For only seconds, it was there. A formula, a child’s pain-filled cries and the knowledge that, once again, the tests were going to hurt. Once again, they were going to experience hell.
She hadn’t realized she was holding her breath.
She hadn’t realized that for the briefest second, the pain that radiated through her could be felt by every Breed in the room.
And each of them flinched.
“Enough!” Stygian’s arms were suddenly around her, pulling her against his chest a second before she was able to slip back into that distant, remote place she’d been unable to access since he’d taken her.
“I’m sorry.” She was almost wheezing again.
God, she hadn’t wheezed in so long.
“They can have the damned code,” she whispered hoarsely. “I’ll give them the damned thing. Just get them out of here.”
“The code isn’t what they needed,” he told her, his own voice thick with fury now. “It wasn’t the code. It was this, Liza. It was your pain he wanted to access, and you’re giving him exactly what he wanted.”
But was that it?
Staring back at Jonas, she saw a man tormented. His eyes flashed with enraged mercury, his expression becoming taut as he fought to wipe it free of emotion.
No, her pain wasn’t what Jonas wanted any more than he wanted to see his own daughter’s pain. He just wanted answers—answers and the key to save the child he loved as though she were created from his genetics rather than another man’s.
“Don’t you know I would help you if I could,” she suddenly cried out to Jonas, desperate, terrified of what she suddenly felt rising within herself. “Do you think I would deny her for the hell of it?”
“No,” he said, his voice stark. “Not for the hell of it,” he finally breathed out wearily. “But to avoid hell? Yes, I believe to avoid whatever hell may be awaiting you on the other side, you would gladly walk through the flames barefoot and with a smile.” He shook his dark head, turned to the two men watching them and jerked his head to the door before turning back to her. “I just pray you realize that whatever you’re fighting to escape could well be my daughter’s only hope of life.”
“If that’s true, if she’s dying because Brandenmore gave her whatever he gave the girls he had before, then how did they survive? If it’s killing Amber, Jonas, why didn’t it kill them?”
Her fingers were digging into Stygian’s arm as she demanded the answer, demanded to know the one thing no one seemed to be discussing.
To that, Jonas breathed out with weary helplessness, “I don’t know, Liza. All I know is that from day to day I watch her struggle to live. To breathe through the pain. And every day I see the same question in her eyes. ‘Why won’t you help me, Daddy?’ And it’s killing me as nothing those f**king scientists who created me could have. I promise you that. There’s no hell greater than seeing that in her eyes, hearing her cries, and knowing how helpless I am to save her if death is truly what she’s facing. And if it is.” His eyes suddenly flashed with an icy promise. “If I lose her because of your refusal to face whatever it is you’re trying to escape, then I swear to you, I’ll make damned sure you pay for it.”
Before the sudden, fierce growl that vibrated in Stygian’s chest could finish, Jonas was out the door and stalking back to his own suite.
As the door slammed behind him, it was Liza who flinched. Not from the sound of steel meeting steel, but the realization that there was the very real chance that he was right. If she was Honor Roberts, wouldn’t she be desperate, horribly desperate, to keep from returning to the memories of a hell that had pushed her to reach out for a dead girl’s identity?
Lifting her gaze to Stygian, she watched him, knowing the sacrifices he was making for her. He saw her as his mate. As the woman created for him and for him alone, and for her, he was willing to betray the vows he had made when he went into the Bureau of Breed Affairs as an enforcer. The vow to place all Breeds, their security and their safety, above his own.
Breaking a vow wouldn’t be easy for a man like Stygian.
“I want to go to the desert now,” she told him as she faced him. “I want to go to the crash site. And I want to see where the sweat lodge sat. Now.”
“Liza—” he began.
“No, I want to go now,” she demanded. “I want to know who I am, Stygian. I have to know who I am.”
She had a feeling, though, she already knew.
CHAPTER 16
It didn’t take long for Stygian to arrange the outing to the area where Liza and Claire had taken Ray Martinez’s sports car over a canyon cliff.
After twelve years, evidence of the crash should have been completely wiped away; instead, there were still several signs of the wreck as well as the hastily erected sweat lodge that had been placed a short distance from where the vehicle had slammed into the opposite canyon wall.
As Liza stepped from the Desert Dragoon and surveyed the damage to the rock wall, she didn’t attempt to fight any memories or sensations that swept through her.
One of the reasons why she was beginning to suspect she was Honor Roberts was the distant fuzziness of the memories of her life before the crash as well as the memories that seemed determined to torment her since Stygian had come into her life.
She remembered parts of her childhood well, especially those things her parents often reminded her of. Picnics at the lake, birthday celebrations, certain amusing or even embarrassing moments in her life. And though the memories were there, they had that hazy, uncertain quality as well. A lack of detail, or even periods of time when she couldn’t recall certain memories at all.
Now, standing to the side of the Dragoon’s multiple lights directed on the stone wall, it wasn’t being in the wreck that flashed through her mind.
It was seeing the wreck.
Staring at the unnatural crack in the stone from the force of the vehicle slamming into it, she felt a flash of light tear through her memories, the ground rocking with the explosion as flames overcame the vehicle, and remembered looking down to see the two bodies that had been thrown clear.
Her father had told her that that memory was the result of having “died” more than once that night.
Three times.
She had died three times. The last time had been in the ambulance as she was being transported to the hospital.