“Your brother was one of our best informants,” he finally told her, and though she hadn’t known that, she wasn’t surprised. Mark had so admired the Breeds and all they had been forced to do to survive. “He was a high-level hacker who had found a way into their computers and was feeding us information on hidden labs and the identities of the Council’s scientists and managing to steal dozens of their top-secret files,” he continued as she watched him. “He refused to let us protect him. He refused to even let us know who he was. We were here because we had tracked him this far, unaware that the Council had managed to do the same so quickly. They would have found him whether you had slipped out of the house or not. The fact that you had slipped out and were with Khi is all that saved you, honey. No one could have saved your brother.”
He was wrong.
Mark was smart.
If it hadn’t been for her stupidity, he would have found a way to save himself.
She shook her head. “He was going to leave. I heard him on the phone the last time I tried to talk to him. He was telling someone he’d meet them in a few hours. He had to finish something.” If she hadn’t left the house—
If the party hadn’t seemed so important at the time, her brother would still be alive.
She was only barely aware of Jonas rising to his feet and moving away from her. Seconds later she could hear the sound of his voice as he spoke to someone.
She was shaking as she fought to push back the memory of her brother’s death. How he’d stared at her, his dark eyes bleak and filled with hopelessness. And helplessness, as he told her how sorry he was.
He was sorry? Why had he been sorry? It had been her fault.
The Coyote had laughed at him. Standing behind her brother, that big knife against Mark’s throat, he’d laughed at Mark, then told him what they were going to do to her after he was dead.
She had begged them not to hurt Mark. She didn’t care if they killed her. She didn’t care, as long as they just let him go.
“Don’t cry, Gypsy,” he told her as that Coyote, Grody, had laughed at him. “Don’t cry, and be brave, Peanut. Do you hear me? Don’t cry. Be brave, Peanut.”
She had heard him, but still, she had watched that knife bring blood and she had screamed. Screamed and begged, Please don’t hurt him.
The knife had bitten into Mark’s throat, blood welling at the side of his neck, and then there was a long, bright red line of dark scarlet that began to flow with sickening speed as the Coyote released his body. Mark had fallen to the ground as though in slow motion, boneless, his gaze locked with hers, dimming, then finally staring back at her with a blank look of sorrow.
She jerked, her eyes flying open as she realized she had let them close.
She just wanted to go to sleep.
She wanted to sleep for a very, very long time. Long enough that maybe her mom and dad would forgive her. Maybe her baby sister, who loved Mark just as much as Gypsy did, wouldn’t hate her forever.
But every time she closed her eyes she could see that moment when Mark had died. That second when his blood had spilled down the front of his white shirt.
“Your parents will be here soon.” Jonas spoke from beside her once again. “My team has just loaded them into the heli-jet.”
They would be here soon.
They would be so angry with her.
Oh God, what if they didn’t let her go home? What if they didn’t even want her anymore?
“They’ll hate me. Momma and Daddy will never forgive me for this,” she told herself, unaware she was speaking aloud, that her words were breaking the heart of the new director of the Bureau of Breed Affairs. “They won’t even want me to come home now. How could they ever want to live with me after this?”
Where would she go?
She was only fifteen, and no one would want the girl who had helped Coyotes murder her brother. Because everyone loved Mark.
He was everyone’s best friend.
How could anyone ever love the awful person who had enabled those filthy animals to kill him?
“How could they ever want me to be home?” she whispered again, laying her head against the wall beside her and staring into the darkness once again.
Maybe if she was very, very still, if she tried hard enough, she could just disappear into that darkness and never have to exist ever again.
“I promise you, Gypsy, your parents won’t blame you,” he lied to her again. “But if that ever happens, I swear to you I’ll make sure you’re taken care of. Do you hear me, sweetheart? You have only to contact me, I’ll never desert you.”