Stygian's Honor (28 page)

Stygian was silent as he rose from the bed, moved to the bathroom and soaked a cloth in heated water before moving back to the bed to clean the proof of his release from Liza’s thighs.

She lay exhausted, nearly asleep, and only a mumbled protest left her lips as he parted her thighs and wiped the slick essence mixed with her virgin’s blood from the soft folds of her sex and her inner thighs.

His virgin mate. She had met him with a hunger and a need he could never have expected from such innocence. She had taken him, held him in a grip that had rippled over his cock and tightened around the mating knot as though she had been made for him and him alone.

Now, as she lay more asleep than awake, he could feel something more as well. The part of her that hid so deep, refusing to completely emerge, but awakening.

The animal inside him was pacing restlessly now at the hint of suspicion rising inside him.

No, it had been there all along, he realized. Just waiting for this moment, for the proof that somewhere, someone had been deceiving not just the Breeds, but also Liza.

Finishing, he returned to the bathroom, proceeded to clean himself then returned to the bed and his mate, where it
seemed she had struggled to make her way beneath the heavy quilt.

His lips quirked into an amused smile. She’d managed to pull the blanket over her shoulders, but nothing more.

“Come on, sugar.” Lifting her into his arms, he pulled the blanket, quilt and sheet back from the bed before laying her in the middle of the mattress.

Moving in beside her, he felt his chest clench as she curled herself into a little ball, and her sudden sense of uncertainty reached him.

He pulled the sheet over them both before pulling her against him.

“Do you think I’ll allow you to sleep in isolation now?” he asked as she lay stiffly beside him. “Come on, Liza, I know you need warmth. Come to me and I’ll warm you.”

She turned slowly. “So I lie against you or I can stay cold?” A hint of gray eyes showed between narrowed lashes.

“Would you prefer the quilts?” he asked as he ran his hand caressingly along her spine. “I’ll keep you much warmer.”

“I have an electric quilt, Stygian,” she told him, but she didn’t move away from him.

“You’ll need it no longer,” he promised, relishing the feel of her silken back against the palm of his hand.

At the same time, he felt her hand, so soft he was amazed at the living warmth of it, in a fleeting caress against his chest before it stilled.

“Did I hurt you?” she asked then, her fingertips glancing across the vicious bite she’d bestowed to his chest.

It wasn’t even throbbing. The bite was deep, yet there was no blood, no ache of muscle, as though the mating heat had been transferred to her saliva as well and bestowed on the wound to ensure it caused no true pain, just that slight, “it was there” ache.

The feel of that sensation was one he wouldn’t change.

“It would take a much harder bite to cause me to complain,” he assured her as he brushed his cheek against her forehead. “And the feel of it will remind me of the pleasure I gave you.”

She was silent then, but he could feel her thinking, feel the frown that creased her forehead before she tilted her head back once again to stare up at him in the dim light.

It wasn’t dark yet, though it was close. The heavy curtains were pulled over the windows, and the darkening feature on the newly installed security windows had been activated.

“English isn’t your first language, is it?” She surprised him with the question.

“I have no first language, actually,” he told her. “My training involved three language studies—English, Spanish and Russian—which began at birth and continued through my training.”

“Why Russian?” The curiosity in her tone was a far cry from the nosiness of most who questioned him whenever they had a chance.

“They believed it would be the one I picked up easiest, as my paternal and animal DNA came from Russia.”

“Really?” Drowsy interest filled her voice. “Where did your paternal genetics actually come from?”

Stygian grinned. “Attila the Hun. Straight from the source. When his burial site was found, they recovered enough DNA to actually track his descendents. They used some of that DNA to create my genetics.”

“Attila the Hun?” Surprise filled her voice now. “Damn. I think I’m impressed now.” She was actually laughing at him, and he couldn’t help but grin.

“And your maternal genetics?” she queried then, her tone suggestive, teasing. “This one has got to be good.”

No doubt she already knew, or had at least read the partial history that could have been attained if certain records had been hacked.

Moving the pillows more comfortably behind him, he lifted her against his chest until she sat comfortably against him, the sheet and quilt pulled to her breasts now.

“Her name was Nera,” he answered. “The Genetics Council chose her for her ties to one of the greatest voodoo priestesses to have been born in the Caribbean, and she was rumored to have been quite powerful herself. They kept her
twenty years but only managed to impregnate her twice. Just after her daughter was born, she disappeared from her cells and was never seen again.”

“She escaped then?” Surprise colored her voice.

Stygian glanced down at her, his lips lifting in a slight grin. “Who the hell knows. One minute she was showing up on their monitors and in the next breath she was nowhere to be found in her cell. Her infant daughter, barely six weeks old, disappeared as well. They spent years searching for them, but each time a team was sent to the area where she had originally been abducted from, every soldier and Breed sent after her disappeared.”

Damn, he was proud of her. However she had managed to escape, she’d done a damned good job of it.

“Where was she abducted from?”

“She was born in Haiti, but raised in the Jamaican rain forests. She was seventeen when she was abducted because of her rumored genetic ties to both an ancient priest and priestess of the religion. But rumors at the labs say she was so powerful herself that she nearly walked out of the labs with me when I was an infant. After that, she was isolated with limited contact while they continued to attempt to impregnate her. It took twenty years before she conceived again. Each time she was impregnated with an embryo that wasn’t from her eggs, her body immediately rejected it. Finally, they once again tried using her ova. She conceived a girl, gave birth and six weeks later just disappeared.”

“Did you ever search for her?” Liza asked then, a hint of forlorn melancholy in her voice now.

“Once,” he admitted. “I spent nearly two months in one of the darkest jungles I swear I ever entered. One night, I awoke to find myself surrounded by six of the biggest, baddest-looking jungle warriors I swear a man or Breed could encounter. The biggest moved to the fire I’d made before sleeping, sat down and proceeded to explain the threat I represented to Nera and her daughter. And despite her fondness for me, and her concern, she couldn’t allow me to venture farther. Then, four dead Coyote soldiers were tossed into the camp from the darkness. Their throats were
slit; I hadn’t even known they were following me. I left the next morning and left her in peace.”

“How sad.” Regret for him filled her, and Stygian realized he’d never sensed sympathy or an understanding of his loss from anyone else in his life.

“Not so sad,” he told her, realizing that himself. “I found my own peace. She and my sister are alive and protected. That was what mattered to me.”

“You didn’t feel that her daughter was more important than her son?” She lifted against him, the outrage suddenly pouring from her touching him in ways he had no idea how to express.

“I was a grown man,” he pointed out. “I was twenty when she and my sister left the labs. The child would barely have been ten by then. Her safety was more important.”

“To have to choose to let a child go must have been heartbreaking.” There was the slightest edge of an emotion in her voice that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

“I was a grown man,” he repeated. “I understood her choice.”

“And she never contacted you after that?”

He let his gaze rove over her, taking in the sheet that barely covered her breasts, the long, dark blond hair that fell around her face and shoulders, a few heavy strands falling over her breasts, before he answered with a small smile. “No. And I didn’t expect her to.”

He could feel her sadness reaching him. It wasn’t pity, something he wouldn’t have tolerated; rather, it was a sincere sorrow that such a choice had been demanded.

“I’ve watched all the documentaries on the Breeds,” she said softly. “The scientists and soldiers were monsters in their treatment. To take something so essential as parents and family and make a crime of wanting or needing them was inhumane.”

“That was the point,” he reminded her. “We were led to believe we weren’t human, Liza. That emotions, family, love, they were all things we had no capacity to feel, let alone ache for or hunger for. As though they could force us
to be as unemotional and uncaring as the robots they wanted us to be.”

It was no longer enraging.

At one time, talk of those dark, horrifying years would have led him quickly down a path of rage that would inevitably lead to snarling fury.

To allow such emotions to rip through him now would mean releasing the hold he had on the gentle warmth that filled his arms at the moment. It simply wasn’t worth it. They were now days long gone, and if the Breeds were diligent, if Stygian was extremely careful, then they were days he would never be forced to repeat.

“I remember watching the video cast when Callan Lyons revealed the existence of the Breeds,” Liza said then. “It was as though the world was holding its breath, certain it had to be some horrible farce. That there was no way humans could be so
in
human. That such monsters could exist. Only to learn it was much worse than we had ever imagined.”

“Worse, yes,” he agreed as he let his fingers thread into the heavy length of her hair. “But freedom was much sweeter, the realizations of the gifts that were actually given became more cherished. I would not trade who and what I am, because in doing so, I would have missed this night, and I would have missed loving you.”

She was retreating.

Stygian felt it with a sense of shock.

Her reaction was so swift, so instantaneous he nearly missed that critical point in pulling her back.

A snarl pulled at his lips as his hand wrapped around her neck, jerking her to him with a swiftness that had that internal attempt to disappear from him emotionally pausing.

“You will not,” he snarled, his lips nearly touching hers, his gaze holding hers, shock filling it as her lips parted on a gasp. “You will not go away from me in such a way, Liza. Never again. Do you understand me?”

“Don’t.” Her fingers curled against his chest, as though she could force him to release her with such a paltry resistance. “Let me go.”

“Little coward,” he bit out, feeling the strike of her anger as it began to burn inside her mind. “You run and hide like a child, terrified of the responsibility of being an adult. Have I mated a woman or a child in a woman’s body?”

“You didn’t even warn me of what was coming,” she accused him roughly. “I didn’t accept this.”

“The hell you didn’t.” His laughter was rough, bitter. “You knew, Liza. Deny it all you wish. You watched Isabelle and Malachi for weeks, you knew there was more than just the love you could see in their expressions for each other. Such a deep, fierce emotion is more than humans experience without something paranormal fueling it. Admit it: You knew. And I told you before I brought you to this bed that you were my mate. That mating heat bound us.”

She tried to shake her head, to jerk from the grip of his fingers around the back of her neck.

“Lie to my face,” he growled. “Go ahead, mate. Say the fucking words, I dare you.”

“Stop pushing me!” The cry was torn from her heart. “You didn’t tell me you loved me.”

Stygian felt her pain, felt something tearing at her, some knowledge rising inside her that terrified her. That terrified him. God above knew what he suspected it was. Such fear was more than simply a woman’s fear of the unknown, of a broken heart, or a male whose dominance was unlike any she had known before.

No, this fear was pure self-defense.

“I won’t let you go.” Nipping at her lips, he lifted her to him, one hand jerking the sheet from her body, leaving her lying against his chest, naked and warm and filled with such emotion that he swore his heart would break from her pain. “You knew where this was going. Did you think nature and God would have bound us so tightly together without love being at the core of those bonds?”

“Stop this, Stygian,” she tried to demand, but he had heard enough.

Lowering his head, he caught her lips in a kiss that he feared would steal the soul from his body.

The glands beneath his tongue were pounding with a
sudden infusion of hormones. The spicy taste that filled his mouth was richer, more heated than before, the hormone strengthening in response to her denial of him, her denial of the mating that had already been established.

The animal genetics that drove him would never allow him to walk away, nor would it allow her to retreat.

His tongue pushed past her lips, stroked against hers and gave her the taste of pure lust. An ambrosia created to bind the perfect heart to his Breed soul.

And she was his perfect heart. His mate.

Holding her to him with one hand wrapped around her neck, his free hand stroked the curve of her breasts, the backs of them stroking over the swollen mound as she suddenly moaned, spread her fingers against his chest and let her little nails bite into his flesh.

As his tongue retreated, hers followed. It licked over his, drew it back to the warmth of her mouth, then drew a savage groan from his chest as she gripped it with her lips and suckled at the taste with delicate greed.

His cock jerked to attention, thick and furiously hard. The feel of her sucking mouth about his tongue struck at the hunger rising inside him.