furious life inside him now.
It was similar to what raged inside Phillip Brandenmore, except the animal snarling inside Navarro was a natural part of his genetics, of what made him who and what he was at his core.
A Wolf Breed.
Beside him, he could feel Josiah tensing as well, signaling to Jonas that he would hold Navarro back. There would be no holding him back and they both knew it. They were wasting their time in the attempt.
Josiah might try. And he might find his blood spilling for the effort to keep Navarro from the woman.
Navarro felt her weakening. The scent of her tears shredded the finely weaved bonds that had always held the animal within him in a deep, peaceful slumber.
It hadn’t meant to awaken.
It gave its strength and its senses, but not its awareness. The calculated, finely honed instincts that were raging inside Navarro now were different, unusual. They were the animal awakening with a sudden, ravenous hunger for blood.
His lips drew back from his teeth. He felt it. A rumbling sound of fury, low and intense, and it was coming from him when it never had before. Rising from the pit of his stomach, building in his chest, and emitting a low-level sound of such fury that he would have been surprised if he weren’t so focused on the sight of Brandenmore’s fingers wrapped around Mica’s throat.
“I could kill her, Jonas,” Brandenmore said placidly, his tone so calm he could have been discussing the weather rather the life of an innocent woman.
The life of Navarro’s woman.
That thought would have shocked him ten minutes earlier. Now there was no time for shock, there was no thought of it. There was only the imperative, overwhelming need to save her.
“I hear that animal behind us,” Brandenmore chuckled at her ear. “Navarro Blaine. The liar. The deceiver. Do you know”—he caressed her neck again before wrapping his fingers around it once more—“he was created to have no Breed scent. His genetics erased to the deepest level, but for that sense of smell.” His fingers tightened. “Hearing.” Further. “Sight.” He hissed the words at her ear. “Created to identify and to assassinate any Breed, recessed or hiding. He thought he could outsmart me. That he could defeat me. I helped create him. He can’t escape me.”
Mica tensed, her breathing ragged as Josiah stepped in front of him.
Navarro was losing the last of the chains that tethered his self-control, that held back the rage rising through him with a force he could no longer control.
“Kita will never forgive you, Brandenmore. Is that what you want?” Jonas warned as though he really cared, as Navarro felt the animal rip free.
“She won’t forgive me anyway—”
Brandenmore’s fingers tightened, but the sound of Mica’s whimper of fear and pain was overshadowed by the enraged snarl that suddenly echoed through the hall.
Josiah was thrown against the wall with a force that stole the air from his lungs and left him collapsing against the floor, wheezing with the agony tearing through his diaphragm as Jonas and Callan rushed for him. They didn’t move to stop Navarro; it was too late.
In the space it had taken to make those few steps to the fallen Breed, Brandenmore was screaming in his own agony, his wrists in Navarro’s grip as Navarro moved them slowly, slowly from Mica’s flesh and took the man to his knees.
Brandenmore was screaming, the sound of his pain like a symphony of vengeance echoing through Navarro’s ears as Breeds rushed through the hall. Lawe Justice, Lion Breed, one of two that were called Jonas’s right hand, rushed for Mica as she stumbled.
“No!” The sound was primal, animalistic. Navarro threw Brandenmore, slinging him with a strength that broke the monster’s wrist with a snap and a howl of agony as he crashed into Lawe and Navarro caught Mica as she went to her knees.
She was breathing.
She was weak, fear still pounding through her, reaction and shock leaving her dazed, confused as she fought to get a bearing on what had happened and the fact that she was no longer in danger.
“I will give my last breath to keep you from harm,” he whispered at her ear as he cradled her against his chest and lifted her from the floor. “Did I not promise you this, Amaya?”
Holding her close against his chest, he watched as Jonas, Lawe and Rule struggled to hold the feral Phillip Brandenmore under control until the physician’s assistant, Cameron Lucian, could inject him with the sedative created especially for the unique imbalance destroying the man’s mind.
Once, Navarro had felt a measure of sympathy for him. Now, his gaze flickering to the woman he held in his arms, watching as she massaged the reddened, scraped flesh of her neck, he felt nothing but a killing fury.
His gaze lifted to Jonas.
“Better to let me kill him now.” Hoarse, brutally dark, his voice held the promise of violence. “You’ll save us both the trouble of my having to expend resources to do it later.”
He didn’t make promises he wouldn’t give his life to keep. He would kill Brandenmore if that damned drug he injected into himself didn’t kill him first.
A Breed hormonal concoction Brandenmore had created to cure the cancer killing him and to stop the aging of his decrepit body.
Instead, he’d created a serum that was slowly rotting his mind, destroying him, and would very soon, Navarro had heard, kill him.
“Don’t make that mistake, Navarro,” Jonas warned him. “He’s too important to allow that to happen.”
A furious snarl of denial snapped through Navarro’s teeth. “If the bastard were going to give you the secret to the serum he injected into your child, then he would have already,” he retorted. “His mind is so gone now I doubt he remembers what he took, only what he still wants.”
“Take that step, and I’ll have to kill you,” Jonas promised, and like Navarro, he didn’t make promises he didn’t intend to follow through with. “That man holds my daughter’s very life in his hands.” A grimace pulled at Jonas’s features, then, as pain seemed to explode from him, he pulled it back. The sense of the emotions raging through Jonas sent a chill racing up Navarro’s spine. “Attempt to hasten his destruction, and you will be the one that dies.”
With an imperious flick of his fingers, Jonas had Brandenmore dragged, weak and incoherent now, back toward whichever cell he was being confined within.
“Let him get loose again,” Navarro growled in deadly earnest, “I promise you, I’ll be waiting.”
Turning, he strode quickly to the turn in the hall, opposite the direction Bradenmore was being dragged, and headed toward the silent, pale Dr. Elyiana Morrey as she watched the scene.
“Take her to the examination room.” Her soft, compassionate voice held an edge of weariness, and wariness. “I have to check on Phillip . . .”
“No.” Navarro stepped in front of her before she could pass him and commit the ultimate sin of daring to make that bastard more comfortable as Mica fought to breathe, the scent of her physical pain ripping across his senses. “Mica needs you more. As do I.”
He couldn’t put it off any longer. The mating tests she ran when Breeds mated would have to be run on his and Mica’s blood now. Right now. His behavior was changing too quickly. The signs of mating heat that came with the extreme possessive moodiness were too suspicious.
The glands beneath his tongue weren’t swollen. His skin wasn’t hypersensitive, but his senses seemed to be remarkably stronger the moment he realized the bastard had put his hands on her.
He wouldn’t allow it.
Manipulative and calculating, Brandenmore had been dangerous to the Breeds before he’d ever used them as research to create his fatal brew. If he was dying now, then it was by Navarro’s own hand. Brandenmore wouldn’t allow the Breeds to ever live in peace, not as long as he was living.
The only answer left was to see him dead.
CHAPTER 6
He lied to her.
Lying on the gurney of the examination room, Mica kept her eyes closed, her arm thrown
over her face despite the additional pain the position caused.
Perhaps it was just that time of the month due to arrive early, or the shock and fear of the past few days. She wasn’t a weepy woman, but tears were falling from her eyes like a faucet that insisted on dripping.
Except this was silent. It was a misery she couldn’t contain and she didn’t understand why.
It wasn’t as though she hadn’t been lied to by someone she loved before. Hell, Cassie was always lying to her over something, or simply not telling her. A lie of omission was no better though. Her parents had lied to her countless times over the years when they had been forced to run for Haven as though the hounds of hell were after them. Of course, that was usually exactly what had been after them. But rather than telling the truth, so many times her parents had assured her they were just long overdue for a visit.
Jonas had lied to her, Wolfe and Callan had lied to her, each time Cassie had been harmed in the past. Those times, Mica had missed the calls Cassie made on a regular basis and had called the two Breed leaders.
To be told Cassie was busy, but she fine.
Studying for exams, she’ll call later.
The excuses had been varied, but still they had been lies.
And now Navarro had lied to her.
People lied every day, she knew that. She wasn’t a child to agonize and blame her problems on the lies she was told. It was an accepted part of life. Everyone told little white lies, black lies, and all the shades in between. She had even been guilty of it herself.
It was the specific lie that had punched her in the gut though and left her struggling for balance in more ways than the pain from Brandenmore’s attack, the shock or the fear of the past two days.
That lie. The statement that his senses were as recessed as his genetics, if his genetics were even recessed, was the one tormenting her, because she had been herself around him. She had believed she didn’t have to hide her emotions, her fears or her arousal, from him. She had thought she could simply be a woman in ways she hadn’t been able to before.
Regular men had no place in her life; besides the fact she hadn’t found one she really liked, the danger associated with her friendships was always something she worried over. After all, Breeds were stronger, tougher, and Council Breeds were merciless and vindictive. If they decided to target her, then a normal man wouldn’t have a chance against them.
Just as he wouldn’t have when she was attacked two nights before. Someone she cared about would have died, and where would that have left her?
Besides, no one else fascinated her as Navarro did.
And now she was crying over a mistake she should have known better than to make in the first place, and trying to hide it from him, when she knew it was impossible.
The sound of water running disrupted her thoughts for a moment. Dr. Morrey washing her hands, no doubt.
Mica had caught a glimpse of her from the gurney when Navarro first laid her on the table more than an hour earlier.
The doctor’s hair was pulled up into the bun Mica remembered it always being styled in, though that mass seemed much thicker than before. Much thicker. From the appearance of it, the doctor’s hair would likely fall nearly to the curve of her butt now.
Her brown gaze was more distant, her face thinner and appearing sharper than it had years ago.
She was still a beautiful woman, and still very young, but if you looked deep into her eyes, a person would swear she was much older than she actually was.
Long seconds later the water stopped and the sound of a heavy weight slapping against metal had Mica flinching.
She lowered her arm and glared up at Navarro as the doctor banged around the examination room. She knew Ely, and she knew the confrontation in the hall had upset not just her, but also Jonas, immeasurably.
“You have no idea of the depth of pain you just caused, have you?” Mica asked Navarro, keeping her voice low, but her anger no less forceful.
She hated Breed male arrogance and superiority. They were always so damned certain they were right, that they had all the answers and knew the questions before they were even asked. It was so damned irritating that there were times Mica wondered how Cassie had escaped those irritating habits.
His gaze sharpened on her. “Are you in too much pain to be challenging me at the moment?”
Mica may have been in pain, terrified out of her mind and certain she was drawing her last breath, but she had glimpsed Jonas’s face when Brandenmore’s death was mentioned. The memory of his expression would haunt her, and it gave her the strength now to do much more than confront Navarro.
When Phillip Brandenmore died, Jonas’s hope for learning what his daughter had been injected with would die as well. That had to be hell, never knowing, always fearing from one day to the next that he could lose the child he and his wife Rachel loved so dearly, and had risked so much to save.
“That child means everything to them, Navarro,” she reminded him, incensed that he could be so cool. “As long as Brandenmore is alive, then there’s a chance. You can’t even let them have that without trying to destroy it, can you?”
Mica could hear the doctor working in the background, but she couldn’t see her. All she could see was Navarro and the blazing fury burning in his black eyes as she had never seen it before in any other Breed’s.
The Breed least likely to feel more than lust, she thought in disbelief. Had she truly once believed that?
“Do you think the fact that it hurts makes it any less the truth?” Furious, rife with the promise of violence, his tone had a dangerous sharp edge of sarcasm now. “Do you think Jonas isn’t well aware of that? Or that I should simply stand back and allow him to risk your life, or the lives of anyone else who gets in that bastard’s path?”
“And that of course is all that should matter, isn’t it?” Mica snapped back. “For God’s sake, Navarro, there is such a thing as holding out for that last, great hope. And you’re a fine one to let just such a high principle have your back up now, when you lied to me in the worst possible way last night.”
“And don’t all Breeds know the value of that last, great hope?” Heavy mockery filled his voice. “We lived it daily in those fucking labs, Mica. Tell me, did that last, great hope ever give a damn about us then?”
The pain and the cynicism in that single question had Mica’s heart constricting in the knowledge of what the Breeds had suffered there. She knew it, she understood their nightmares, she’d lived with the knowledge of the horror they’d suffered. But still, that was no excuse for his actions, or his threats.
“That doesn’t give you the right to ever make such a threat.” Knowing that pain, and those nightmares, didn’t mean he could make her understand why he had lashed out at Jonas as he had. “You and I both know you’ll never lay a hand on Phillip Brandenmore unless you simply have no other choice.”
“Oh, there you are wrong.” He lowered his head, his palms braced on the gurney as he came over her, his lips pulling back from his teeth in a furious snarl. “Trust me, Mica, if you trust nothing else. If I see him but one more time outside the cell he’s to be locked within, without a full team of Breed guards restraining him, then yes, I will kill him, before he has the chance to harm anyone else. Especially a woman. And most especially.” He leaned closer. “My woman.”
His woman?
“Your woman?” Mica was incensed. Livid. The sheer arrogance in the words, the dominance and utter, contemptible confidence he displayed raked over her pride like nails on a chalkboard. “Not in this lifetime, Wolf,” she sneered back at him. “The last I checked, you weren’t spilling a mating hormone, and I wasn’t on my knees begging for your cock, and Dr. Morrey wasn’t being forced to create that vile concoction of hormones for me. Three strikes, Breed. You’re out of the running to ever claim me.”
For a second. One dangerous, heart-stopping second, the image of Mica on her knees, lips parted and swollen, face flushed as he sank his dick inside the sweet d
epths of her mouth nearly shattered his control.
He almost reached for her.
His fingers curled into fists as he felt his chest tighten with another of those rumbling little growls he wasn’t used to displaying.
Hard, thick, so fully engorged and throbbing in desperation, his cock ached to fuck her lips, to slide in slow and easy, filling her mouth and stretching her lips erotically.
“Navarro!” It was Ely’s voice that brought him back from the brink.
The hard, cold command in her voice was pure steel. This room, for examination and testing, was her territory. It was where she ruled. The cavernous underground area was separated by partitions rather than walls, and imprinted with an indelible, invisible mark that made her demand all but impossible to ignore.
“Stand down, Wolf,” she ordered firmly. “Jonas, Callan and Kane are awaiting in control room C, where your pack leader is demanding your presence on vid call immediately.”
He straightened slowly. She was backing the imperious demand of right of territory with a summons by his pack leader. Again, almost impossible to ignore. But he’d ignored his responsibilities to Wolfe before for this woman lying before him; he could well do it again.
And he would have. It would have been so easy to lean into her, to steal her kiss and force her submission with the pleasure that would wrap around them both and hold them in place with bonds of sheer heated eroticism.
He could have done it so easily, if he weren’t staring into her eyes. If he hadn’t seen the distress that went beyond anger and physical pain in the incredible depths of her golden green eyes. Like lace, the green surrounded a ring of golden brown, weaving in and out and creating such a unique color she all but mesmerized him when he stared into her eyes.
Instead, he straightened. Slowly.
“I’ll be back, Dr. Morrey,” he promised her, shocking himself with the hoarseness of his tone. “When I am, you have tests to run.”
Ely didn’t speak.
He turned his head slowly, staring at her as she stood across the room, shoulders straight, her long dark brown hair pulled back into an intricate braided bun, defining the sharp Feline features of her face and the exotic dark brown eyes.
She was a Lioness ready to defend her charge, and he couldn’t blame her. He was certain he wasn’t giving the most confidence-inspiring impression at the moment.
She nodded sharply though, her gaze moving to the entrance to the lab as the secured doors slid open.
“Navarro, are you really going to make me look bad by refusing to accompany me down the hall, man?” Lawe Justice stepped into the exam room, and the fact that he seemed uncertain was almost amusing.
“How could I make you look any worse than you make yourself look, Lawe?” Navarro asked conversationally as the other Breed stepped closer.
Head tilted, his long black hair free around the defined, sculpted planes of his face, Lawe looked as though he’d already been in more than one fight that morning.
Ah yes, Phillip Brandenmore.
Lawe’s cheek was scraped with smears of blood on one side of his face, the other one was sporting what was sure to be a beautiful black eye come morning.
Lawe grimaced at the question. “Actually, it probably wouldn’t be too damned hard,” he grunted. “Come on, man, Wolfe is ready to murder because we’re not producing you. He thinks we’ve gone and massacred one of his favorite enforcers. He and Jonas are presently exchanging insults, which is normal for anyone who talks to Jonas except his mate, but Wolfe has already accused him of having locked you up or buried the body where it couldn’t be found. Let’s go make a nice little appearance if you don’t mind?”
Navarro could hear the exasperation in the other Breed’s voice and didn’t blame him a bit for it. Politics was alive and well, it seemed. It was just adopting a new member in the form of Lawe perhaps?
More and more Jonas seemed to be sending Lawe into the thick of conflicts and expecting him to actually work miracles.
“It’s a good thing for you Dr. Morrey has her own intractable presence,” Navarro informed him before nodding back to the doctor.
He turned back to Mica. “I’ll see you later.”
“Not if I see you first,” she muttered. “I’m calling Dad. I’m going home. He can have an army transport here in no time flat—”
He turned on her so quickly it was shocking. His expression dangerous, the warning in his black eyes almost frightening.
“Do you really want to push me?” There was that growl.
Her eyes widened. She, along with every Breed at Haven, was well aware that Navarro hardly ever growled. Until now.
She gazed back at him suspiciously, uncertain of the strength of determination in the sound. Exactly how far could he be pushed?
Arguing with her would serve no purpose, Navarro decided. Mica being stubborn meant, no matter man or Breed, active measures had to be taken immediately. Besides, he had to get the hell away from her. He couldn’t get the image of her sucking his dick out of his mind. Each time he turned to her, it was there, and the hunger for it was only growing.
The pure, melting need to have those silken, pouty lips opening over the engorged crest of his cock was becoming overwhelming at this point.
“Let’s go,” he ordered Lawe gruffly as he turned away from her, hoping—hell he was praying—she didn’t make the mistake of attempting to leave Sanctuary.
Not until he was certain that her trip to Haven—and she would be going to Haven—would be safe.
Striding past the other Breed, he ignored Lawe’s smirk and strode to the entrance. The door slid open with a soft hiss, allowing him to leave despite the fact that the last thing he wanted to do was leave her.
“If I didn’t know better, I would swear you’d mated her,” Lawe commented as he followed him out and the door closed behind them.
“No kidding.” Irritated and thrown off balance, he stared straight ahead as he headed for the vid-conference room on the other side of the underground facility.
“No mating scent,” Lawe pointed out thoughtfully. “The two of you were aroused, but not to the point of insanity.” Amusement laced his voice then. “Damn, seeing you now though, if you were mated, I’d be taking a vacation on the opposite side of the world. You’re going to be a mite hard to get along with, aren’t you?”
Navarro came to a slow stop before turning to stare at the other man.
“Weren’t we trained to be quiet, and unobtrusive?” he asked the other man with grave deliberation.
Lawe’s lips twitched. “Sure we were. Doesn’t mean we have to allow those bastards the pleasure of thinking they succeeded though. Right?”
Navarro grunted in response. “Contact Ely, tell her I’ll be back in the labs once we’re finished here.”
“You haven’t mated her, Navarro.” There was no amusement now, only the blunt truth. A truth that oddly enough had the power to piss him the fuck off.
“Mating heat is nothing but a contradiction and an anomaly with each pairing,” he reminded Lawe