“How do you think this will convince me to let you shed it instead, Dane?” Quizzically, she watched him, seeing the calculation, the gentle manipulations the Breed used as others would use a weapon. Efficiently, unmercifully.
“I was merely hoping.” He shrugged.
“Strangely,” she told him, “I really don’t give a f**k who cuts his throat, as long as someone does. And as long as they wait until I get the answers I want. Then I don’t care how he’s sent to hell.”
“Understandable,” he agreed before breathing in deeply and straightening against the wall. “Do me a favor, dear, don’t tell anyone but your mate I was here, if you don’t mind. I rather enjoy my American family, and learning who you saw the night your contact met with Dog and me could endanger our slowly merging bonds.” His grin was mocking. Too mocking.
“None of my business, Dane,” she promised him. “As long as Jonas gets what he wants and my parents walk away from this, then it’s really none of my business.”
“And they deserve to walk away?” he asked as she turned to leave.
Gypsy lowered her head, all too aware of the fact that she’d linked her fingers in front of herself nervously.
“They don’t deserve it,” she answered honestly. “But no one was hurt, Dane. No harm was done. And I don’t think I could survive seeing them punished when I should have known what was happening. When I should have remembered what Mark was trying to tell me.”
If she had, then she would never have spent nine years believing in a guilt she hadn’t owned. And maybe, just maybe, her mother wouldn’t have ended up hating her.
With that, she turned and moved along the short hall to the main room of the facility where her parents were being held. There, Lawe and Diane waited along with half a dozen Breeds to escort her back to the hotel.
“Ready?” Lawe came to his feet, his expression concerned.
“I’m ready.” She nodded before turning to Diane. “Has my sister been found?”
“She’s still at the hotel.” Diane nodded. “She’s refusing to see them.”
Gypsy understood that one. She wished she had stayed at the hotel herself now.
“Has anyone contacted Jonas yet?” she asked Lawe then, knowing Dane had been there for a reason.
Lawe grimaced. “Sorry, Gypsy, not yet. Are you sure they will?”
She nodded shortly, remembering the look in Dane’s eyes as she turned away from him.
He was a calculating son of a bitch, she suspected, but his compassion, the empathy she sensed he felt and his love for not just his species, but also the family he spoke of, had been like a flame refusing to be quenched.
“They will,” she stated resolutely. “Someone will. They can’t afford not to.” Then, squaring her shoulders, she moved for the door. “I need to leave now, there are things I have to do.”
She had to see a man about a betrayal and the blood he owed her. But first, she had to find the man stroking her senses from a distance that should have made such a thing impossible.
The Breed who owned her heart.
...
Rule stepped into Jonas’s suite, finding the director instantly where he stood, staring through the tall windows onto the desert below.
“I should f**king kill you.” The animalistic growl in Jonas’s voice should have filled him with wariness. It was a sign, a signal that Jonas could be making a trip to a hungry volcano very soon.
He wasn’t a fit meal for Madame Lava, though, Rule assured himself as he stared at the stiff set of the other Breed’s shoulders.
“You have all the information he has, Jonas,” Rule assured him. “I’m certain of it. There’s nothing the Unknown, or the Bengal Judd has, that can help Amber or the Bureau.”
“And you know this as a fact, how?” Jonas turned then, the pupils of his eyes obliterated by the dark, stormy swirls of color flickering there.
Freaky as shit, Rule had always thought, but he was used to it.
“I made sure of it,” he reminded the director. “It’s all in my report. Nine years’ worth of notes as well as everything Judd stole from those labs. He was never a threat or a link back to Gideon. He was a tool, nothing more. He drew Gideon here but you and I both know that Judd can’t force Gideon to show himself. If Gideon wanted him dead, then no doubt, he’d be dead.”
Aristocratic nostrils flared as Jonas’s features seemed to tighten further. Rule couldn’t detect any emotion, tension or intent in the Breed. It was rare that Jonas let anything free with anyone except his mate and his child.