Authors: Lora Leigh
Her family was aligned with the Breeds; they would never be completely safe. Her parents were even discussing selling their ranch and moving into Haven to ensure the family’s safety as her father grew older.
She couldn’t endanger that. She wouldn’t allow herself to endanger it. But if she weren’t very very careful with Navarro, then that was exactly what she would do.
CHAPTER 7
Navarro sat on the steel gurney, the thin padding that cushioned the cold metal doing little to obliterate the reminder of the same gurneys once used at the Genetics Council labs. The only exception was the fact that the Council hadn’t bothered to pad the steel, or to hang around the labs the bright, childish drawings that Ely had hung on the partitions surrounding her examination area.
He was wrong, the only real resemblance to the labs was the steel gurneys, but that was more than enough. Any reminder of those hellholes was too much for even those Breeds who hadn’t suffered the full measure of the scientists’, trainers’ and guards’ brutality.
The one he had been created in, high in the Andes Mountains, had been one of the worst.
His jaw tightened. Deliberately, he tried to push those memories behind him and focus on now and the question of mating heat.
He dressed once again, blood samples, saliva and semen having been collected, as well as skin and hair scrapings, which contained the minute, all but invisible silken body hair Breeds possessed.
In the thirteen years since Callan Lyons had stood before reporters, his mate Merinus at his side, and revealed the secret experiments that had been going on for more than a century in the creation of the Breeds, mating heat had become an imperative secret.
“Let me get your blood pressure, pulse and a few other readings and we’ll be finished,” Ely promised as she came toward him, her assistant pushing a lab cart behind her.
He remained still and silent, forcing himself to relax, to accept the electrodes on his chest, at his temples and his back. To hold out his arm for the pressure cuff, and his finger for the heart rate monitor.
“What happened to the simple stuff? Blood, saliva and semen?” He stared down at the cuff, resigned to the fact that to get the answers he wanted, he would have to deal with it. He didn’t have to like it. He didn’t have to like the memories the tests evoked, but he’d been trained to endure them.
Ely gave a muttered little snort, a sound filled with both frustration as well as resignation. “Evidently you haven’t been paying attention to your friends in the past few years, Navarro.”
Oh, he had, he just hadn’t wanted to admit what he was seeing.
His brow arched as though he was still unaware of that was going on. As though he was going to convince her he’d been living under a rock? It wasn’t going to happen.
Her head lifted, her brown eyes so confidently knowing he almost grinned. She knew he knew, but he wanted confirmation.
All amused knowledge and irritation aside, he knew what they’d learned in the Andes, knew what he’d read in the files that had been stolen from the labs during the rescues. And he knew that the signs of mating heat from then to now were far different.
“Mating heat is changing,” Ely finally revealed, her lips thinning as a hint of fear flashed in her dark brown eyes. “It’s becoming very unreliable in its symptoms and progression, as well as its reactions from couple to couple. I don’t know what we’re looking at anymore, Navarro.”
He could hear the hint of weariness, a fear for the future, and a sense of failure in her words.
“Have you managed to decode any of the files we sent from Haven?” In those files were years of research the Council scientists had done on mating heat at the Omega lab. The Omega Research Project had been a fully funded, closely watched project researching the mating heat phenomena that the scientists had been unable to grasp.
The aging delay, the higher human immunity and the strengthening of both body and senses of the human mate had fascinated the scientists, and pushed them to greater heights of depravity and pain than Navarro had seen before, or since. But what had especially fascinated them had been the rare times that they’d seen diseases disappear after a mating. The most notable, and the one that had infuriated the Council the most, had been the young scientist that had escaped with her Coyote mate. The scientist had been diagnosed with terminal cancer just weeks before. The members of the Genetics Council had been desperate to find them and to learn what drove the mating heat, as well as the anomalies that went with it.
“Bits and pieces. We’ve decoded nothing significant from them, but the files Storme Montague gave us are also giving us nightmares.” Ely recorded the readings on blood pressure, heart rate and whatever the hell the electrodes were on his flesh for.
She was trying to avoid the memory of whatever those files had revealed. He’d seen it in Styx Mackenzie several weeks before, when Navarro had come to Sanctuary before heading to New York, just as he’d seen it in both Jonas’s and Callan’s gazes.
There was something in those files that had left a portal of dark fury raging in each of them, and Navarro knew exactly what it was: Breed mating heat research and the mated couples who had been tortured so severely, so horrendously, that even though they couldn’t hear them, every Breed in those labs had sensed them, and raged inside for them.
Navarro stared across the room, ignoring Ely and the quiet assistant working with her as he once again pushed back those memories. He’d been a part of those labs. He’d sensed more than just their rage, their pain. He’d sensed that soul-deep darkness of an inner insanity that came with being unable to stop the destruction of their mate.
“Jenny, could you put a rush on those tests for me?” Ely asked, her tone more reserved as she spoke to the assistant. Suspicious. Ely would never be able to drop her suspicion of anyone who worked with her now.
How she had found the courage to choose another assistant after what the two the year before had attempted to do to her, he wasn’t certain. They had nearly killed her, secretly drugged her, forced her to unwittingly do things she would have never done otherwise and nearly destroyed her mind.
She was stronger than he was. She had a new assistant; Navarro had yet to settle in one place, or to make more of a commitment than it took to remain at the Bureau of Breed Affairs as an enforcer.
He stayed on the move, never really making friends, never allowing himself to acquire anything permanent. It was better that way. It kept the memories at bay, as well as the knowledge that he had failed the most important task of his life.
He’d once been a pack leader. More than a dozen Wolf Breeds and a few Coyote Breed trainers who had secretly turned against the scientists at the Omega lab had been a part of his pack.
He had worked tirelessly, commanded with confidence and strength, and in the end, he had lost the two most valuable members of his pack. He’d lost the very ones he and his pack had fought so hard to protect. He’d lost the couple that had secretly mated beneath the scientist’s noses, and their unborn child.
It was a failure he was unable to forgive himself for, and something he’d been unable to forget.
“Perhaps you could give us a bit of your time to help decode some of the files while you’re stuck here,” Ely finally suggested as the last of the electrodes were removed. “You knew those scientists better than anyone, as well as their codes.”
“No one knew those bastards, and their codes are a bitch. I’ve been studying some of them for years and I still can’t make sense of them.” Moving from the gurney, Navarro jerked his shirt from the end of the steel medical bed and pulled it on with restrained violence.
He could see Ely from the corner of his eye, her head tilting curiously to the side as she watched him.
“You’re not as calm as you’ve always been. You seem moody, on the edge of violence, and restless. Those aren’t Wolf Breed traits.”
“They’re human traits. I was created to be human, remember?” But the growl brewing in his chest was far from human. “Look, Ely, I’m ready to get the hell out of here—”
“And find Mica?”
He stared back at her silently.
“Her father and Dash are very close friends, aren’t they, Navarro? They’re loyal to each other. If you mate her, if he learns you’ve touched her, Dash Sinclair won’t be pleased.”
“Mike Toler might not understand, but Dash is well aware that nothing can change mating heat. Besides, I don’t live my life to suit Dash Sinclair, or his friends.”
“Would you live it to suit Mica Toler?” A questioning slant tilted her brows.
Navarro buttoned the shirt slowly before loosening his jeans, tucking the shirt in and neatly refastening the denim material. When he was finished, the fine cotton shirt and well-worn denim felt as comfortable against his flesh as the silk he’d worn at other times.
“What’s your point, Ely?” he finally asked, knowing she wouldn’t let it go, she wouldn’t stop harping at him until she got whatever warning was itching her ass out of her system.
“Human’s aren’t the only ones who rely on a system of politics,” she finally stated. “We have our own system of hierarchies, loyalties and understandings. Do you truly want to risk Dash Sinclair’s displeasure for a woman that is not your mate? He wouldn’t understand you touching her for any other reason but a mating.”
And this was between him and Dash Sinclair. Ely had no say in it either way.
“Do you really want to risk my displeasure by continuing to poke your nose into my affairs?” he grunted testily.
“You seem to be forgetting there are still unwritten rules among the pride as well as the packs,” she snapped back at him, the challenge in her tone raising his hackles just enough to piss him off. “Just because we’re no longer in the labs doesn’t mean that there isn’t still a certain code we live by, Navarro. Dash is still your superior—”
“None but Wolfe could make such a claim. Make no mistake, Ely, Dash Sinclair is not my superior, but even more important, neither are you. Hierarchies and politics be damned, Dr. Morrey. I’d highly suggest you pull back.” Savage and echoing with strength, his voice may have been low, but Ely recognized the latent command in it if the flicker of her gaze was any indication. Just as Navarro recognized the sudden guarded distance she instantly placed between them as her assistant scurried away.
Hell.
He was forced to restrain a curse. He could feel a growl tearing at his throat to be free, and at the moment, losing the hold he had on it could be more detrimental to his temper than Dr. Morrey could even begin to guess.
Ely’s lips thinned, but the angry defiance in her expression and in her eyes eased away, allowing the primal instinct to suppress it to ease back into a relatively guarded position.
Where the hell had that come from? He hadn’t felt such an overwhelming need to reinforce his own command since he had been in the labs and he’d been called commander rather than enforcer.
“I’ll be at the main house when the tests are completed.” Staying here wasn’t happening.
“Just because you’re a Breed male doesn’t mean you have to display your arrogance and sense of worth like a damned banner, Navarro. You
are
still just an enforcer.” Exasperation rather than anger filled her tone, but still, the words she used, and the insult behind them, set his teeth on edge.
He stopped in front of her slowly, his head lowering. Just because the confrontation in her tone had disappeared didn’t mean her disrespect had.
He knew the moment she caught the scent of the fury raging inside him.
Her eyes widened as she swallowed tightly, the knowledge of his strength as well as her own lack of judgment flickering in her gaze.
“Never speak to me in such a way again.” The growl definitely escaped. “I am not one of your pets here to plead for your help, nor will I ever be. I am not a Breed that you can speak to with such disrespect and expect that the memory and/or the guilt of what happened to you in these labs last year would convince me to allow you to take such liberties. I may no longer carry the title of commander, or of pack leader, but what you should well remember, Dr. Morrey, is that dropping those titles was by my choice, and there isn’t a Breed alive that would have dared to attempt to force it from me.”
Navarro turned sharply on his heel and stalked to the exit, the flames of such hidden anger building in that dark, icy pit he normally kept them locked within. He couldn’t afford to lose the precarious control he had been holding on to since the moment he’d realized the danger Mica was in.
Activating the earbud communication device he wore, he snapped the code in for the locks that automatically slid into place each time the door closed.
This time, the locks slid free, allowing Navarro to jerk the door open and stalk through it before easing the heavy steel panel closed behind him.
Hell, ever since that bastard Brandenmore had managed to bribe two Breed physician’s assistants to drug and betray Ely, she had had this attitude. She was changing before their eyes, and Navarro knew it greatly worried every Breed that called Sanctuary home.
They had hoped that once she came out of the padded cells that Jonas had been forced to lock her within for her own protection, she would heal. She had been so damned moody and confrontational, though, that even Jonas was having problems with her now. And normally, Jonas was the one person Ely refused to get angry with.
The subject of mating Mica seemed to be a particularly sore one with her, however. Ely seemed insistent on locking mating heat back into the parameters it had once existed within. The fact that nature was dictating its metamorphosis, rather than Ely predicting it, seemed to be throwing her off her game.
Navarro had warned Wolfe it would happen.
He had warned Callan and Merinus it would happen, and no one seemed to want to hear him. He had watched and listened as the scientists at Omega had fought with the conflicting and often confusing phenomena for years.
He knew just enough about it to get himself into trouble as the old saying went. Because he was damned sure nature wasn’t finished playing with them yet.
What he did have was more than twenty years in the Omega lab, watching, listening, waiting. He’d spent his time there wisely once he’d matured into adulthood. He’d worked, along with his men, to contact those who could help them, who could provide the needed backup for escape. He’d gathered information, stolen as many files as possible, and fought to help those who mated within his own pack, of which thankfully there were few, to escape.