Hunger's Mate (18 page)

Jewel had stiffened at his touch, holding her body so rigidly still, cold waves emanating from her skin. He frowned, hopefully inwardly, at the reaction.

“Did you steal the diamonds?” Bas asked evenly.

“Yes. I did,” was her immediate reply.

The room grew silent. She did not continue with an explanation. Bas wanted one but he may have actually been shocked speechless, which wasn't his norm. Priya, who Ezra had learned always had a question, even had to blink a couple of times before finally sitting up straighter, about to speak.

Ezra beat them both to the punch.

“This isn't about a robbery. It's about some fake-ass cops barging in here and illegally detaining her. They took her to an abandoned station house and would have continued to hold her hostage there if we hadn't shown up,” he said.

The rest, the arrival of ADAM and what they'd had to do to get the thing down, he did not mention. Jewel had asked about it and he'd been saved from answering by the knock on the door. So he wasn't about to walk into that discussion at this moment and prayed like hell Bas didn't want to either.

“I need to know if I'm harboring a criminal,” Bas argued to Ezra. He didn't look at Jewel this time.

That was as Ezra wanted it. He wanted to be her shield, to stand in front of her the next time anyone tried to take a swipe at her. Even if that someone was one of his kind. What he didn't want was the stretching of his cat, the pressure from the animal within to stake an even clearer claim, to make it known that she belonged to him.

“You knew exactly who you were harboring when you let her stay here despite all that you found out about her. It's a little hypocritical to go back on that stance now, don't you think?” he replied vehemently.

Bas stood then, his six-foot-three-inch height unfolding, his gaze holding steady with Ezra's.

“The situation has changed,” he spoke, an edge to his voice.

Priya stood quickly, coming to stand just a few steps in front of her mate, her focus on Jewel.

“What he's saying is that Captain Crowe is obviously looking for you. After you were taken away last night I started thinking about why now and how they knew you were here after all this time. On a hunch I had the front desk print out the guest list for the last six months. It took a while to cross reference them, but Dyson and I finally got through all the names. One of them was under a company booking. A private investigation firm. We pulled the guy's ID and Syfon said he'd seen him at the resort hanging around the loading area the night before last.”

The night Ezra had watched her run from her car like someone had been chasing her. He couldn't hold back his rage; he cursed, fists clenching at his sides.

“I was out there. I should have picked up his scent. I should have known,” he spat.

“So someone was following me. I knew they were. I could tell,” Jewel said. “He always said he would find me. He told me I could never leave him. But I did.”

Priya stepped closer, reaching for Jewel's hand. Ezra thought she was going to pull away, the same way she had with him. She didn't. Apparently that reaction was reserved solely for him. His shoulders tingled with agitation, heat swirling at the base of his neck.

“He doesn't have a goddamned choice!” he barked. “He's not getting another shot at her. Not if I have anything to do with it.”

For a split second Bas's returning glare was quizzical, then it changed and a muscle ticked in the shifter's jaw. Bas didn't give a shit. He was pissed off as well. He'd had that bastard within arm's reach and he'd let him go. That was definitely not going to happen again.

“This is my resort,” Bas told him. “My territory. I will handle this situation, but first I will know the entire truth.”

“She's told you the truth! What else do you want her to say? Or do you want to hand her over to Crowe and his suspicious authorities?” Ezra had always been hot-blooded and quick-tempered. As he'd grown into a man he'd learned to temper his emotions, to act instead of react. The training he'd received from his grandfather and from the tribal leaders and soldiers they'd had the privilege to work with all across the world had been more than beneficial to him. He'd been sure to implement all the techniques he'd learned.

Until now. Until Jewel.

There was no breathing. No counting up or down from one hundred. No mental distractions he could employ at this moment. Nothing that would keep him from thinking of one thing and one thing only—keeping Jewel safe, even if she was an admitted diamond thief.

“Let's just take a breath and wrap our minds around what's actually going on here. Jewel ran from this man for a reason. She took something that didn't belong to her, but I'm guessing there's a good reason for that as well. We can stand here interrogating her, or we can look to the bigger picture. Who the hell is Captain Lawrence Crowe and how does he possess the power to pay off an entire police department, and is he really going to all these measures just to get some measly diamonds back?” Priya asked, looking from her mate to Ezra and then back to Bas again.

Jewel cleared her throat and added, “Just to be clear, it's four-point-five million dollars' worth of diamonds.”

 

Chapter 12

“Where is this ADAM now?” Rome asked via the speaker banked in the center of the long, glossy conference table.

They'd left Jewel's room after her comment about the diamonds because Bas had received a call notifying him that the Stateside Assembly Leader would be initiating the conference call twenty minutes earlier than had been planned. Bas wasn't happy about the change, but wisely kept his disagreements to himself as he moved quickly out of the room.

“Ezra, you come with me,” he'd ordered without looking back at the spot where Ezra had stood. After opening the door and entering the hallway, passing Syfon, he snapped, “She goes nowhere without me knowing.”

When Ezra heard the FL speak the words, he felt a burning anger centered in his chest. He kept his mouth shut and followed them into the elevator and down the hall, but not without thinking that this was not how things should be. Jewel was his responsibility, his to protect, to claim, to … His temples throbbed with the thought of what else this woman had come to be to him in such a short amount of time. His shoulders slumped slightly at the realization of what she could never be.

“He's being detained in the bunkers,” Bas replied.

Ezra sat in the first seat on the right side of the table, while across from him Jacques looked from the FL to the console at the center of the table. Paolo, Dyson, and the veterinarian, Tereza, sat in seats spread along the length of the table, all listening intently, most likely wondering how Rome was going to react to all that had happened last night.

“You don't know what it is but you're able to detain it?” Rome asked.

Bas looked to Tereza. “We were able to sedate it. We have a vet here to manage the high dosage to keep it stable.”

“And we know for sure this thing originated from the Comastaz Labs?”

“The flash drives Ezra obtained from the lab contained files that detailed studies of several prototypes. All under the name of the Genesis Project. All previous prototypes were abandoned and were never named. Except ADAM.” Bas finished giving the reports that he'd obtained from each of the shifters in this room.

“It's unlike anything we've ever seen before in the world, Rome. And even in the jungle,” he concluded.

Ezra stiffened at those words.

“You're telling me that we're dealing with some unknown creature, possibly developed from this government lab. And it appears to be like us.”

Ezra could just imagine the look on the Leader's face. He'd known Rome for years, knew his calm and steady demeanor on the outside covered a vicious cutthroat personality when provoked. He'd watched the shifter fight his mating to the First Female, Kalina, and stand by his best friends and Lead Enforcers, Nick and X, when their lives had spiraled out of control and their mates had been discovered.

The Leader would be sitting at the head of his cherry-wood conference table, similar in length and style to this one in Perryville. Standing on either side of him would be Nick and X. His twin, Eli, would be standing close to Rome. The First Female would be sitting next to her mate; Jax, her personal guard, in a seat closest to her. All faces would be grim, all cats lurking close to the surface, ready for battle. Similar to the way it was here.

“With all due respect, Assembly Leader,” Dyson began, stopping briefly to clear his throat and look to Bas for approval to continue. He continued once receiving the go-ahead nod. “Not only does ADAM look like us, his DNA is pretty similar to ours.”

“Who are you and how do you know this?” Rome inquired.

“I'm, ah, I'm Dyson More, sir. I work for the FL as a programmer and analyst. Ezra sent me some files from the lab that he couldn't get into. I was able to hack into those files last night, or more like early this morning.”

Dyson sat up straighter, flipping open a file he had in front of him. He looked down at the papers he had neatly stacked in a file folder, shaking his head as he continued to speak. “It looks like they've been running elaborate tests on a DNA sample. After seeing that thing last night I figured it had to be connected to us somehow so I used X's shifter database, looking at all the rogue files that have been compiled. I ran a comparison sketch and after going through several filters was able to isolate two possible matches.”

Ezra had been staring intently at the young shifter as he'd been talking. All of this information was new to him, even though he'd exchanged several texts with the kid for a couple of hours after Jewel had fallen asleep last night.

“It's either a
Lormenia
or a
Serfin.
Genetic markers definitely indicate the Sierra Leone region. The
Lormenia
and
Serfins
are the only ones with these strands.”

“You're saying this thing is a Shadow Shifter?” Jacques asked.

Through the speaker, low curses and even a couple of growls could be heard.

Dyson shook his head. “There are some gaps, but yeah, I'm saying that this ADAM thing has a lot of Shadow Shifter in it. I'm not a scientist so I can't really pinpoint every marker, but it has an awful lot of shifter combined with its DNA. Which, ah, kind of means…” Dyson's voice trailed off.

Tereza sat up, a long braid curling around her right shoulder. “It means we've got a hybrid being out there with a couple of pretty deadly cat traits mixed inside. And from what I'm guessing Dyson hasn't figured out yet, there might be more.”

That brought complete silence and a heated glare from Dyson to Tereza that Ezra recognized but decided to ignore.

“Hybrids and unknown ailments,” Rome said quietly. A curse followed and everyone in the Perryville conference room raised their brow.

Roman Reynolds did not get angry easily, but when he did …

“I want your top scientist on this. Find out what the hell this is and where it came from, then kill it!” the Leader said vehemently. “We just found out Shya's going to need more intensive treatment. Nick and Ary and Dr. Papplin are with her now but we have to figure out what's going to be the next step. I need you to get a handle on this, Bas, and quick!”

The Leader seemed ready to say something else but there was a sound so loud Ezra's ears instantly began to ring, and everything around them shook, the lights blinking on and off, then on again. Bas stood immediately, gathering Priya up from her seat. Paolo had stood also, his hand to the gun at his hip, while Jacques had been jolted but not thrown completely from his seat. The Enforcer quickly stood and was headed for the door.

“South wing.” Jacques turned to Paolo.

Paolo nodded, pulling his gun free. “I'm on it.”

“Get the entire blue team down there. Call Syfon and tell him I need Jewel on the floor in the main lobby to deal with the guests,” Bas instructed, walking toward the door, his arm tight around Priya.

“No!” Ezra immediately replied.

“It's her job,” Bas said over his shoulder. “Regardless of what reason she has for being here, she has a job to do.”

“She's not the manager of this resort, he is,” Ezra continued, pointing to Jacques.

He circled around the table and was headed to the door, pushing past Bas and Priya, when there was another rumble. Smaller than the first but powerful enough to knock the landscape pictures from the wall, cracking the glass on the long stretch of windows.

“I'm going to get Jewel,” Ezra told Bas after the movement around them had ceased. “You want to stop me, shoot me.”

*   *   *

“I'll be there this evening. If you could please make sure he's ready to go,” Jewel said into her cell phone.

On her bed, her two suitcases were packed. Moving to her dresser she picked up her clutch purse, unzipping it to check the passports she'd put in there only moments before. She had to make sure she didn't forget anything. There was no coming back.

There were no sad feelings, she would not feel homesickness once she was gone and settled in their new place. Emotions like that had no purpose in the life she knew she'd need to lead from here on out. Those weren't officers who had taken her away last night; she'd realized that the moment they entered the empty police station. She hadn't been booked or read her rights, nothing, simply shoved into that cell. Minutes later that big bulky guy had walked past. He walked back and forth a number of times. She figured he was guarding her, making sure she didn't leave until Larry came. So she didn't look at him anymore, didn't keep track of how many times he passed the cell.

Then all hell had seemed to break loose and she was once again free. Now, she thought, after closing the clutch and leaning over to pick up her Land's End backpack that had been stuffed with more clothes, her toiletries, and the diamonds, she would make sure she and her father remained free for the rest of their lives.