Dawn’s Awakening (21 page)

“You were still waking us with your screams almost nightly,” he snarled. “You couldn’t bear to be in the same room with the man without shaking in fear, and you ask how I could do such a thing to you? How could I not?”

“Because it wasn’t your call,” she snarled right back at him. “He was my mate. He wasn’t a ravening monster that had no self-control. You should have trusted him. And you should have given me the chance.” Her fists clenched as the rage threatened to engulf her. “You took my choice, Callan. And that was wrong. You took my mate when I ached for him, when I needed him. And you took my choice.” Just as it had been taken so many times before.

“That smirking son of a bitch. He was so arrogantly cocky, strutting around Sanctuary as though he owned the place and watching you like a hungry dog. You were too fragile. He had no control then, Dawn. He had nothing but his hunger and his certainty that what he wanted should be his.”

“If that were true, then he wouldn’t have given a damn what you wanted,” she yelled back. “You let your guilt nearly destroy me, Callan. You didn’t want me with Seth, because if I left, then you couldn’t make up for the years that I, myself and no one else, allowed Dayan to destroy me.”

The room was silent as she finished. She stared back into Callan’s tormented gaze before she turned her attention to a silent Jonas.

He stared back as expressionlessly, as coldly and unmovingly, as an iceberg. She respected him, but she didn’t particularly like him. There were very few who did.

“I wanted to protect you, Dawn.” Callan exhaled roughly. “I still want to protect you, but not to the extent that I would have held you back from your mate if I thought for a second that being with him wouldn’t have traumatized you worse at the time. I did what I felt I had to do.”

His golden eyes swirled with emotion. Anger and regret and power. Callan carried his power easily. His shoulders didn’t bend from it, and he never flinched from what he had to do. Callan was never weak, and he never faltered. And she knew he didn’t regret that long-ago decision he had made. Nothing she said, nothing she felt, would ever change that about him.

“You and Jonas make a good pair,” she finally whispered sadly. “You don’t care about the individual Breed you’re making the decisions for, all you care about is your own idea of what you believe is right for them.”

“That’s not true,” Callan snarled furiously.

“But it is true,” she refuted calmly, yet she felt broken inside. She felt as though she had lost something imperative to her life, and in a way she knew she had. She had lost the brother she knew she could depend on—no matter what, she had believed Callan would be there for her. And she had been wrong.

“I nearly left Sanctuary that first year without Seth,” she told him. “I nearly ran, because I couldn’t bear smelling the scent of him each time he came to Sanctuary and believing he didn’t want me enough to so much as seek me out and say hello.” She shook her head painfully. “You and Jonas decided my life for me, and you nearly decided my death. If Seth had married another, if he had impregnated that cow who’d been trying to trap him into marriage, then it would have destroyed me as nothing else. Is that what you wanted for me?”

“I wanted you whole,” he bit out, pushing his hands through his long hair as he glared at Dash again. “That’s all I ever wanted for you, Dawn.”

“I’m whole now,” she assured him flippantly. “You can fly back to Sanctuary with a clear conscience. Been nice seeing you. Tell Merinus hi.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” he growled. “It’s not pleasant.”

“Oh, you think it’s not pleasant?” She rounded her eyes and stared back at him incredulously. “Wow, Callan, should I bow and ask your forgiveness now? I guess you just might have to accept it for the time being, because attacking you isn’t an option. Merinus might hurt me.”

Jonas shifted then. A smooth flow of muscle, not a tensing, but a warning. She turned back to him and smiled coldly.

“I want to be around when you find your mate,” she snarled.

His brow lifted. “I doubt she would give me the trouble it would appear you give those who love you, Dawn.”

“I bet she digs a very deep hole and does all she can to hide from you,” she retorted insultingly. “And I couldn’t blame her. Her life will be nothing but a series of attempts to avoid your calculations. Tell me, Jonas, how did keeping me away from Seth benefit you? It must have, or you would have never done it. Did it keep the money flowing in? Was Seth more charitable when he believed he was protecting his woman than you thought he would have been if he had had her?”

Her fists clenched at her sides as the pain drove spikes of fury into her brain. She knew Jonas. She knew how calculating he could be. One person’s pain wouldn’t be a blip on his radar when it came to the welfare of the Breed society as a whole.

“It was my decision, Dawn. Not Jonas’s,” Callan stated firmly.

She stared back at her brother. She had always admired his strength, his integrity, his determination to see not just the Breeds as a race survive, but each individual Breed survive whole and intact. Until her.

“Why, Callan?” she whispered. “Why would you do that to me?”

Before he could answer, Dawn tensed at the scent of her mate outside the door. A second later the door opened behind her and Seth stepped inside.

“Come to join the party?” She turned to him with a bright smile and a clenching of her stomach. The arousal was there, but so was the pain. “Come on in. It’s just getting fun.”

He didn’t say a word. He moved to her, his broad palms cupping her shoulders as she turned, drawing her back against his chest. She felt his heartbeat, his warmth. His scent and his strength wrapped around her, and her breath hitched with the renewed pain that fed into her soul.

“Callan.” She felt Seth nod behind her as Callan glared at Seth, the gold of his eyes flickering with anger.

“You weren’t invited to the meeting, Mr. Lawrence,” Jonas said, his voice dark, controlled.

“My house.” Seth shrugged before Dawn could snarl back at the Breed director. “I didn’t need an invitation.”

Dawn breathed in, her gaze still locked with Callan’s as she moved slowly out of Seth’s embrace. She would face them all on her own terms. She didn’t need a protector, she needed a partner.

“We were discussing old times,” she told him brightly, crossing her arms over her chest as she watched his hands slide into his trouser pockets. “You know, all those nasty little images they used to run you off without telling me about it.” She met his eyes, and it hurt. There was somber acceptance there.

“I had a right to know, Dawn,” he told her. “Callan wasn’t wrong in allowing me to see the hell they put you through. I was wrong to stay away.”

She flinched. Suddenly, for a second, those images were more than just the images of a Breed being tortured. They were her. For a second, the protective shield she had placed between herself and the past slipped, and she was sucked into a rage, a horror, an overriding shame so deep, so agonizing, she had to turn her back on them to hold back a cry.

Just as quickly it was gone, but not before she heard the muttered curse and enraged growl that came from Callan’s throat. In the past, it had been his arms that had sheltered her when she felt broken; now, it was her mate’s arms. They wrapped around her, strengthened the control she was fighting for and returned the strength to her limbs. How had that happened? Those feelings, so intense, slicing away at her entire being? How had they slipped through?

“I’d die for you,” Seth whispered at her ear. “And so would he.”

She shook her head; she knew that. That painful realization was all that had kept her from breaking the day she learned Callan had betrayed her.

She straightened and turned back to Callan.

All the pent-up rage brewing inside her broke free. Years of knowledge, of hatred, of the aching pain that drove her to run until she felt as though she would drop. All the needs, the fears, the pain exploded in her brain until it was all she could do to hold on to the animal clawing at her emotions.

“All these years I thought there was one man’s eyes that I could stare into who hadn’t seen those horrible discs. One man who didn’t know how I begged to a God that didn’t care.” Callan’s eyes widened in shock as the throttled scream tore from her throat. “You let him see. You let him see me become an animal. You let him see how little we mattered in the eyes of the god that didn’t create us and damned sure didn’t adopt us. Damn you to hell, Callan. You had no right.”

And she couldn’t stand here and hurt like this. She couldn’t accept what he had done, not yet, maybe not ever. And the animalistic fury rising inside her couldn’t be given a chance to escape. Never again.

“Dawn, that’s enough.” Seth’s voice was steady, controlled, when she felt anything but controlled.

“Yeah, it is enough.” She jerked the door open and moved quickly from the room. She walked, she didn’t run—but everything inside her was screaming to run. To push herself, to put distance between herself and the pain.

“You will not turn your back on me like this.” Callan grabbed the sleeve of her uniform, pulled her around and stared down at her in snarling fury.

Angry, he was a dangerous sight to behold. His amber eyes glowed almost red; his lips had pulled back to reveal the fearsome canines, strong and sharp, as a feral snarl twisted his lips.

“Why not?” she hissed back. “You turned yours on me when you dared to betray me this way. When you showed another man what they did to me. Not just my mate, Callan, but anyone.” She was shaking, she could feel—something. Something worse than rage, something worse than betrayal, building inside her. “They raped me. They forced me to act like an animal and you let him see it. Hell, why not just send it to those fucking documentary bastards to use and then the world can see it too? Hell yeah, why not? Why fucking care at this point?”

She tore away from him and moved quickly down the hall. She needed to run. She needed to hunt. Those options were closed to her though. As she made her way back to Seth’s room, she knew she couldn’t leave the house. She couldn’t lose herself in the shadowed vegetation that ringed the island, because Seth would come looking for her. He would come looking for her, even though his life was in danger and an assassin was just waiting to get his sights on him.

CHAPTER 14

Seth caught Callan’s arm as the other man tensed to rush after Dawn. He had seen what he knew Callan didn’t want to face. The woman emerging inside her, the one fighting with the past and the child she tried to keep buried.

Quickly, Seth moved in front of Callan and ignored the powerful hand that latched on to his throat, the sharp canines that flashed in lethal warning.

“She’s not yours to protect now,” he told the other man softly, staring back at him in determination.

Callan wasn’t a man he wanted to fight, but he would. The Breeds were damned strong, they had been engineered for strength, for endurance, but Seth had found there were more than a few advantages to the mating heat hormone. In the past ten years, he too had grown stronger, his muscles more adaptable, gaining in strength and endurance.

A decade ago he would have been no match for the pride leader, now, he’d at least give him a hell of a fight.

“She’ll always be mine to protect,” Callan snarled, jerking his hand back as he cast a frustrated glance down the hall. “She’ll run now. She’ll try to hunt. Her senses are compromised and she’ll only end up hurt if that fucking assassin is out there.”

“She won’t leave the house, Callan.”

“And you know this how?”

“Because I’m her mate. She knows I’ll follow her. You hurt her, and she doesn’t understand why,” he told the other man. “I do. But you won’t make her accept it this way. Let her realize it on her own. You’re too much a part of her life for her to turn away from you permanently. Unless you push her.”

“Understand, do you?” Callan’s teeth snapped together furiously. “You’re just as fucking arrogant now as you were then, you cocky little bastard.”

“And you’re just as much the frustrated father trying to make up for things that were no fault of yours,” he shot back. “And now I know where Dawn got her smart-assed tendencies. She’s not a child, and I’m not the big bad seducer trying to break her heart. I’m the last person you have to protect her from.”

He didn’t give the Lion Breed a chance to answer but turned and moved quickly along the hallway, following his mate. The pride leader was stepping close to a line in the sand that Seth hadn’t even been aware existed. A line he had come perilously close to crossing only once before, ten years earlier the day Callan had accused him of attempting to buy Dawn.

Son-of-a-bitch Breeds had more pride and sheer balls than anyone Seth had ever met, and he was getting flat tired of their habit of poking their noses into his and Dawn’s lives.

Callan had let her suffer when Seth could have been there, when he could have tried to ease her pain, tried to be the mate she needed. His guilt and his fears for her had overcome everything else. And Seth understood why, but enough was enough.

He stalked to his bedroom, where he knew Dawn was waiting. She wouldn’t endanger his life, and she knew he would follow her. He would always follow her now, no matter where she went.

He stepped into the sitting room and watched as she flung her utility belt to the couch. He’d heard the comment Patience Foreman had made regarding Dawn’s clothes. He wondered how she would react to the deliveries being made in the morning. The clothes he had always dreamed of dressing her in. Silks and satins, the colors of the earth and of dawn.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” She turned back to him, her body vibrating with the anger and the hurt rolling through her.

Seth closed the door and locked it before crossing his arms and leaning back against it, remaining silent.

The dim light from the lamp he had left on earlier cast a soft shadow around her, but nothing could dim the fire glowing in her eyes.

“I mean it,” she snarled, and the little feminine hiss of fury had the effect of arousing him further rather than warning him off.