He had grown up in a loving environment. His heart hadn’t been battered and scarred by one betrayal after another. Just watching the way his team had handled her arrival gave him a little insight into what her life had been like. She was used to it. She’d been expecting betrayal and mistrust, and she’d been right. He had thought his endorsement of her would be enough, but it hadn’t been. That had shocked him. It had been an insult. He tried not to allow her reaction to Antonio’s name feel insulting to him.

Finally, Camellia lifted her head, her eyes so intensely blue they looked like two bruised cornflowers pressed into her face. “I’m sorry, honey. For a minute, all I could think about was Whitney’s torture camps. At the facility Antonio guarded, Whitney was conducting all kinds of experiments. He tortured us under the pretense of learning what would break a soldier. He kept inserting more and more horrific genetic materials into us. At the same time, he would tell us he was enhancing our psychic abilities. Already some of the girls were far past their ability to cope without filters.”

“Antonio wasn’t guarding you,” Jonas reminded as gently as possible. “He was sent there to guard the compound, just as other guards were. They had no idea what Whitney was doing.”

She rubbed her temples, as if she had the beginnings of a headache. “Perhaps not at first, but it would have been impossible to ignore the screams of agony coming from his laboratory. It wasn’t soundproof. That was one of Whitney’s biggest beefs. Eventually, he demanded that anywhere he worked, he have the best security with his own handpicked soldiers, and everything was soundproofed.”

“That’s because of the three soldiers testifying against him to a committee in Washington. Kane Cannon from Team Three. Malichai Fortunes from Team Four. And Antonio Martinez from Team Two. All three of those men were targeted after that. Sent time after time on suicide missions, often alone. If their team leaders hadn’t sent backup without anyone knowing, all three would be dead. They risked their careers and their lives to try to save you women and get Whitney arrested and brought to trial.”

“I should have asked you,” Camellia conceded.

Jonas wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her tight against his chest. He wondered how Ryland and Lily were going to fix their problem when trust had been broken between them. Trust was so fragile. Camellia was trying. He could feel her making every effort, but it was so difficult to overcome her past. And the two of them could share one another’s mind. That should have made it even easier to trust one another.

“I understand, honey. You good now?” He hated to rush her, but he could feel danger coming closer with every passing second. “We have to get a move on.”

The fingers of fog were drifting up from the ground, darker in color than before. Taking on a purplish hue. Instead of fingers moving through the trees, the fog appeared as dark, spinning masses, growing in size, the threads clotting together as if magnetized until they became a bank of rolling clouds. The fog spread out and raced along the ground, low and so dense that the trees appeared to rise up out of the mists with no anchor to earth.

Camellia tilted her head in order to brush a kiss along the underside of Jonas’s jaw. “Let’s go. I’m good. Really. Who is the other man Team Two sent?”

Jonas took lead again, setting a faster pace in spite of the fact that the fog blotted out the trail. He used his connection to the mycelium under his feet to keep them on the right track, sharing his visualization with the others as he ran. Camellia’s connection to them all telepathically was so strong that Jonas didn’t have to think about it. He allowed her to do most of the heavy lifting of sharing their minds so he could keep them on track running.

The fog was growing thicker and darker, roiling as if in cauldrons. He shouldn’t have worried that the “weather” wouldn’t cover Logan’s men lying in wait for the scouts. Their orders were to trail the scouts and then take them once Jonas and his crew had killed the enhanced leaders of the battalion coming at them.

The second man is Trace Aikens. Like Antonio, he seems to disappear into the shadows when he doesn’t want to be seen. He has a brother, Todd, also on Team Two. Trace is a deadly man, from what I understand. And incredibly fast. I imagine the reason Antonio and Trace were sent out on their own to handle the advance scouts was because Logan figured they wouldn’t need help. Like us, Whitney considered Team Two flawed, although not nearly as severely as us. Jonas wanted Camellia to know the second team wasn’t held in much higher regard by Whitney than his team.

Tags: Christine Feehan GhostWalkers Paranormal
Source: readsnovelonline.net