing so, he ensured that the hidden little bugs didn’t have the chance to infiltrate the independent wiring and network systems into which all cameras and wireless electronic devices were programmed.
The very attempt to get to the eighth floor with such a device was an infraction of Breed Law. To be caught with a nit was punishable by imprisonment and even, in some cases, death.
And Gypsy’s parents had been caught, not just once, but twice, attempting to get a device into Jonas’s suite. The second such attempt had included one of the dangerous little nits, which placed Gypsy in a tenuous position, that of being forced to watch her parents arrested, tried and sentenced for breaking Breed Law, for which there were no extenuating circumstances. Or bargaining with Jonas. Either of which, Rule knew, would destroy the fragile trust and love for him that he knew his mate was already fighting.
But it also had the potential to destroy his mate.
CHAPTER 24
Gypsy paced the living area of the suite, biting at a fingernail as a strange, imperative restlessness gripped her. It had been building since Rule’s abrupt departure, demanding that she do something.
God, if she only knew what.
Along with the restlessness was an overwhelming sense of dread, and an inner need for him that she realized had haunted her since she’d first seen him two months before. From across the noisy, too-crowded bar their eyes had met, and she’d felt something she hadn’t felt for so long that she’d forgotten the lack of it.
Security and warmth.