Had the scientists begun injections in Honor sooner, then the pain of reversing it would have been much lower, closer to the levels Amber was experiencing.
But hearing that tiny child cry, seeing the pain in her eyes as he’d returned for each follow-up injection, was killing him.
He believed himself to be a monster. What did that make the scientists who had created and tortured the Breeds for so long?
“Got problems, Gideon?” The name that fell so easily from the Coyote’s lips had Graeme turning slowly, the monster that existed within him making its presence known.
Graeme felt the burn of his flesh, the primal response that ignited a genetic code and flashed the dark stripes across his face, his hips, alongside his left leg.
As quickly as he lost control, he snagged it back, holding on with a desperate grip before it could escape forevermore as it had before.
The Coyote saw it, though. His eyes widened, he swallowed tightly and an instant later Graeme was in his face, canines bared, his eyes picking up hues of color, differences in body temperature and the fear the Breed had been fighting to hide as claws gripped his neck, exerting just enough pressure to pierce the tough hide and threaten the large artery in his neck as the sound that rumbled from his throat echoed in the caverns like a lost nightmare.
“Say that name again,” Graeme suggested, “even think it, and we’ll see how easy it will be to skin you.” With the other hand he used a razored nail to lay open the thin layer of skin and slice between it and red meat.
He knew what it felt like. He carried his own scars from the scalpels the scientists had wielded.
“Then I’ll dissect you as they did the fine Gideon. Living. Screaming. Your bowels bloodied as the waste of it seeps from your body like liquid terror and you piss yourself from the pain. And that’s just the beginning,” he hissed, feeling his eyes begin to redden. “Within seconds you try to beg for mercy, but the pain is such that no words can form, your brain no longer recognizes the need for speech, the need to rationalize—it only knows one thing. The agony, the horror of it and the inability to move. The stark realization that you can’t tighten a muscle, can’t jerk a limb. You can’t even control your own heartbeat as they reach in and touch it, slicing into your brain with such a brutal punch of agony as they do so that those animal genetics of yours tuck their tails and start howling for death.”
A second later he scented the wash of the Coyote soldier’s urine as it began seeping from his body.
Fuck, and here he thought he had a soldier of better mettle than the others. The scent dragged him back from where he’d slipped once again, though. It jerked the sanity back to his mind, the logic and ability to think, to reason flooding back into his senses.
“Don’t test me,” he growled, stepping back from the obviously terrified Coyote Breed. Casting him a sneer, he asked in disgust, “You bastards used to have more iron in your spines. What did we do? Kill all the crazy ones?”
He was starting to think it was possible.
...
This was a complication.
Dane inhaled the sweet, black cherry taste of the slender cigar and considered his next move.
It wasn’t that he enjoyed this particular game, and God knew he didn’t. It was that he knew his brother far too well, and their parents were certain at the time that there were no alternatives.
Dane had even suggested to Jonas that if the message went out to Gideon and Judd that the injections rather than the code itself were needed, one or even both would help. Both Jonas and Rachel had instantly rejected such an action, though.
And Ely, the Breeds’ doctor, wasn’t yet in a place where her confidence could match Jonas’s will as it had once done. That had left Dane to do the dirty work, as it usually did.
He didn’t care to get his hands dirty, but if Gideon, or Graeme as he was called now, didn’t give Jonas what he wanted within forty-eight hours, then Dane could kiss his entire American family and friends good-the-fuck-bye, because Rule’s little mate would tattle on him like a five-year-old.
“Remind me to stay the f**k out of your little games from here on out.” Dog sidled next to him, struck a match and lit the tip of his own cigar. “I’d heard conspiring with you could get dangerous. Strange, never heard of you getting caught before, though.”
Dane threw him a careless, confident smile. “I’ve got this, my friend,” he drawled with far more assurance than he felt, he admitted. “All will be well.”
“Let’s hope Leo’s ready to welcome me home when Jonas puts out that execution order on me,” the other Breed sighed in response. “I’ve been getting rather bored with America anyway.”
Dane almost snorted at that one. Dog? Bored? He rather doubted it. Dog lived for the games he was able to play within the Breed societies here. Like all the Leo’s protégés, Dog was a master manipulator and a calculating son of a bitch in the bargain. So much so that when Leo realized Dog was in America working at freeing the Breeds and not just helping them to set up their societies, but encouraging it in a fashion, he’d been livid and dared the Coyote to return.
Leo was still a bit upset over that one.
The patriarch worried incessantly about the safety of the American branch of the family, and still swore that the world simply wasn’t ready for Mating Heat, and keeping it a secret much longer would be impossible.
Dane shuddered to consider what his father would do if he ever learned that his son, his legitimate heir, had been bankrolling the Coyote’s little venture at the time. He often wondered if Leo, as he often threatened, would actually disinherit him.
He was afraid his father just might do so.
“You worry too much, Dog,” Dane informed him absently as he drew on the cigar and considered the night thoughtfully. “You should relax a bit.”