“I can protect you, goddammit,” he snarled. “Give me that much at least.”
Her gaze flickered with indecision, with hope and fear and a flash of agonizing pain.
“I can’t.”
“I won’t let them f**king kill you.” He was surprised to hear his voice rise. His voice never rose. He was the calm Breed, the playful one.
She stared back at him, a cynical twist to her mouth that told him more than words how little she trusted him.
“I can’t give you what you want, Tanner.” Desperation filled her voice. “I don’t have what you need.”
“Why do I have to keep telling you that I can f**king smell your lies?” he growled.
“Have I ever mentioned how little I care?” she cried out, the lie obvious not just in her scent, but in her voice and in her eyes. “You seem to be under the misconception here, Breed, that I’m willingly playing this little game with you. I’m not. I didn’t ask you to bring me here, and I didn’t ask you to interrogate me. All I asked for was a bath.”
The tiger he fought to keep hidden awoke with a dangerous shift within him. He could feel the warning snarl in his chest, the opening of extra senses, the added determination that nothing ever hurt her again.
“You’re still protecting him.” He clenched his teeth against the knowledge. “That bastard has beat you, buried you alive how many f**king times, and killed your child. He hired his own man to be your lover and used him to find reasons to punish you, and you still protect him?”
She turned back to the tub, her hand running beneath the water again before she gripped the lip of the high, claw-foot tub and moved to lift her leg over the side.
She didn’t make a sound, but he saw the discomfort the effort was costing her.
“Goddammit, Scheme, can’t you even f**king ask me for help?” He gripped her waist and lifted her in as he fought back emotions he had never known in his life. For the first time, he knew fear. Without her help, he couldn’t save her.
“If I needed your help, I would ask for it.” She lowered herself into the hot water with a small, sighing gasp, the heated liquid washing to her h*ps as she pulled her hair out of the way and let it flow over the edge of the tub.
“Scheme.” He hunched next to the tub and stared back at her imperatively. “Give me something. Anything I can use to help you. Don’t go down like this. For both our sakes.”
Her lips quirked. “I’m nothing to you, Tanner,” she said softly. “You aren’t even part of the equation.”
Scheme watched as Tanner’s face hardened, his eyes gleaming with an almost unearthly light as he straightened, staring down at her with a predatory intent that she knew should have frightened her.
“I won’t let you die like this.” His voice was guttural, animalistic. “No matter how willing you are to die for that bastard who sired you.”
He turned and stalked from the room, snapping the curtain closed behind him as she closed her eyes against his rage.
He was good, she thought, in regret, fighting back her tears. God, she was not going to cry over this. She had never cried for anything short of unbearable pain, until Tanner. She didn’t cry because her emotions were ripping her apart inside. And they were ripping her apart.
For the first time since Chaz, she wanted to believe in a man. She wanted to believe so bad it was eating her alive inside, breaking her heart, destroying a part of her mind that she hadn’t known existed. She could have sworn she had outgrown fairy tales. But she wanted the fantasy Tanner was offering so desperately that it cut like a knife inside her.
She had lost her child because she had trusted a man. Believed in him with all her heart. Loved him until she had overlooked the tiny inconsistencies that warned her of his betrayal. And now she was on the very edge of doing it again. Placing her trust and the lives of others in the hands of a man who could betray her.
Her soul screamed out in denial. But she remembered that the moment she realized that Chaz had aided her father in destroying her child, her soul had screamed out the same denial. Could she survive such betrayal again?
If he was sincere, then once he learned the truth of what she had been doing, he would understand. That was love, she told herself. He would forgive her, wouldn’t he? He would understand why she hid the fact that she was working for Jonas, that she couldn’t trust him until the information she had made it to the only man who knew what she had been doing for the past eight years.
Her lips quirked at the thought of that silver-eyed Lion Breed. Very, very few people knew his secrets. She was one of them. And because she knew them, she had trusted him. He would have bled out in the most painful ways before betraying his own people. Or betraying someone attempting to help them.
He was her only chance. All she had to do was get to Jonas. She couldn’t trust Tanner, no matter the demand inside her that pushed her to do just that. No matter the pain that holding her silence cost her.
A part of her was certain that Tanner wasn’t her father’s spy. But there was that dark voice within her soul, the one the had awakened the day she realized her lover had helped destroy his own baby. The voice that whispered of Cyrus’s manipulative, calculating evil.
Breeds were deceptive; it was part of their training. And Tanner’s training, even at a young age, had been extensive. And Cyrus had been part of his training. To date, he still controlled more than half of the Breeds he had helped train himself. He had helped train Tanner before the escapes from those New Mexico labs. He could still have enough hold over Tanner to control him.
So why did she need to trust him? Why was it such a battle to force herself to remember what he was, and what he could be?
Because she loved him. Because he had touched her inside when she was certain she could never be touched there again.