His gut had told something wasn’t right with Scheme Tallant all along. Nearly ten years he had been watching her, and he had known something was off. Something was wrong. But hatred and suspicion had clouded logic; the need to hate had clouded reason.
The proof the Breeds had gathered on her over the past ten years showed a spoiled general’s daughter as merciless and bloodthirsty as the monster who had sired her. Proof such as orders carrying her signature to execute Breeds still beneath her father’s command, for no other reason than whatever perceived weakness they possessed. Proof such as the surveillance videos the Breeds had managed to acquire of meetings between Scheme, her father and high-ranking soldiers within her father’s organization. Her cold, deliberate plans to strike against Sanctuary.
But the gut had warned him, even during the investigation, that something was off. That something wasn’t right with the evidence they had against her. As though he were seeing only part of the picture, and the rest was in shadow. He should have paid attention to his gut.
There were too many inconsistencies in the evidence they had gathered on her. A Breed marked for execution only to escape at the last moment because of a mistake she had supposedly made. Scheme’s profiling reports before the escape that the Breed was trustworthy and wasn’t an escape risk. Attacks Sanctuary had been warned were coming, or a transmission suddenly appearing that hadn’t been there before. Little things. Things that made it appear as though fate were on the side of the Breeds. Tiny little f**kups that, taken by themselves, were meaningless. No organization or person was perfect. But when put together—
And then there were the short disappearances she had made each time those little mistakes had been made.
She had been punished during those disappearances. Punished in ways that made Tanner’s skin crawl and his suspicions rise.
He knew Jonas had managed to find a spy within the Tallant ranks eight years before. One he had never revealed to the Breed Cabinet. That spy had been one of the successes that had allowed him to step in as director of the Bureau of Breed Affairs.
Jonas was a sneaky son of a bitch. He had managed to place spies in areas that the Breed analysts had considered impossible. He knew weaknesses and strengths and how to exploit them. And he had had an ace in the hole.
Somehow, Jonas had recruited General Tallant’s own daughter. He had to have. It was the only thing that made sense. Why else would her father beat her, bury her, in a search for information? And Tanner knew that was the reason why.
Cyrus Tallant was as evil as they came. He was a monster who believed in his cause. He wasn’t there for the power or the money, but because he believed in what he was doing.
To the general, the Breeds had no soul because man, rather than God, created them. They were tools, no more or less than a dog or a rifle. The only difference being in how they were trained.
Their humanity was stripped from them as babes. After they were weaned, they were placed in pens and taught to fend for themselves. Once there, they were watched every second, studied until each surviving toddler was finally placed in what was considered an appropriate training program.
Psychologists, psychiatrists and doctors created individual programs for each Breed, designed to create the weapon the Council envisioned.
They believed in their own rhetoric. That Breeds weren’t truly human, and therefore had no rights. They had no souls, and therefore the Council could not be held accountable for their deaths.
They believed in what they were doing just as desperately as the Breeds believed in their right to freedom and life. And General Tallant believed more strongly than most in his right to rid the world of the Breeds now that they were no longer controlled.
He wouldn’t hesitate to use his daughter in that battle. And if his daughter showed the same weakness his wife had, then she was as disposable in the war he was fighting as his spouse had been.
Not that there was any proof that the general had ordered her death. Dorothy Tallant had been a scientist within the Breed lab Tallant had first been assigned to oversee.
A petite Asian-American with an IQ off the charts and a talent for genetic engineering, she had supposedly died of a massive stroke twenty years before.
He breathed wearily as he continued to go through the information he had pulled up on his laptop. The surveillance on the Tallants had begun even before the revelation to the world that the Breeds existed.
Only in the past year or so had the Breeds managed to actually formulate a case against Tallant. After all, it wasn’t illegal to hire Breeds as security personnel. Just as it wasn’t a law that Breeds had to register with the Bureau of Breed Affairs, though most did to assure their own safety.
Tallant’s Breeds didn’t. The dozen Coyotes he employed had never registered, which meant no fingerprints, no way of identifying them. And they were damned good killers. The best the Council had ever created from the Coyote DNA.
He pushed back from the laptop as he disconnected the link into the Breed satellites and sighed wearily.
Something was eating at him; he could feel it. Something that just didn’t set well with what he knew about Scheme Tallant so far.
Forget the lust and the raging hunger. He knew himself; he didn’t lust after whores and killers. And he could smell them; the animal inside him could sense them.
Scheme was neither a whore nor a killer. And that definitely didn’t fit with the profile the Breed analysts had put together on her.
So where did that leave him? The minute he walked into Sanctuary with her, she would be placed under Breed Law, convicted and possibly executed.
Her only chance had been a mating. If he had mated her.
He stared at her, his lips flattening in anger as his teeth clenched with it.
And there lay his problem. There was no mating heat.
He had almost been certain she was his mate. The emotions were there. The lust, the need, the overwhelming, primal protectiveness. He was falling in love with her. The animal inside him was claiming her. But there was no mating. Occasionally, at odd moments, an unusual taste would tempt his senses. The taste of wild lust and heat, similar to the tastes mated couples described. But it was never there for long. And the glands that held the mating hormone beneath his tongue didn’t swell and release the hormone created from the biological and chemical reaction to a mate. It could be that his DNA was just almost compatible for the mating. Which meant she might be another Breed’s mate. A Breed whose DNA matched his own.