Once, when Cassie had been a little girl, she had stopped him as he moved across the backyard of the Ruling Pride’s home. She’d looked up at him, solemn and eerie, and told him the day would come when he would need her to help his mate—his mate would make a choice that would require her help. Cassie’d promised she would be there for him.
That time had come.
Staring back at him, Jonas sighed wearily as he nodded his assent. “I’ll contact Dash.” His expression turned questioning then. “Are you sure this is what you want, Stygian? If she sees Liza as anyone other than who she is, she won’t hold back, you know that.”
He knew it. He hated it, but he knew it was the only answer.
“A Core Level DNA test isn’t going to convince Liza of anything, and if her genetics were wiped and replaced, there will be no way to know for certain who she was before the wipe,” Stygian warned him. “Cassie will see more than DNA. She’ll see her fears, a memory, a nightmare or whatever the hell it is that Cassie sees that will pull those memories free if she is Honor or Fawn.”
“She’s Honor Roberts, Stygian,” Jonas said then, his gaze heavy. “I can sense it. I feel it. That woman is Honor Roberts, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt she can help us save Amber.”
Jonas stared back at Stygian, hating what he knew he was putting his enforcer through, hating what he knew that young woman he claimed as his mate would soon go through.
“I’ll protect her, Stygian,” he swore with a desperation that burned inside his soul. “I swear to you, if need be, I’ll give my own life to protect her if I’m right. I’ll do whatever it takes because I know together, she and Fawn Corrigan are all that can save Amber.”
“How?” Stygian snarled in frustration now, unaware until this moment that the question raged inside him. “How can they help her, Jonas? They were children. They would have no idea the makeup of that drug.”
“Honor Roberts had a photographic memory before she entered that lab,” Jonas hissed, hope suddenly burning in his eyes. “The reason the Genetics Council wanted her back after they released her to her father was because of the anomalies her Council-controlled nanny noticed. She’d developed a photographic memory and was often left with the coded notes and diagrams the scientists used while developing the serums they tested there. Judd and Gideon developed the photographic memories after the tests began. Each of the three would make certain, day by day, that they saw the notes and files on the tests and the serum used. Fawn Corrigan never saw the codes that we know of, but that nurse told us what she never told the scientists: Honor, Judd and Gideon would write out or draw what they saw, and Fawn would translate it. She could crack a code without a key, Stygian. She could decipher all the files we have, all the notes, everything we haven’t been able to crack where those experiments are concerned. With Honor’s memories of their particular serums and experiments, her memory of the codes used, combined with what little we know where the serum Brandenmore gave Amber is concerned, and all our questions would be answered.”
Together, they would have the ability to save Jonas’s daughter’s life and to help decipher all the encrypted files scientists had left over the decades of Breed research and the mating phenomena.
One without the other wouldn’t work.
“We also have Gideon to worry about.” Jonas sighed as he looked up the hall to the suite he and his family occupied. “He knows by now where Liza and Claire are. He’s probably already one step ahead of us.” He turned back to Stygian. “And he couldn’t care less about Amber or what it would do to her parents to lose her. All he cares about is killing Honor Roberts, Faith Corrigan and the Bengal Breed who was a part of those experiments with him.”
“He won’t get her,” Stygian growled, praying to God he was strong enough to keep Liza out of Gideon’s reach.
Jonas nodded, clasped his shoulder then turned and continued up the hall.
Stygian watched him go. Jonas’s shoulders were as straight as always, his head as arrogantly lifted as it had ever been. But Stygian could feel the weariness dragging at the director, as well as the fear.
If they lost Amber, then Jonas’s mate, Rachel, would never be the same. Hell, no one who had ever met that child would ever be the same.
Two years old, bright as hell, loving, generous. The heart Stygian sensed within the toddler was one that shined with such compassion that seeing her pain, feeling her fear, could humble him as nothing else he had ever known.
This particular spell caused by the serum she had been injected with had lasted longer than any other. At the most, until recent weeks, the spell would last a few days to a week and then the child would pull out of the weakness and pain and once again she would be her bright, childlike self.
This time, she was growing weaker, the pain at times so strong that Stygian could sense it even across the distance between Jonas’s suite and his own.
There were times he swore he could feel the toddler’s tears.
And there was nothing he could do to help her. He held Honor Roberts in his arms every night and listened to the nightmares that plagued her.
Her pleas that the pain stop, the terror that filled her as she begged that “they” not harm her again was killing him. All he could do was hold her through the dreams that he sensed filled her with horror and pray she would remember them when she awakened.
And she never did.
She never remembered them and he never mentioned them, because his animal instincts reined in the words each time he began to mention them to his mate.
Returning to the suite, Stygian followed the scent of his mate to the suite they shared and stood in the connecting doorway, just watching her as she stood in front of the heavy curtains that blocked the small balcony outside.
“How could they do it?” she asked softly, though she never turned from the view of the curtains. “How could anyone change something so basic as a teenager’s memories, her hopes and her dreams?” Her voice became softer, her pain became deeper. “How could they steal that part of a person and give them someone else’s?” She turned to him then and the tears that glistened in her eyes, the dampness on her cheeks, broke his heart.
“Tell me.” Liza sobbed then, her breathing hitching as she wrapped her arms across her br**sts and fought to hold back the rage that would have had her screaming. “Tell me how they could do it, Stygian? How could science have reached that peak?”