“You saw the mark, Elizabeth.” His head was lowered. His eyes blazed back at her in fury, in determination.
This couldn’t be happening. She wanted to slap herself, to tear herself out of this new, horrible nightmare suddenly exploding within her mind. She couldn’t be awake. This couldn’t be real. Her daughter wasn’t created in a damned lab. She had been conceived within her womb, carried to full term and delivered in a hospital under the eyes of a caring obstetrician. Tests. Immunizations. Every care had been taken to make certain Cassie was healthy, free of defects. A perfect baby girl. And now he was ripping what was left of her life apart. Telling her that Cassie was more than she had believed, that her baby now faced the danger of not just Grange, but a deranged Council who was even more powerful. If they found out. If they knew… The consequences slammed into her head, making her fight it instinctively. Not her child.
“It’s a coincidence.” Her hands pressed against her stomach as she swallowed deeply, fighting the bile rising in her throat. It couldn’t be possible.
He laughed, a low, feral sound lacking in amusement. The sound ripped over her nerves, shredding them further. It was animalistic, dangerous. There was no amusement in his voice, only savage acceptance of what he was and what he faced. The man she had fallen in love with before she ever met him would be taken from her as well. Not just her baby, but Dash would be gone. How would she ever manage to hold either of them to her now?
“If there’s one thing I know, Elizabeth,” he informed her harshly, “it’s about being a Breed and how to hide it. You can’t hide the marker, though. Nothing can erase it. It’s a genetic imprint created to keep just this from ever happening. To be certain if conception occurred, then a Breed child could be identified. The Council was fanatical about not mixing the animals in the general population.”
She swayed. God. This wasn’t happening. Please don’t let it be happening, she prayed. If she thought the past two years had been a nightmare, then this was hell and she was being plunged in head first. No chance to test the heat. No chance to accept the danger and the pain. No chance to plan a way out. She wouldn’t accept it.
“My daughter is not an animal.” She wanted to scream the words, needed to make certain he heard her, understood her. She didn’t care what he thought he was, but her daughter wasn’t an animal. And she sure as hell wasn’t an experiment. “And neither is she a Breed. She’s my baby.” Her hands knotted at her abdomen. “I had her. I carried her. She looks like me.”
Her baby. Elizabeth fought Dash. Fought the sudden, sickening realization that he could be right. She had always known how special her daughter was. So unique and so gifted in so many ways that she had convinced herself that it was only a mother’s pride that made her see it.
“She’s still your child, Elizabeth.” He tried to step closer to her, then stopped as she retreated in panic. She couldn’t let him touch her. If she did, she would break. Shatter into so many fragments she would never be able to find all the pieces again. “I smell your connection to her. It’s unmistakable. But Dane Colder is not her father.”
She was going to faint. Elizabeth could feel it and fought it. He could smell it? No. Motherhood wasn’t a smell. Or was it? Cassie had come from her body. Her womb. She trembled violently. How could he smell it?
“He is.” She shook her head desperately, suddenly remembering Dane’s desperation to convince her to have a child that first year. “He was desperate for a child. We went to the doctor’s office together. He did everything he was supposed to.”
She was fighting to deny him, to deny what he was telling her. Fighting to try to find a way out of this sudden, horrifying situation. She stared at Dash, silently pleading, begging him to take it back, to show just a small moment of weakness, a doubt that he could be right. If he would, then she could find a way to convince herself that none of this could be true. Instead, he gave her proof.
“Martaine was a high level Genetics Council scientist,” he said with chilling knowledge. Of course, he knew, she thought. He was a Breed. He knew the monsters who worked within those labs. “He worked in the initial phases of breeding, trying to reverse the coding that kept the males from fertilizing their females.” A low, painful whimper was her only protest. “When he failed to do what they wanted, he was quietly retired rather than killed, in case they needed him later,” Dash continued. “He went into fertility practice and evidently his experiments continued. Somehow, he figured out how to use the unique Breed sperm to fertilize the ova. Because I swear to you, Elizabeth, Cassie is a Wolf Breed child. That is why Grange won’t let her go. That is why he killed her father. And that was why Dane refused to accept the child. Because he knew.”
“No.” She shook her head desperately. “He wouldn’t have done that. He wouldn’t have.”
“He did, Elizabeth,” he snarled, the sound ricocheting through her body like a bullet. “Listen to me, damn you, because Cassie’s life is in more danger than you ever realized. She is the first. Do you hear me?”
She flinched violently. “She is the first Breed child conceived outside a lab. The first created, in vitro, without first altering the ova to accept the unique DNA. Do you understand what I’m saying, Elizabeth?
She’s unique. A bridge between human and Breeds, and a female in the bargain. Breedable, Elizabeth. Grange would know that. He knows it and he wants her for it. And if he doesn’t get her, his next step will be to sell this information to the bastards who created us to begin with.”
Breedable? She was a baby. You didn’t breed babies. You cuddled them and you loved them and you raised them to be happy and free and to love you in return. She couldn’t make sense of this. Couldn’t accept the information battering into her brain.
“She’s just a baby. You can’t do that with a baby.”
“Elizabeth.” He groaned her name with agonizing emotion. “Listen to me, honey. You have to listen to me now. You can’t protect Cassie from this. You can’t shelter her or run far enough away to hide her from this.”
Elizabeth stared back at him in shock. Couldn’t protect Cassie? She had to protect Cassie. She was her child. She couldn’t accept anything else.
“I won’t let my baby die,” she raged furiously. “You’re wrong. You have to be wrong.”