Cross Breed (Breeds 23)

Moving farther into the lush greenery, she could find little pleasure there. Despite her bare feet and the feel of grass beneath them, she found no satisfaction here. Just as she found no satisfaction in the deep, wide pond trickling in the center of the trees surrounding it.

The trees were heavily leafed and beaded with what appeared to be dew. The moisture actually came from the water that misted from pipes running along the steel frame supporting the glass above.

The scent of the night wasn’t here. The chirp of insects, the scuttle of creatures created to stalk such shadowed beauty, wasn’t here. It was sterile. Created by man rather than by nature.

Just as she had been.

She hated it.

At least on her balcony she could smell the night, the creatures that inhabited it and the sea surrounding Lawrence Island.

On her balcony there was a chance of sensing him … the man, and she knew it was a man, who watched her through a gun’s sights.

Here, there was a chance that he would search the night for her.

That he’d go ahead and take the shot rather than waiting.

Swallowing tightly, Cassie lowered herself to sit on the rough, flat boulder bordering the pond, then shed the matching robe covering the thin, sleeveless white gown she wore. Drawing her feet up to rest on top of the stone, she looped her arms beneath her knees and rested her chin on them as she stared into the trickling water.

What was wrong with her? She knew how dangerous it was to allow herself to stand on the balcony, in clear view, a target to any enemy with the intent to kill her. What force had drawn her there, pushed her to stand there in full view?

Though few wanted to kill her.

The price on her head was for her abduction, her virginity intact when she was turned over to the scientists secretly working with what remained of the Genetics Council.

She was Cassandra Sinclair.

She was unique, not just in her genetics but in her birth. Breed sperm had been used to inseminate her mother’s egg without any alterations to the ovum. The same as a hybrid, a Breed born of a Breed-human mating.

But she was even rarer than that. She wasn’t created from a single animal species’ genetics, but two. She was created from both Wolf and Coyote genetics. The good and the bad. The proud, enduring Wolf DNA altered and forever dirtied by the taint of the Coyote DNA.

Such a beautiful animal, the voice whispered through her memories.

She’d been five, standing in nothing but the white panties she wore, shuddering, sickened by the touch of the bastard’s fingers on the mark at her shoulder. The shadow of a paw print. A genetic marker. But as she grew older, another shadow began marring her flesh, one even her parents were unaware of, one resembling that of jagged slices made by claws. The mark of the Coyote stained the flesh just over her womb.

“She was created to whelp monsters,” her father sneered as Cassie shook with tears and disbelief.

A part of her had known he wasn’t her real father. Unlike her mother’s, her father’s scent didn’t resemble hers. Her momma’s scent resembled hers. And her mother loved her.

“She’ll whelp my little monsters,” Terrence Grange, drug lord and murderer said, chuckling, then lifted his arm, and a second later the weapon he carried exploded and her father was dead.

She knew he was dead. He fell to the floor, blood spilling from his chest as he stared at Cassie with hatred.

Thirteen years. It had been thirteen years since that night, and still, Cassie remembered every second of it as though it had happened only moments before.

She would whelp monsters.

Many said she was the monster, though.

The point was moot, because she’d be dead. She’d seen the blood explode from her head, watched herself falling, and in that vision her eyes had slowly closed as her father’s howl of rage spilled into the night.

She’d never been kissed, never been on a date. She was carefully protected, and those who protected her feared Dash Sinclair—her true father in the most important ways—far too much to risk lusting after her. She socialized within the Breed community, rarely among non-Breeds. And if by chance on those rare occasions a human male showed her any attention, then it wasn’t allowed for long.

Whoever had watche

d her while she was on the balcony earlier that day lusted for her in ways she’d never felt with the young men her own age. There had been a sense of maturity, of experience, in the hungry gaze focused on her. She’d felt it, like a wave of heat reaching out for her. Curious and hungry. He knew who she was, and he didn’t care.

If he abducted her, she wouldn’t be a virgin for long.