She was fighting something, fighting some fear or uncertainty that perhaps even she didn’t understand. He could feel her confusion, though, and that dark pain brewing brighter and hotter deep inside her and, he suspected, causing the silent retreat.
He hated the lack of emotion and sense of warmth that was always a part of her.
How the hell did she do it? Was it voluntary or subconscious? And where the hell did she go?
Rubbing his thumb over the back of her hand, warming the cool flesh, he released the unusual, if quiet, sound of a primal question.
It was a sound he had never made before, one he’d never heard—somewhere between a half growl and a low questioning breath of a hum. As though the animal he carried inside him was calling out to her itself.
Her head whipped around as her heart gave a hard leap.
The animal he was raged inside him before that spark of her inner spirit showed itself in the surprise and eased his anger.
Just a spark. Just a hint of the woman she was.
And what he sensed coming from her all but froze his soul in terror.
For a second, he didn’t sense the woman he knew, in any way.
For the briefest moment, it was a stranger he felt, a stranger he touched.
With his gaze locked with hers, her entire being open as Stygian gave the primal animal he was free rein to call to her, he realized he had opened a door inside her that he had never imagined existed, and for one heart-stopping second he swore he was going to receive an answer to he animalistic call.
And just that quickly, it was over.
Whoever, whatever, had nearly stepped forward, retreated just quickly.
“Is everything okay?” Liza asked, and he sensed her confusion, her uncertainty over what had just happened.
He didn’t know what it was. He had no idea how to identify or describe what he had just felt, what he had just glimpsed inside her.
But he was determined to find out. One way or the other he would learn exactly who or what he had found hiding so deep inside the psyche of the woman he loved.
The woman he was determined to mark as his mate.
CHAPTER 12
Audi watched from the window as the SUV carrying the daughter Audi had traded his soul to protect twelve years before heading back to the hotel.
Fists clenched, his jaw aching from tension, he nearly flinched at the knowledge that she was sharing a room with that Breed.
Stygian Black.
If he wasn’t Liza’s lover yet, he would be soon.
“What are we going to do?” he asked the friend that stood beside him, knowing they hadn’t expected this.
In all the years they had been protecting the girls they called their own, they had never anticipated this.
“They’ll be protected.” The same grief that twisted him filled Ray’s voice as well.
“What are we going to do, Ray?” His question hadn’t been answered. “Their protection at this moment in time isn’t in doubt. Their protection, if our secrets are learned, is quite another thing.”
Glaring at the man he had weathered a war, a prisoner of war camp and the politics of the Navajo Nation with, Audi realized they were finally facing the consequences of the choices they had made over the years.
Ray breathed out heavily. “Remember those articles we read on the Breeds and mating? And Father’s suppositions that such rumors were true?” he finally asked.
Audi closed his eyes briefly.
God, no.
If those stories were true, then no doubt he had lost his daughter forever.
“Isabelle,” Ray said his niece’s name roughly. “She no longer uses her own doctor, but a Breed doctor exclusively. She exhibits all the signs of a Breed mating, and when Terran questions Malachi, the Breed merely stares back at him silently. What more proof would a man need?”
Would Liza tell him if such a phenomenon had occurred within her where the dark Breed Stygian was concerned? She was incredibly loyal to friends, he knew. If she mated with the Breed, then her emotions would be even more so involved.
Her loyalty would no longer be to her family first, but to the Breeds instead.
And if her loyalty was to her Breed first, then she could unknowingly end up betraying them all. And possibly destroying her.
Audi could handle the unintentional betrayal, after all, she had no idea of the secrets she harbored. After all, he and Ray had committed no crime, nor had they done anything that would betray their daughters. It was what it would do to her, it was the fact that the daughter he loved would no longer exist, that threatened to destroy him.
Hell, it would destroy him. He and Jane both. It would destroy them in ways that there was no way Ray and his wife could possibly understand. Unlike Audi and Jane, they hadn’t developed the closeness and the bonds with their daughter, Claire, that existed between them and Liza.
Liza was his and Jane’s life. They had worked tirelessly to protect her, to ensure her happiness, independence and well-being.
And now, it was all being threatened.
God help them if they lost her, because Audi knew, they would never survive it.
It wasn’t going away.
The involuntary separation of mind and body, of emotion and self. And she couldn’t seem to find her way back.
As Stygian pulled into the driveway of her home, Liza stared as though she didn’t recognize the place. As though it were someone else who had rented it. Someone else who had invited her best friends to share it. Someone else who had dreamed of freedom as she moved her belongings into it.
After returning to the hotel, he’d had Flint and Rule take another vehicle to follow them.
She’d demanded to return here. She didn’t like the confinement of the hotel or the room they shared. She didn’t like the feeling of imprisonment or of being watched every second.
Now, she was here, and she wondered where “here” was.
From the corner of her eye, Liza was aware of Stygian staring at her, his expression more savage than normal, the dark bronze skin of his face stretched tight over the sharp planes and angles that made up his face.
He was furious at her decision.
He could have been Navajo if not for the darker color of his flesh.
Of course, she had no doubt there were Navajo genes in his DNA. Almost all Breeds held the DNA of the Navajo, or one of the tribes that had joined with the Nation in the early part of the century.
“Where do you go when you disappear, Liza?”
The question threw her off guard but not enough to eliminate the mental and emotional distance between them.