Rule Breaker(126)
A year before she’d overheard a Coyote soldier discussing a lab in the western United States and hinted that it was still in operation, carefully hidden, fully funded and still experimenting on both Breeds and humans. The soldiers heading to the club now were rumored to be coming off duty rotation there before heading to another assignment.
This was the information her contact had been trying to get to her the week before when he’d been forced to abort the exchange of information. She could have had advance notice. She could have eliminated the mistake she’d made by going to Rule’s bed, and already had plans in place and questions prepared that would draw out the information she needed.
Now, she was working without plans, without backup and without the careful control she’d always depended upon to ensure that the suspicious, scent-sensitive Coyotes never picked up on the fact that each question, each smile, each flirtatious comment was no more than a careful deception.
Until her much-sought-after Coyote team arrived, though, she was going to dance.
Her lashes lowered over her eyes as Ashley, Emma, and Sharone danced with her, Gypsy sipped at the beer she’d carried onto the dance floor with her and fought back tears. She’d been fighting back tears since she’d left that damned hotel the night before.
“Hey.” She turned quickly to Ashley rather than allow a lone teardrop to fall. “Cassie couldn’t come with you?”
Her gaze lacking the sparkling excitement it once held, Ashley still managed to give her a slight smile. “Jonas has her on lockdown for some reason,” she called back over the music, the hint of Russian in her voice giving it a mocking undertone.
“Let’s go rescue her,” Gypsy suggested, ignoring the amused, mocking horror that flashed in the Coyote female’s gaze while her sister stared back in pure fear.
“We don’t fuck with Wyatt, Gypsy.” Emma shook her head, shoulder-length dark hair flowing around her face as the Russian accent crept into her voice as well. “He’s damned scary.”
Gypsy snorted at the description. “He can’t kill us.”
“He can make us wish we were dead once he gets finished telling the alpha all our dirty little secrets,” Ashley informed her, leaning close, her gaze intent. “We do not let the alpha know all our dirty little secrets.”
They tiptoed around their alpha as anyone else would a rabid animal.
“I can’t believe the three of you are scared of your alpha,” she laughed back at them.
“Two,” Sharone informed her. “Those two”—she pointed to Ashley and Emma—“are terrified of their alpha because they know damned good and well he would have nightmares for weeks if he knew what they were doing. And he would ensure they did it no more.”
“Sharone’s the good little Coyote soldier,” Ashley smirked, a hint of her former self in the sudden sparkle of merriment in her gaze. “She never gets into trouble.”
Sharone merely rolled her eyes, but Gypsy could see the concern in the other woman’s gaze as it drifted around the room.
She might be a stick in the mud, as Ashley and Emma called her, but she was intuitive, cautious and rumored to be a stone-cold killer whose efficiency, lack of emotion and attention to detail was nearly unparalleled among the female Breeds.
Despite the hard, fast pace of the music, the driving tempo and the perspiration that poured from her body and dampened the black cami top she wore, Gypsy was still burning inside. She could feel the moisture collecting on her bare skin, running in small rivulets here and there. It was a caress that drove her crazy, that made her ache for Rule’s touch.
That ache was becoming deeper, hotter. She moved with the music and found herself drifting, remembering his touch. His lips at her throat, her need to feel his teeth raking against her flesh.