A long, wide table filled the center of what Scheme knew had once been an opulent ballroom. The estate had once been held by a group of Genetic Council scientists. Deep beneath it was a labyrinth of cells and medical labs once used to splice the Breed genetics and create the soldiers that the world was never meant to know about.
There were twelve people sitting at that table. The members of the Breed Cabinet, one of which was a lone Wolf Breed that had apparently disappeared off the radar after news of his existence was released. She recognized the faces and knew the profiles of each of them. She trusted none of them.
As they stood to their feet, Tanner led her farther into the room, his hold suddenly gentling as she felt a shaft of humiliation rise inside her. Her father had tortured several of those Breeds. He had been instrumental in the attempted murder of the lone human on the cabinet, Kane Tyler, the brother to the pride leader’s wife and the husband to his sister. And he had attempted to use the miscarriage of his wife’s child at that time against her. As an experiment. To see if she could conceive again.
Scheme met each of their gazes, lifting her chin as her breathing became heavy and the pain in her chest increased. These men and women had fought to live, to love. They had wanted nothing more than their freedom, and it was something her father was determined to see destroyed.
“Callan.” Tanner held her close to his side as he addressed the Breed at the head of the table. “I would like to present my mate, Scheme Tallant.”
The silence was deafening. She watched as two of the women, Sherra Tyler and Dawn Daniels, exchanged glances, before Dawn pushed her fingers through her short, golden brown hair.
“Scheme, welcome to Sanctuary.” Callan’s voice was calm, distant. “Jonas, it seems, has been lax in informing the cabinet of your work on our behalf. Let me be the first to thank you.”
She was shaking her head even as he was speaking. “Don’t,” she whispered, ignoring Tanner’s warning grip on her side. “Don’t thank me, Mr. Lyons. What I’ve done isn’t that much. And my presence here could only complicate your lives. I’m sorry for that.”
Callan breathed out heavily before waving his hand to the empty chairs. “Please, sit down. Would you like something to drink? A snack?”
“Coffee?” She was dying for coffee.
“Yeah, fix her a cup of coffee, Sherra.” Dawn picked that moment to speak, her smile mocking as she stared back at Scheme. “One of the large cups.”
“Dawn,” Tanner snapped as he dropped into the chair beside Scheme.
Dawn rolled her eyes.
“You don’t drink coffee?” Scheme swallowed tightly as she glanced at the amused expressions of those around the table.
“Mates in mating heat don’t drink coffee, Miss Tallant,” Merinus Tyler announced from her husband’s side. “It makes the symptoms worse. We have decaf if you like, water, or a specially blended tea that we drink during the heat phases.”
“Phases?” This was starting to sound worse by the second.
“We’ll get back to the mating heat later,” Callan announced. “Have the tea, Miss Tallant. Merinus seems to thrive on it.”
Sherra rose from her chair then, walked to the sideboard and poured an amber-colored liquid into a glass of ice before moving around the table and setting it by Scheme’s side. Scheme had no intention of touching it. She stared at it for a moment, feeling the dryness of her throat, her mouth, wishing she didn’t feel like a lamb in the middle of a carnivore’s feast.
“Here.” Tanner picked up the glass, brought it to his lips and took a healthy drink. “I promise, it’s safe.”
She was going to collapse. Scheme could feel something buckling inside her. A need to reach out to him despite the anger she could still feel in his gaze.
“We wouldn’t poison you, Scheme,” Sherra announced, her ice blue eyes warmer than Scheme had expected. “Jonas had his assistant relay your file once he realized where you were and how to breach the caves. We’re aware of what you’ve lost, and the sacrifice you’ve made for the Breeds. We wouldn’t repay that by poisoning you.”
Scheme’s gaze moved to Callan. “Did he tell you what I reported?”
Callan’s gaze flashed with merciless fury.
“Tallant is going to attempt to take David?” he asked, though she could see he well believed it. “It won’t be the first attempt that has been made, Scheme. I doubt it will be the last.”
As he spoke, his wife reached over, laying her slender hand on his arm as his voice echoed with a primal growl.
Merinus Tyler had just passed her thirty-fourth birthday, not that one could tell. She didn’t look a day older than she did the day she stood beside her lover, Callan Lyons, and announced to the world that Breeds existed. There were no lines at her eyes or lips. Her skin was still fresh, youthful. Only her eyes appeared older.
“In the past ten years, Cyrus Tallant’s spy hasn’t been in a place of trust within the Breed community,” Scheme stated firmly, adopting the brittle shell she had used all her life when confronted with a situation guaranteed to throw her off balance. “His spy is now in place. Within a week, perhaps a few days more, that spy will make his move to take David. There were no details; the only clue I have of when or how it’s going to happen is a conversation I overheard between Cyrus and his second in command, John Bollen. The pickup point isn’t heavily defended because of the difficulty of accessing the compound on foot or by vehicle. Cyrus will fly in, pick up your son and his kidnapper, and fly out before you have him on radar because of a particular blind spot. And the spy knows the location of the transponder you’ve placed just below David’s skin in the event of a kidnapping.”
Surprise, shock, fury. It all erupted in the room as Merinus turned to her husband with a cry of distress.
“Only a few people know about the transponder,” he snapped. “It’s undetectable.”
Scheme nodded. “A prototype that you acquired from Vanderale Industries in Africa.” She nodded. “He knows that much, though he’s not been able to learn who created it, or if there are more.”
Callan’s lips flattened as he turned to Kane Tyler.
The ex-military head of Sanctuary’s security was staring back at Scheme with brutal gray eyes as Callan spoke softly to him. Kane nodded sharply before his gaze moved behind her.
“Jackal.” He said the name coldly.
“I got it, Commander. I’ll get on him now.” Jackal, the scarred, bass-throated stranger Scheme had fallen into when Tanner had returned her to the caverns had entered the room with Jonas, Cabal and several Breed Enforcers.
Scheme glanced back in time to see him leaving the room quickly.
She turned back to the cabinet. “I have names, locations and profiles of the contacts Cyrus has that I’ve met. Jonas has most of them, but lately, there’s been a stream of purist and supreme race leaders and commanders passing through the Tallant estate. I don’t know if he’s gaining support or planning to make a larger attack than he’s attempted before. I know the Inner Council is losing faith in him.”
“Bastards!” Callan cursed. “Why do you think they’re amassing?”
Scheme licked her dry lips. “I think they’re awaiting the kidnapping of your son and the chaos it will cause. Every Breed alive will be out looking for him. Breeds will begin striking Council strongholds and hitting their members. It’s what they want. They want the Breeds to shed blood, they want to prove to the world how vicious, how merciless you can be. And they believe David Lyons’s disappearance will do that. Once you’re destroyed, they’ll then use your son as a base for the new generation of Breeds. Ones they can control. They feel they’ve learned from their mistakes and that the killers they envision are finally within reach.”
It was insane, but Scheme had never believed there was any sanity within the Council to begin with. The scientists that created and oversaw the labs were cold, without emotion. The Breeds were an experiment to them, nothing more. They were disposable because they were created rather than born. They saw them as animals, without soul.
The Breeds were their chance to do the experiments they dreamed of. Learning how far the human body could possibly be pushed, how to immunize against particular diseases, how the brain and the body functioned together. The Breeds were stronger, more enduring than normal humans, which made them perfect for such experimentation.
“Do you have any information that can shed any light on who we’re looking for?” Callan asked then, leaning forward intently. “We need more than this, Scheme. We need something to catch one of our own. That won’t be easy.”
“They’re trained in subversive infiltration.” She rubbed at her head, trying to think past the arousal that filled it. Tanner was too close, his body too much of a temptation. And she needed. She needed so desperately. “The spy he recruited posed as a Breed that followed his trainers to gain information, when in fact he was no more than a double agent of sorts.”
“The same training Tanner received, then?” Callan asked. “The same training many of the Breeds received. We weren’t all trained as assassins.”
Scheme sighed. “The profiles are similar from the quick glance I caught of it.”
Callan chuckled at Tanner’s growl. “Let me guess. You were afraid Tanner was our spy?”
Scheme glanced at Tanner. The question didn’t set well with him.
“I was.”
Callan shook his head, his expression somber, concerned.
“Miss Tallant, I would be pleased to offer you Sanctuary,” he said then. “I understand that this moment isn’t the best time for what we’re doing as far as the mating heat is concerned, but I hope you can stay here and talk to us a bit longer?”
She stared back at him in surprise.
“Yeah.” Dawn spoke up then, her voice amused, her gaze cynical. “We can all smell how bad you want to bed the little Bengal.”
Scheme felt her face flaming.
“Dammit, Dawn,” Tanner retorted. “Drop it.”
Dawn rolled her expressive whiskey brown eyes and restrained the smile tugging at her lips.
Scheme hated having something so personal, so uncontrollable being so easily detected by these fierce men and women. Strangely, she didn’t hate the arousal that was continually building. The sensitivity of her flesh, the sharp awareness of Tanner sitting so close beside her.
“We need to reschedule this meeting,” Tanner said. “Scheme needs to eat and change clothes and rest for a while. She’s not going to be able to give you what you need as clearly as she could if she had a break.”
Callan glanced at the others before sighing deeply. “Agreed. We’ll meet back here in a few hours.” He turned to Jonas. “Get me the rest of those files together, then you can sit down here and explain to me why the agents you and Tanner had in place didn’t pull her out of that damned coffin when her father buried her. I’ll expect something a bit more than I read in the reports you supplied before heading out to find Tanner.”
Tanner froze in the act of helping Scheme from her chair. She went still, the smell of her fear slamming in his face as he stared into her eyes. She knew. She had known there were Breed agents within her father’s inner circle that could have helped her, and she had refused to ask for that help.
He knew her now. Knew she would have died rather than ask those men or women to betray themselves. His gaze lifted to Callan, and he saw the condemnation in his brother’s eyes. In Merinus’s. Kane’s. They thought he had known. They thought he had left an innocent woman to suffer, to possibly die in a way that they all knew was filled with horrendous fear and suffering.
And Jonas. Jonas had kept those reports from him.