“So take care of your fucking narc,” he grumped, rolling his eyes and catching sight of the prisoner he’d dragged into the Reever cells less than an hour ago. “I have things to do. Dealing with Wyatt isn’t one of those things.”
“Then make it one of your things. Our narc is Whisper. Exactly how do you expect me to take care of that one?”
Son of a bitch.
Pinching the bridge of his nose, he swore he could feel the stripes that once marred the flesh of his face beginning to shade his skin again as fury rose inside him. He couldn’t touch Whisper and they both knew it. Hell, he didn’t just owe her his life, he owed her the life of his mate. Whisper was the child who had overheard the plot to kill Judd, Honor, and Fawn before the Unknown had managed to hide their identities. Had it not been for her contacting the man her deceased brother had worked with, then Fawn would have died. And Gideon—Graeme—would never have found his sanity.
He’d kill for her, but he’d never consider killing her.
The bastard on the other end of the call was another story, though.
“I’m going to take this one out of your hide, asshole,” Graeme warned him.
“Stand in line.” The suggestion was amused and filled with a confidence that his safety was assured.
Graeme wasn’t so certain about that.
“You actually have forty-six hours,” he was told then. “I expect to hear the roars of rage long before that deadline is actually up.”
Yeah, he just bet the bastard did.
Disconnecting the call, he turned to the soldier staring back at him malevolently, wondering how pissed Lobo would get if he just beat the shit out of the bastard instead of wrapping him up nice and pretty for Lobo’s stepdaughter.
She’d gotten to him, Graeme admitted. The little toddler slowly becoming a Breed. Once he’d explained it all to her in a way she could understand, she had warmed to him. She knew it was going to hurt at first, bad enough that she wouldn’t be able to stop crying maybe. That she would feel really bad, but once it was over, she would be her daddy’s little girl for sure.
The first injection Brandenmore had given the baby had begun the process of changing her DNA. Almost overnight her ability to understand and to reason began rising exponentially. If one knew how to communicate with the child, then seeing the world through her eyes, through her observations, almost made a Breed believe in miracles.
Now, four injections later, the last and by far the most painful was coming. What Brandenmore had done should have destroyed the child in the same manner in which he had died himself. What no one had known, but Graeme had found in the blood and tissue samples Phillip Brandenmore had taken that night, was that Amber would soon have been diagnosed with the same type of leukemia that had nearly killed Honor Roberts.
Had the scientists begun injections in Honor sooner, then the pain of reversing it would have been much lower, closer to the levels Amber was experiencing.
But hearing that tiny child cry, seeing the pain in her eyes as he’d returned for each follow-up injection, was killing him.
He believed himself to be a monster. What did that make the scientists who had created and tortured the Breeds for so long?
“Got problems, Gideon?” The name that fell so easily from the Coyote’s lips had Graeme turning slowly, the monster that existed within him making its presence known.
Graeme felt the burn of his flesh, the primal response that ignited a genetic code and flashed the dark stripes across his face, his hips, alongside his left leg.
As quickly as he lost control, he snagged it back, holding on with a desperate grip before it could escape forevermore as it had before.