“What you should have done was left my Breeds on my damned team instead of taking them away from me and giving me the choice to contact you when I needed them.” Her voice rose along with her anger as she glared back at both of them.
“The shooter today was Gideon,” Jonas informed her quietly as he broke in on the battle getting ready to flare to life. “He’s been following you for weeks, Diane. The team tracking you has had signs of the shadow on your ass but they couldn’t verify. All they had was a sense of it. Catching sight of him has been impossible despite their efforts, and you know my men are damned good.”
She knew Gideon, the Executioner, had no intention of killing her, despite appearances. Not once had she herself been struck by one of the precisely aimed bullets. But three of her men had been. Three she couldn’t be certain weren’t betraying her.
“And if your men hadn’t been between me and him, perhaps he would have taken the advice I left for him at my previous location and actually come out of the shadows and arranged a meet,” she suddenly yelled at him as she threw her hands up in fury.
In her room she’d left an answer to the message she’d received in Argentina. She’d done everything possible to draw the Executioner to a meeting after he had left her the warning that she was being betrayed.
“My God, Jonas, do you realize how many times your men, by his order probably, stood between me, my contacts and my damned missions?” She stabbed her finger in Lawe’s direction as a haze of disbelief filled her mind.
She was furious.
There was no scent quite as intoxicating as feminine fury, unless it was female lust. And the lust was definitely there, Lawe thought as he felt that instantaneous, burning hunger suddenly sear his mind.
She wanted to hide it. She wanted to deny it. She would have denied it to hell and back if he confronted her over it. She would cut her nose off to spite her face and they both knew it.
She was so determined to be alone, to push him away, that she ran in the opposite direction of him every chance she had.
“Both of you stand down,” Jonas ordered, his tone harsh with irritation.
Turning to him, Lawe realized the other man hadn’t taken his eyes off the devices lying so innocently on the pristine gleam of the table.
“Why don’t you take your handler and leave,” she ordered him, the command grating on the animal instincts threatening to take over. “Then the two of you can moon over the electronics together.”
“These aren’t just electronics,” Jonas said as he reached into his pocket to extract a handkerchief before carefully wrapping it around the three bugs and pocketing it before turning his gaze back to them.
“Really?” Her arms slid down to allow her hands to prop on her hips defiantly. “Are they aliens disguised as electronics? Didn’t I see that movie already?”
Jonas’s lips quirked. “Only if you managed to find a copy that I couldn’t. That movie is over forty years old and harder to find than Casablanca. But these little babies are like fingerprints. I’ve only seen them twice before, which means if Gideon put them in place, then I may have a way of tracking him.”
Diane focused her attention on him rather than the anger demanding action as it rose inside her.
“Such as?” Diane asked.
Not that she cared. Come daylight she would be after far different prey. “Such as the same signal that he used to pull information into these babies can be used to pull information out of them,” he told her. “I’ll explain it tomorrow when we meet with the Leo, Leo Vanderale. He’ll need to talk to you as well as Thor in regard to where you found them and how they were connected to their power source.”
Oh yeah, she was going to be at that meeting. Besides the fact that she had no intention of being in D.C. come morning, she also had no intention of facing the First Leo, the rumored first ever successful melding of human and animal DNA, more than a hundred years before.
“Speaking of that information, I’ll have it before I leave.”
Autocratic, demanding and arrogantly certain of himself. She would have expected Jonas to demand the information, not Lawe. Diane laughed at the pure Breed confidence he had in himself and his certainty she would be led so easily.
“You can get the information at the same time Leo and your alpha do,” she snorted. “I don’t explain things twice, Lawe.”
And he knew it.
It was a test. Had she told him, then he would have known she had no intention of making that meeting.
His eyes narrowed.
“The meeting’s at ten,” Jonas informed her as she and Lawe were locked in a silent battle fought only with their eyes.
“Fine. Now you can leave.” She had no intention of speaking to Leo Vanderale the next day. Once the first glimmer of light had made its debut, she intended to be on her way to Window Rock, Arizona.
Giving a brief, sharp nod, Jonas turned to Lawe. “I’ll contact Callan and Leo tonight. When you’re finished here . . .” He paused before his lips edged into a grin. “Or should I say instead, sometime tonight, you should contact Rule and let him know we’ll need every Breed in the vicinity on grounds when the heli-jet arrives in the morning.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Lawe promised, his nod sharp as Jonas headed for the door.
When the door snicked closed and locked behind the director, Diane turned back to Lawe.
“You need to leave with him,” Diane stated, her chest tight and aching as she battled tears that made no sense. She was stronger than this, she told herself. She was no ninny to cry over a man as though he were essential to her life. But for some reason, the betrayal she felt was tearing at her heart.