was no hope of life. Only Callan, as he said, had been their success.
“You can’t hide forever,” she pointed out. “You’re letting them win, Mr. Lyons.”
“I am living. I do not kill; I do not follow their command. They have not caught me, nor captured me
again since my teens. I will defeat them until I can no longer, Ms. Tyler. Then, as I said, the rest is
history.”
“My father is offering you an alternative,” she told him.
She fought a shiver that washed over her body as he moved, bringing his body closer to her. Heat
suffused her, making the flesh between her thighs moisten. If the feeling wasn’t so strange, she would
have been amused.
Callan Lyons was watching her with a frown, a question in his eyes as he came closer. She watched him
inhale deeply, his eyes narrowing on her. As he brushed against her, the shiver couldn’t be controlled. It
tightened her scalp, tingled down her neck, then spread out over her body, drawing goose bumps in its
wake.
He stopped behind her, his body so warm the heat seemed to wrap around her. She could feel her body
wanting to relax against him, wanting to be surrounded by him. Her thighs weakened, and between them
she could feel the slow leak of moisture from her inner flesh, preparing her, readying her. Insanity.
She gasped, startled when she felt his chest brush against her back, his head lowering to her ear.
“I am going to unlock that door, Ms. Tyler. When I do, I want you to walk out of here, get in your
vehicle and go home. Make no stops between here and there and do not mention my name or what you
know to anyone, do you understand me? It just might keep you alive.”
Merinus turned her head, a grin edging her lips.
“Are you trying to intimidate me, Mr. Lyons?” Good gracious, where had that husky edge to her voice
come from? Maybe the same place that the sharp contraction to her womb originated from.
She felt him tense behind her. His hand moved to her arm, his fingers curling, the backs of them running
softly across her flesh.
“Do you know what the Council does to pretty little women like yourself?” he asked her, his voice low,
a deep rumble of warning from his chest. “They impregnate you with their latest batch of genetically
altered cells. Then they take you out daily, to check the progress. If your body rejects it, then they do it
again and again until you either hold the fetus, or you’re too weak to be of use to them any longer. Then
they give you to the soldiers to use until you die. It’s not a pretty way to be taken from this earth.”
Merinus bit her lip as she felt pain, overwhelming, intense, striking at her chest. It wasn’t fear, it was
horror, revulsion, absolute pain for the women who had endured it, the man who had obviously seen it.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, staring back, seeing only the thin line of anger his mouth had settled into.
“You are risking your very sanity being here.” His breath caressed her ear, a shiver working over her
skin once again as he spoke to her. “Your sanity and your life. You should leave.”
His voice throbbed with menace. It pulsed with heated arousal. Thick and husky, it rippled over her
nerve endings, seared her cunt.
“So you’ve said.” She stared forward as he moved again, coming back to face her. “I told you, I’m not
willing to let them continue to kill and maim, and you shouldn’t be either. We can stop them. My uncle,
Samuel Tyler, is a Senator and close to the President. He’s waiting to do whatever is necessary. I have
seven brothers, each one doing their part, and my father is willing to put every resource he has within his
paper to back you. We have to make them stop.”
“And you think this will stop them?” he asked her incredulously. “Your innocence is to be envied, Ms.
Tyler. It’s actually quite frightening. You can’t take these people down.”
She had to. She couldn’t stand to live if they managed to kill him. He was proud, determined and too
damned remarkable in his very humanity to allow them to murder him. She had to convince him that his
only safety lay in revealing the horrors he had escaped.
“You know who they are. You know what they are. You have the rest of the proof that we need to stop
them,” she argued determinedly. “Your mother died because of this.”
“My mother was a victim of a random crime,” he growled. “Had the Council struck her, she would have
disappeared and her body returned to me in pieces. The Council did not destroy her.”
“There was no sign of theft.” Merinus had read the police report. “It was a personal crime, Mr. Lyons.
Whoever killed her wanted her dead.”