Rule Breaker (Breeds 20)

“So take care of your fucking narc,” he grumped, rolling his eyes and catching sight of the prisoner he’d dragged into the Reever cells less than an hour ago. “I have things to do. Dealing with Wyatt isn’t one of those things.”

“Then make it one of your things. Our narc is Whisper. Exactly how do you expect me to take care of that one?”

Son of a bitch.

Pinching the bridge of his nose, he swore he could feel the stripes that once marred the flesh of his face beginning to shade his skin again as fury rose inside him. He couldn’t touch Whisper and they both knew it. Hell, he didn’t just owe her his life, he owed her the life of his mate. Whisper was the child who had overheard the plot to kill Judd, Honor, and Fawn before the Unknown had managed to hide their identities. Had it not been for her contacting the man her deceased brother had worked with, then Fawn would have died. And Gideon—Graeme—would never have found his sanity.

He’d kill for her, but he’d never consider killing her.

The bastard on the other end of the call was another story, though.

“I’m going to take this one out of your hide, asshole,” Graeme warned him.

“Stand in line.” The suggestion was amused and filled with a confidence that his safety was assured.

Graeme wasn’t so certain about that.

“You actually have forty-six hours,” he was told then. “I expect to hear the roars of rage long before that deadline is actually up.”

Yeah, he just bet the bastard did.

Disconnecting the call, he turned to the soldier staring back at him malevolently, wondering how pissed Lobo would get if he just beat the shit out of the bastard instead of wrapping him up nice and pretty for Lobo’s stepdaughter.

She’d gotten to him, Graeme admitted. The little toddler slowly becoming a Breed. Once he’d explained it all to her in a way she could understand, she had warmed to him. She knew it was going to hurt at first, bad enough that she wouldn’t be able to stop crying maybe. That she would feel really bad, but once it was over, she would be her daddy’s little girl for sure.

The first injection Brandenmore had given the baby had begun the process of changing her DNA. Almost overnight her ability to understand and to reason began rising exponentially. If one knew how to communicate with the child, then seeing the world through her eyes, through her observations, almost made a Breed believe in miracles.

Now, four injections later, the last and by far the most painful was coming. What Brandenmore had done should have destroyed the child in the same manner in which he had died himself. What no one had known, but Graeme had found in the blood and tissue samples Phillip Brandenmore had taken that night, was that Amber would soon have been diagnosed with the same type of leukemia that had nearly killed Honor Roberts.

Had the scientists begun injections in Honor sooner, then the pain of reversing it would have been much lower, closer to the levels Amber was experiencing.

But hearing that tiny child cry, seeing the pain in her eyes as he’d returned for each follow-up injection, was killing him.

He believed himself to be a monster. What did that make the scientists who had created and tortured the Breeds for so long?

“Got problems, Gideon?” The name that fell so easily from the Coyote’s lips had Graeme turning slowly, the monster that existed within him making its presence known.

Graeme felt the burn of his flesh, the primal response

that ignited a genetic code and flashed the dark stripes across his face, his hips, alongside his left leg.

As quickly as he lost control, he snagged it back, holding on with a desperate grip before it could escape forevermore as it had before.

The Coyote saw it, though. His eyes widened, he swallowed tightly and an instant later Graeme was in his face, canines bared, his eyes picking up hues of color, differences in body temperature and the fear the Breed had been fighting to hide as claws gripped his neck, exerting just enough pressure to pierce the tough hide and threaten the large artery in his neck as the sound that rumbled from his throat echoed in the caverns like a lost nightmare.

“Say that name again,” Graeme suggested, “even think it, and we’ll see how easy it will be to skin you.” With the other hand he used a razored nail to lay open the thin layer of skin and slice between it and red meat.

He knew what it felt like. He carried his own scars from the scalpels the scientists had wielded.

“Then I’ll dissect you as they did the fine Gideon. Living. Screaming. Your bowels bloodied as the waste of it seeps from your body like liquid terror and you piss yourself from the pain. And that’s just the beginning,” he hissed, feeling his eyes begin to redden. “Within seconds you try to beg for mercy, but the pain is such that no words can form, your brain no longer recognizes the need for speech, the need to rationalize—it only knows one thing. The agony, the horror of it and the inability to move. The stark realization that you can’t tighten a muscle, can’t jerk a limb. You can’t even control your own heartbeat as they reach in and touch it, slicing into your brain with such a brutal punch of agony as they do so that those animal genetics of yours tuck their tails and start howling for death.”

A second later he scented the wash of the Coyote soldier’s urine as it began seeping from his body.

Fuck, and here he thought he had a soldier of better mettle than the others. The scent dragged him back from where he’d slipped once again, though. It jerked the sanity back to his mind, the logic and ability to think, to reason flooding back into his senses.

“Don’t test me,” he growled, stepping back from the obviously terrified Coyote Breed. Casting him a sneer, he asked in disgust, “You bastards used to have more iron in your spines. What did we do? Kill all the crazy ones?”

He was starting to think it was possible.