Behind her, Stygian let his hand grip her hip as he moved closer.
She was certain no one heard it, even she didn’t, but she felt the growl rumbling in his chest.
“I didn’t say that,” Ray snapped back at her.
“Neither of us did.” Her father stared back at her as though he didn’t know her, though.
“No, it’s the same accusation he used when she tried to leave and go to college in California, and the same one he used when she tried to take a job at the casino rather than the receptionist at the Navajo Nation headquarters. For God’s sake, she’s his daughter and didn’t even get the assistant’s job. She was pushed down to a damned receptionist as though she were some lowly distant cousin he felt responsible for,” she accused Ray. “And he used the same tone of derision and disgust when she announced she was moving into the house with me too.”
“What other reason would she have to treat me so disrespectfully?” Ray charged.
“There was no disrespect, Father.” Claire straightened her shoulders as she battled her tears. The sight of it broke Liza’s heart. “You can’t bear the truth now, any more than you could bear it when I was younger. I’m starting to wonder if you wouldn’t have preferred to see Isabelle raped or murdered than to see her with a Breed. Just as I wonder if you wouldn’t have preferred I died in that crash.”
“Enough of this.” Terran stepped forward, his dark eyes blazing with anger as he glanced at Ray and Audi. “I’ll be damned if I’ll stand here and listen to you insult my child as well as your own. We’re not here to discuss who our adult children have taken as lovers. We’re here to discuss their safety and the fact that the security we placed on their phones and laptops has been broken.” He turned to Liza. “That, my dear, is the reason your, Chelsea’s, Claire’s and Isabelle’s security clearance was denied so quickly. The signal we tracked moved from your phone to your laptop, slid past the encryption and began sending files to a location we’ve yet to track.”
Liza stalked from Stygian into the next room. She moved across the sitting room to the bedroom and grabbed her phone off the bedside table.
Returning, she slapped it on the desk beside her father before moving to the couch, collecting her laptop and dropping it at his feet. “There you go. If you had listened to me last month, when I told you it was acting strange, perhaps you would have found the problem before now.”
Her father watched her with a hard scowl as she moved back to Stygian.
His arm slid around her, pulling her to his side as she stared back at her father challengingly. “Are we still fired?”
“Until we determine what’s going on, yes, you are.” It was Ray Martinez who stated the obvious. No doubt, he was the one who gave the order to rescind their security as well.
Liza nodded slowly, her gaze never leaving her father’s.
“Liza, I know you’re hurt and angry,” he said. “But, rather than blaming us, you and Isabelle should look to your new friends.” His gaze moved to Malachi and Stygian. “We couldn’t track it, but we know damned good and well that signal didn’t leave this hotel.”
Stygian felt his mate tense, felt to the bottom of his soul the sudden suspicion and anger that invaded her delicate body, and he knew she was remembering the night she had overheard Jonas attempting to convince him to betray her—to bug her phone and laptop for the access code into the Navajo database.
“I think it’s time you leave, Dad,” Liza stated then, the scent of her pain slicing through his soul. “We need to get ready and go job hunting, it seems. Since we no longer have jobs.”
She couldn’t describe the hurt flowing through her or the sense of betrayal she felt.
“Liza, we couldn’t risk the possibility that whoever was using the phones and laptops to hack into the database could actually manage to slip through the final layers of security,” her father argued as frustration tightened his expression. “Surely you understand that.”
“I understand that you live less than twenty minutes from this hotel,” she burst out furiously. “Twenty minutes, Dad. And rather than driving over here to tell me what was going on, you let me walk into the offices only to be stopped by security as though I were some criminal myself.”
Grimacing, he turned his head away for a second. He folded his arms over his chest, braced his feet apart and just stared back at her silently.
“So now I just get your military face,” she accused him, her voice thick. “As far as you’re concerned, the subject’s closed, right?”
“I apologized, Liza,” he stated firmly. “Once I had my information together, I came here, but you had already left.”
“You called my phone, knowing it was compromised and a call wouldn’t go through. You couldn’t call Stygian or Jonas, but you obviously got hold of the others.”
“Dad called me,” Claire stated with a hard, cold anger Liza considered uncharacteristic of her as she let Liza know that her father hadn’t tried to stop the humiliation she had suffered earlier.
“Claire, that’s enough,” her father warned her, his tone harsh, harsher than Liza had heard him speak to her since they had awakened from the wreck they were in as teenagers.
“God, this is incredible,” Isabelle stared at the two men, confusion creasing her face. “Claire and Liza have always behaved above reproach. They have never done anything to shame either of you, and this is the only way you can treat them now that they aren’t following your orders?”
“Isabelle, that isn’t true,” Audi argued. Liza noticed his voice was even sincere. “This has nothing to do with the mistakes you girls are making in your current lovers—”
“Oh, excuse me!” Isabelle demanded then. “Our mistakes in our lovers? You can go to hell! As for you, Uncle Ray, you can jump and accuse Claire of doing drugs because she had the nerve to argue with you? And you can’t go out of your way to warn your daughter not to arrive at the office after you’ve canceled her clearance? I’m sorry, Audi, but that’s exactly what it sounds like.”
“Isabelle.” It was Terran who stepped in at that point. “There are things you don’t understand, sweetheart.”
“They why not explain it, Dad?” Chelsea rose slowly from her seat as well. “Because it’s obvious the two of them”—she nodded toward Liza’s and Claire’s fathers—“aren’t going to explain a damned thing.”