Because Mating Heat couldn’t be allowed.
Rule Breaker, Investigative Commander of the Bureau of Breed Affairs, refused to allow himself a mate.
He refused to allow any woman to die beneath the cold, merciless blade of scientists determined to learn the secrets of a mating that nature was still determined to play with . . .
He shook the thought away. Before he could move to possess what he’d waited for for six years, he first had secrets to reveal, a game to end and a Bengal Breed to slowly draw into the fold of the Bureau of Breed Affairs. Years of searching for the Breed called Gideon, and he’d finally arrived in the one place Rule had been pushing him to.
The danger Jonas’s daughter faced and the hell of a past research project, would see the end of its secrets. He would either see the brutal truths hidden among four victims of that horrible project revealed, or the possible death of an innocent child and the slow destruction of a man he respected above all others but his brother.
It would end here, he promised.
But what would happen to him, who or what he would have to fight for, once it was over . . .
TWO MONTHS LATER
Jonas stared down at his sleeping daughter, his hands clasped together as his wrists rested on the rail of her crib. For the moment, he could almost convince himself that she was going to be fine.
Almost.
Rage festered inside him. His daughter was being killed right before his eyes, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t stop the serum she had been given seven months previously from doing as the scientists predicted: It was killing her.
Just as it had killed its creator, Phillip Brandenmore, weeks after he’d injected Amber.
It had rotted his brain from the inside out, killing him slowly, painfully.
God help him, he couldn’t allow that to happen to Amber. It would destroy her mother, his mate.
It would destroy him.
Pulling back from the crib, his arms dropping to his sides, he gazed around the room, not for the first time, searching for some shadow, a spirit, something, some sign of a presence that could answer his questions.
Fairies, Cassie Sinclair called them. Jonas knew them to be spirits, psychic remnants or broken dreams.
And no such spirit or remnant, psychic or otherwise, walked his daughter’s path.
Yet.
That didn’t mean she had none.
It didn’t mean she had no future.
It simply meant she was far too young to have drawn one to her yet.
Either way, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t keep fighting for her life.
The answers were here, in Window Rock, Arizona, waiting to be unburied, while other secrets were waiting on the day they could be buried.
He didn’t see the things Cassie saw and he didn’t see those vague images near as often. But he knew enough to know that the ancient Navajo ritual that had played out in this desert nine years before, three years after the escape of four incredibly gifted creations, would reveal the secret he needed to save Amber.
The question was whether he would uncover the truth in time.
Jonas knew he’d searched every area he could think of. He’d gone over every memory, no matter how unfocused or uncertain, that Liza Johnson had of her previous life as Honor Roberts. He’d especially probed at the hazy, scattered memories of the ritual itself that she remembered. The ancient power that transferred the consciousness of two dying girls into Honor Roberts’s and Fawn Corrigan’s bodies wasn’t as easy to decipher as he’d hoped, even with the help of the guides that sometimes came to him.
The spirits of Honor and Fawn had somehow been put to sleep until the time of the awakening, as it was called. Cassie assured him they were awake now, though, and working quite well with those of the spirits of Claire and Liza when they’d chided her for attempting to interfere.
A recent attack on Liza had revealed the partial memories that now allowed Jonas to piece together some of the missing clues they needed to crack the code that hid the information on the serum Amber had been injected with.
Just some of the pieces. Still, the formula and various notes of the years that the serum had been used on Honor and Fawn had yet to be decoded.
Claire Martinez, the young woman who inhabited Fawn Corrigan’s body, had accepted the fact that she wasn’t who she believed she was. Accepting and awakening were two different things, though. And the secrets the girl was hiding were beginning to bother him. How the hell was he supposed to stand aside and let her continue to search for a way to honorably kill herself?
Son of a bitch, why couldn’t he just f**king walk away from everyone else’s problems and just focus on his own. On his daughter. On his mate.
Because it was all tied together, he admitted.
Woven so closely together that to abandon one would be to abandon the child his heart had taken as his own. And that meant doing what he could to bring Fawn Corrigan, or Claire Martinez as she was now called, along a path that would bring her face-to-face with the Breed sworn to kill her.
Claire had revealed nightmares and some scattered pieces of memories from Fawn’s years in the labs as well. But there were still so many missing pieces and so little time.
Before he could draw the Bengal Judd and the feral Bengal Gideon out, the girls would have to reach inside themselves and find the spirits that slept within them. Liza and Claire would have to accept that the reprieve they had been given from death was at an end, and the parts of Honor and Fawn that still slept would have to accept that it was once again time to face their lives and truly awake.
This had to be finished.