, jaw clenching as he fought against the need to attempt to disprove the very truth the other Breed had stated. “You can’t say that definitively at this time.”
Lawe shook his head as he propped one hand against the holstered weapon at his side and seemed to contemplate what Navarro realized was a rather weak, desperate argument.
“Hell, I don’t have time for this.” Turning his back on the Breed, Navarro stalked down the steel-lined corridor, that damned unfamiliar rumble brewing in his chest again.
How many times had he heard that sound from other Breeds and commented mockingly that they were being “drama Breeds”? And now, he could more fully appreciate the almost helpless frustration in being unable to control the sound.
Lawe, Styx and even Wolfe had commented that they envied many of his recessed traits, especially that one. The animalistic responses in the form of the growls and, at odd times, the agonized howls that echoed around Haven hadn’t been something Navarro envied the other Breeds for though.
He’d enjoyed his recessed status. He wasn’t certain how to feel now that he could sense the animal rising inside him. Now that he could hear it.
The question was, if it hadn’t made its appearance because of mating heat, then what exactly was it, and why had it only make itself known now that he was with Mica?
Mica stared at the ceiling of the examination room as Dr. Morrey, Ely as she and Cassie had always called her, finished her examination.
“Are your breasts tender or sensitive?” Ely asked as she stood back and stared down at her curiously.
“Only when that damned Wolf is around,” she muttered.
She must have managed to catch Ely by surprise, because she could have sworn the doctor’s lips twitched with the beginning of a smile.
“I should have the blood and saliva tests completed soon.” Ely frowned. “I don’t expect a mating though.” She inhaled slowly. “There’s no scent of it, and no signs of it.”
“Don’t look so disappointed,” Mica chided her in relief. “Can you just imagine being mated to that Breed? He’d make me crazy, Ely.”
“They all make all of us crazy,” Ely assured her with a tentative smile. “But they’re just men, Mica. You should realize that by now. Or do you, like others, still believe that Breeds are all animals?”
“Give me a break, Ely.” She almost laughed at the comment. “After all these years do you actually believe I would even consider such a thing?”
It was utterly laughable. She’d practically lived at Haven since the day it had become the Wolf Breed settlement. Before that, she’d spent more time at Sanctuary than she spent at home some years.
Her father had helped Cassie’s father, Dash Sinclair, in many of the rescues of the more hidden labs that had created and imprisoned the Breeds.
“I don’t know, Mica. You’re twenty-five and you’ve never so much as gone to dinner with one of the male Breeds. Despite the invitations you’ve received since you moved from your father’s home.” Ely shrugged briefly, her expression less trusting than it had been before her life was threatened nearly a year before.
“So I’m automatically subconsciously prejudiced against the Breeds, and Breed males in particular?” Well, this was the last thing she had expected from the doctor. One who had known her almost as long as she had known Cassie.
“You’re attractive, heterosexual, and you date human males often. It was a natural conclusion to draw.” Ely wasn’t defending herself, but neither was she backing down.
“Yeah well, most men aren’t as arrogant as Breed males, and I don’t care much for being ordered around. Breeds like ordering people around, Ely, as you very well know. And think about this one.” She eased up on the gurney, swinging her legs over the side gingerly as irritation flared within her. “There are plenty of men in the military who have asked me out and I turn them down as well. Are you going to accuse me of being prejudiced against the military now?”
Ely’s chin lifted. There was that Breed arrogance in the other woman. Her nostrils flared as her expression became detached, her normally warm brown eyes emotionally remote.
“Perhaps Jonas’s research into your sexuality was faulty. Are you homosexual?” Then her eyes twitched as though on the verge of widening at some horrifying thought. “Are you and Cassie involved sexually rather than simply friends?”
Mica just stared back at Ely, uncertain whether she should be angry or amused.
“Ask Cassie.” Mica slid gingerly from the gurney and headed to the bathroom, where she had stored her clothing before donning the paper gown she had been given earlier to wear during the examination.
“Wolf Breeds are possessive, even when they aren’t in mating heat,” Ely warned her, following behind her slowly until Mica stepped into the dressing room. “Having any lover, even another woman, would be unacceptable to him.”
Mica rolled her eyes as she felt the instinctive distancing of her emotions. The subconscious knowledge that she was talking to a Breed with a heightened sense of smell. One created and trained for the science and the medicine she practiced. Mica was aware of the instinctive drawing back and the suppression of her emotions, which would make their scent much more subtle and harder to detect.
Cassie swore that the only time she could be certain of what Mica was feeling was when she slept, when those walls she’d built up over the years were thinner. Not dropped, but not as secure as they were while she was awake.
“Mica, ignoring me doesn’t alter the situation.” Ely’s voice hardened as Mica pulled her clothes on slowly, trying to ignore the pain in her ribs and the tenderness of her muscles as she dressed.
She should have known better than to come down here with Navarro. She should have known better than to come to Ely for the examination period. There was a reason she had always gone to her own human doctor. Because she didn’t have to worry about this incessant nosiness the Feline Breeds seemed to possess in much higher levels than Wolves. And Wolves were too damned nosy as far as she was concerned.
Still, she ignored Ely and finished dressing, wondering if there was any way to slip out of the dressing room and bypass the doctor completely.
Had she moved away from the door? Mica was almost too wary to open the door and check. There would be no playing it off if by chance Ely was still standing at the door. What excuse could she give her for simply peeking out and then closing the door firmly once again if she was still out there?
There wasn’t one.
She inhaled slowly before releasing the breath and opening the door.
Ely wasn’t standing there.
She was across the examination area that had been sectioned off, at one of the machines she used for whatever tests she ran. Vials and bottles of liquids sat at her elbow as she worked while she was recording something on a clipboard.
Ely’s head lifted, her expression thoughtful as Mica closed the dressing room door behind her.
“I’ll just be going now.” A bright smile and a wave over her shoulder toward the door, Mica indicated her intentions with breezy unconcern as she headed for the exit, intending to escape as quickly as possible.
“Not without an escort.” Ely’s tone was calm and unconcerned as Mica gripped the handle and tried to pull the door open quickly.
Smothering a curse and a twinge of pain, she turned back to stare across the room at the doctor’s back.
“I’m quite certain Phillip Brandenmore is contained now,” she said with little hope that it would do her any good.
“I’m sure he is, but those are Jonas’s orders, and I tend to try to follow them now.” The doctor’s voice was carefully calm, almost too controlled.
At times like this, Mica would have loved to have all those Breed senses without actually being a Breed.
“I sent my assistant to the examination room next door to collect blood, saliva and semen samples from Navarro when he’s finished with the vid-call from his alpha. I can have Lawe and Rule escort you up to the main h
ouse if you like. But just as a warning, unlike previous visits, you’ll be confined to the house unless a team can accompany you outside.”
Of course she would be. It didn’t matter that she had practically been raised at Sanctuary. The recent betrayals by their own kind had damaged the trust they had even in one another, let alone a human they had practically helped raise.
“Lawe and Rule will work fine,” she agreed.
Whatever it took to get the hell out of the examination room and away from Ely’s too perceptive gaze and probing questions.
Mica watched as Ely lifted her hand to her ear, her fingers obviously activating the communications earbud.
“Lawe, Ms. Toler is requesting an escort to her rooms if you’re still available,” Ely said. “I’m certain that won’t be a problem, but if it is, then he can come to me,” she stated a few moments later. She listened, then said, “I’ll let her know.” She turned her attention to Mica. “Two minutes.”
Okay, she might make it two more minutes.
“Lawe seems concerned that Navarro will be upset that you’ve left.” Ely crossed her arms over her breasts as she leaned against the counter and stared back at her.
Maybe she wouldn’t make it two more minutes before she became completely pissed off with the lot of them.
“Then Navarro can take it up with me,” Mica fumed. “He’s not my mate and no one sure as hell made him my boss.”
Ely tried to suppress the wince that tugged at her face, Mica could tell she tried damned hard, but Mica caught it.
“What is with the lot of you?” Mica threw her hands up in exasperation before propping them on her hips and confronting Ely directly. “If he were Jonas, I could understand your reluctance to challenge him over anything. Hell, I could even understand with Callan, Wolfe or the Coyote pack leader, Del-Rey. But Navarro? He’s just an enforcer, Dr. Morrey. You’re acting as though he’s a pack leader or something.”
“He was once.”
Mica wasn’t surprised, and that was really troubling. The fact that she wasn’t surprised, that Ely hadn’t shocked her, should have worried her.
“He obviously still has the attitude, but not the title, but why are you so intimidated? He doesn’t have the power without the title.”
Ely’s lips did twitch then. “Is that what you believe, Mica? That all it takes is the title? Do you believe the Breeds follow blindly?”
She stared back at the scientists silently.
“Mica, to follow a pack leader, a Breed has to have much more than a title. It’s the strength, the ability to lead and the strength to lead properly. You may not see it, but I’m damned sure you’ve sensed it. And other Breeds feel it. As though the acknowledgment of such strength is coded into our DNA.” A rueful smile tugged at her lips. “Some things are simply inherent, perhaps?”
Breed head games, she hated them.
“And some things are simply male, but, I’m not going to stand here and argue Breed points with you. I have to do that enough with Cassie when she’s deliberating Breed Law and forming arguments for it.”
Cassie was like a super genius when forming the legal parameters and arguments for Breed Law. But she still insisted on someone to debate her arguments with, and she never failed to insist on Mica to play devil’s advocate.
“Be intimidated, Mica,” the Breed doctor warned her confidently. “He’s not a typical enforcer any more than he’s a typical Breed. Don’t make the mistake of believing you can control him as easily as you control Cassie.”
A start of surprise jerked through her and she frowned, her lips parting to question the doctor indignantly regarding her statement.
She had never even attempted to control Cassie, and she wouldn’t have succeeded if she had. No one controlled Cassie, even her parents.
“Fine, whatever.” She gave a hard shrug and saved the anger for later.
She’d been doing that for years. Saving the anger for later. For when there were no damned Breeds around to smell it, become nosy of it and begin suspecting her of betrayal.
She didn’t blame them for their paranoia. They’d been betrayed by friends, by those they called family, and by those they trusted their lives to. She simply didn’t want to give them a reason to suspect, or a reason to bar her from Haven or Sanctuary and her parents from the safety the two Breed communities provided.
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.