“Parlez-vous français?”
Daphne swore again and rested her forehead against the barrier, her shoulders slumped.
“Such a mouth you have, ma cherie.” Such a mouth indeed.
Her head snapped up and a fierce sound rumbled from her. “I see you like to play with your food, but I’m in no mood for games. Why did you infect her?”
Konstantin was proud of her ferocity. She was a worthy mate. “Would you believe me if I told you the truth?”
He watched as a change fell over her, almost as if a magic wand had wiped away her hostility, and her eyes were suddenly clear and open. Just like her mind. She would listen.
“I can’t know if it’s the truth or not. Only you can.”
“You can read the data in front of you and the data your machines collect about my heart rate, respiration, body language, micro-expressions.”
“I will.”
“She was already infected.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Beasts don’t lie.”
“Yes, they do. There was an article in the Journal of—” She cut herself off and shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to argue biology or animal behavior.”
“Okay, I don’t lie. Not to you.”
Incredulity stained her features. “You think I haven’t heard these lines before? I work with death row inmates who all have a reason to sweet-talk me. Who all want me to think I’m special, that we have some kind of connection.” She rolled her eyes.
“We do. You’re mine. I’m yours. You said it. It is so.”
“People say things—”
“People,” he interrupted her. “Of which I am not, and neither are you. There is a wolf under your skin, lovely Daphne.”
She jerked away from the glass. “No.”
Konstantin didn’t like the taste of her fear. She wasn’t ready. “As you say.”
“If you ever say that to me again, I’ll close the wall and I will never open it again. Do you understand me?”
The part of him that wanted to court her gently was quickly silenced by his new role as species Adam—his title by genetic right as the first of his kind, he was the Alpha of all Alphas for this new race.
“You mistake me, my love. I’m here because I choose to be.”
“Prove it.”
He let his gaze linger until she fidgeted under the weight of it. “Do you really think you’re ready for me to be on that side of the glass with you, my Daphne?” He cocked his head to the side and studied her hard. “Say the word and I’ll tear this place down for you brick by brick.”
She feared it, but her pheromones spiked. She liked his ferocity.
Daphne swallowed and licked her lips. Her pulse fluttered against her throat like hummingbird wings. “If you can, why don’t you?”
“Because I want you to find a cure. For them.” He nodded to the significantly smaller group of infected. Those who had died a true death were devoured during the night. “The antibodies are in my DNA.”
“All this is well and good, but you still scratched Bethany with the intent to change her, and now she’s one of those things.”
“She’s not. That’s why I scratched her. She reeked of infection.” His lip curled with disgust.
“The bio suits—”
“Are worthless. They didn’t attack her because the origin of her infection was the same as mine.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Nor will you until you turn the cameras off.”
“I can’t do that.” Her shoulders slumped.
“Then I can’t tell you my story, Daphne. Your government would use this knowledge to weaponize the virus. I can’t let that happen.”
“No, we’re looking for a cure!”
So heated, so passionate. But somehow still so innocent. “Don’t be naive.”
Trust in me.
“You agreed!” She jerked away.
You told me I couldn’t pleasure you, not that I couldn’t speak with you. Are you afraid they’ll see our connection and dump you in here with us, the same as you did to Bethany when you saw she was infected?
“Playing with your food again?” she growled. “You don’t need me to turn the cameras off to communicate.”
He didn’t speak; all he did was watch her.
“You should know that if the cameras stop recording, there’ll be an F-16 here in five minutes to drop a payload that will destroy anything in a twenty-mile radius.”
“Good to know. I can run faster than that carrying both you and Bethany.”
“So much talk and no action. I believe nothing you say, dog.” Her face was like stone.
“Believe this.” Konstantin flooded her with his desire. It was a gift for mates to feel each other’s bliss, but he’d had enough of being called a dog.
Only, he gave her more than his pleasure. He gave her his pain, too.
Memories erupted that were poisonous and black, filling her mind’s eye with images he didn’t want in his own head, let alone in hers.
“Dog!” They snarled as they kicked him, stabbed him with silver pins. “Beast! Devil!” As they’d dragged him and his mother, his father and his brother out into the freezing darkness toward four pyres. But dog was what seemed to stick. They’d chanted it, some sick spell as his mother was violated, then burned as a witch for trafficking with the devil to change her skin.
“I didn’t know,” she whispered. Daphne put her shaking hand back to the glass. “I didn’t...” The flood continued to crash over her, and no matter what he did, he couldn’t pull it back.
Because that wasn’t the worst—that wasn’t the most horrible. What he didn’t want her to know was that when they had searched the cellar, the townspeople had found what they’d been looking for. Henri La Croix was the legendary Beast of Gevaudan—the horror from which most mortal werewolf lore sprang. The animal that slaughtered women and children walked among them as a man.
The Aeternali had taken him, exorcised the madness from his blood in ways more horrible than even the Inquisition could imagine.
They had called him “dog.”
And yet, he did not want her to feel this. He would suffer the Aeternali a million times over if it would keep her from experiencing it for even one second. He’d failed as a protector. This was his punishment for using their connection against her. Perhaps his father’s madness was still in his blood, after all.
Konstantin tried to close the connection, but she fought him, opening herself to all of his memories. “Let go, Daphne.”
“No.”
“Now,” he growled, his beast angry.
“I said no.” She stood her ground, devouring everything that poured out of him.
The memories combined with his failure and her pain were all too much, and the beast exploded from his skin—one minute he was a man, the next he was a predator that could crush her between his jaws. Her fear was fetid and tasted of death. She didn’t look at him, and she shook with terror, but she refused to back down.
With his animal brain in the forefront, he didn’t communicate the same way. Their link should have been broken, but it wasn’t. She was there, inside his head with the animal, and he couldn’t protect her.
The animal didn’t want the cure, didn’t care about the cure, only wanted to taste his mate—run with her beneath clear skies and mount her on soft summer grasses. Drill into her until her cries shattered the moon.
Tasting her—yes. That sweet salt of her on his long tongue, the give of tender flesh beneath his teeth as he released the wolf that lived under her delicate skin with his bite.
“Please don’t,” she whispered.
The beast was drunk on the scent of her, the intimacy of being inside her head. Konstantin fought for mastery and regained his human shape.
He didn’t want her to be afraid of him, but Konstantin was afraid of himself.
“Daphne,” he said softly.
The movement of her head as she turned to lo
ok up at him was like a glacier, slow and infinitesimal. He turned the topic of conversation back to what was safe, back to the pleasure he could bring her, rather than the things in the dark. “Before the Beast of Gevaudan, there was a Greek island where fathers would offer up their firstborn daughters to appease the appetites of the beasts.”
“You’re just trying to scare me now.” Her voice was hoarse, choked.
“Ah, no. The daughters would vie for the right to be offered in a pageant where they would paint their faces with the most expensive cosmetics, drape themselves in the finest silks and offer up their families’ best livestock.”
“For what purpose?” She still hadn’t looked back up at him. “To save their villages?”
He needed her to see him; he needed her not to be afraid. The beast wanted to protect her—it didn’t understand she was afraid of him. “The livestock was for one appetite and the women for another.”
“You can’t be serious.” Daphne’s head tilted the rest of the way at his implication and she looked at him, relief at his human form stark in her eyes.
“The maidens all wanted to know what it was like to be ridden by a wolf-man. The depraved pleasures of a long tongue, the regenerative powers of a supernatural being with a god-sized phallus.”
“You’re not god-sized.” She flushed and swallowed hard. The tension seemed to have broken until her eyes teared. “But you scare the hell out of me. I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t—What happened to you—” She floundered. “You’re terrifying. Especially now. Before you were just an animal, but you’re an animal that thinks like a man. All teeth and claws with a man’s cunning. You say we have this connection, that I’ve got this thing like you inside me. I don’t want it. None of this. The memories are too much. Make them stop.”
Her plea broke something in him. Konstantin meant what he said—that he’d tear the building down brick by brick to please her. He could do no less than what she asked, even though her words sliced him through deeper than any piece of silver could go.
Just an animal.
I don’t want it.
Make it stop.
He was so befouled—the blood-sick whelp of La Croix—that even his mate didn’t want him. Konstantin should have realized this would happen when he’d claimed her. There would be no mate for him.
“If I can. You said I was yours, Daphne. Among my kind, those words are a covenant that even an Alpha cannot break.” The beast raged that he would even speak such a thing, let alone consider giving her up. Konstantin was more than his animal; he was a man who valued his woman’s needs above his own.
She closed her eyes again. It seemed like she used the action as a shield. “What do I do with that?”
“I said I wouldn’t lie to you.”
“Comforting.” She snorted, an inelegant sound.
“Do you want comfort, or do you want the truth?”
“Truth,” Daphne said easily.
“The truth is your specimens are dying and you’re running out of time. Your lab has samples of my DNA. Start there.” He turned away.
“I would’ve already been working with it if we had it.”
“Are you sure about that, Dr. Panetta?” He threw one last look over his shoulder before his animal form claimed him again.
Chapter Three
Daphne swiped her ID card and accessed the lab.
Drained emotionally and physically, Daphne wanted nothing more than to collapse on the cot in her quarters and sleep for the next two days.
But there would be no rest for her until she figured out how to break the connection she had with Konstantin Gevaudan.
She dreamed of him, even with her eyes open. The things he said, the things he wanted from her—on some level part of her wanted them, too.
His words conjured such pictures of the Greek island, the pageant. It had been easy to see herself painted and perfumed, waiting for him to claim her. To be ridden by a wolf-man, was what he’d said. He could have used much rougher language, but somehow this was more devastating, burrowed deeper into her imagination.
Not only was it wrong to want him because of what he was, but because he was in her care as a doctor. It was illegal, and unethical.
But so were a lot of things that went on here. The land here had been declared an Aeternali embassy to get around the law.
She couldn’t get the images of the things he’d endured out of her head either. And, somehow, the look on his face when she’d begged him to make it stop was even more awful.
You are weak and unworthy of him anyway. The thought came unbidden—foreign. It was her voice, and yet it was not.
As a scientist, she should have been thrilled at the discovery of new species, new worlds. She should have wanted to explore and investigate. Instead, she wanted to cower behind a locked door and never face the idea that the things she’d imagined in the dark were real.
Her world was built on the foundations of logic, facts and illumination. Daphne had taken this all in stride until she’d spoken with him. How stupid was it that he’d been able to bring her to orgasm without a word, but what drove home this new reality was nothing more than a conversation?
She shook her head, trying to clear away her thoughts. Daphne had to focus on the cure first.
So caught up in her own thoughts, she didn’t notice the project head at the workstation. Until she saw him inject something into his arm.
His head snapped up, his bright blue eyes focused on her, and for a second, she was anchored to the spot by a predator’s hungry stare. Except he smiled, the kindly expression she’d come to expect from him.
She exhaled heavily. “You startled me, Dr. Gerard.” Konstantin had her seeing darkness everywhere.
“You? I was just taking my insulin. Almost broke the needle off in my arm.” He laughed. “It’s much too easy for our kind to get used to the solitude here.”
His phrasing triggered something in her awareness. It was so similar to the way Konstantin spoke. Our kind. She studied him without the constraints of polite, human society. Normal, instinctual behavior would be avoidance, but she was suddenly under the impression that this wasn’t polite, human society.
“Something wrong?” he asked, cocking his head to the side.
That’s when it hit her full force. Dr. Ian looked much like the subject she’d just left behind. He was a smaller, more compact, more human version of Konstantin. The similarities were so stark, how had she not seen it the second Konstantin showed her his human face? Dr. Ian never came to the observatory.
“Ah, just seeing it now, are you?” he said gently.
She backed up a step. “Who is he to you?”
“There’s no reason for that,” he said just as thoughts of flight filled her brain.
“Oh, God.” Daphne backed up another step.
“Daphne. You’re a woman of science and reason. We’ve been colleagues for a long time and, I thought, friends. Won’t you let me explain?”
She wanted to run, and visions from every bad horror movie she’d ever seen whirred to life on a clicking reel. She could see herself running down the empty halls, a beast on her heels, claws scraping...
Stop it. The voice thundered through her awareness like a gong. “I’m sorry, you have to admit this is all a little startling.” Daphne hated the tremor in her voice.
“I’m sure it is. Imagine now growing up in this world, but not being a part of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“My name isn’t Ian Gerard. It’s Ian Gevaudan. I have the same longevity as my brother, but I don’t share his illness. I don’t change my skins. What he has is a sickness. After the outbreak of the virus, he was infected again, but I think the cure for both conditions is in his blood.”
“So you just brought him here? Condemned him to live in a cage?”
“Better that than out in the world. I was in the Czech Republic when whole villages were infected. He did his best to protect the humans, but they swarmed him. It was the
only way to save him.”
He played the good brother part very well, but something about his story didn’t ring true.
“Your father—”
“Was a madman who killed women and children.”
How had he known what she was going to ask?
“Do you have access to more infected subjects?”
“Why? Has he killed them all?” His eyes narrowed.
“No.” It only took her a millisecond to decide to keep the specifics of Konstantin’s behavior to herself. “They’re consuming each other.”
He nodded. “Maybe it’s time I took a look. I’m very interested to see my brother’s dynamic with you in person, Daphne.”
She refused to acknowledge the dual meaning of his words—that he’d been watching her in the observatory. That he knew every private moment. Of course they weren’t private. The cameras were always on. Of course he’d watched them. What the hell had she been thinking?
Daphne wasn’t ready to face him again so soon, and she certainly didn’t want to do it in Ian’s presence. “Maybe you can help me with something first? Did we get blood samples at intake?”
“We did, but we’ve used them all for various vaccines. Maybe you’ll convince him to give us more?”
She nodded, and allowed him to lead her back toward the terrarium, unable to shake the dread that plagued her. Daphne kept thinking about that needle in his arm. It was much too big to be an insulin shot.
The lights flickered off, but then blazed back to life as the generators kicked in. “What’s that?”
“My guess would be Bethany’s fiancé. Looks like he’s pissed, and rightly so.” Ian still wore that kindly smile.
“Beth’s fiancé is an accountant,” she said. What would an accountant have to do with the fluctuating power source at a secret government research lab? Further, how had he gained access? Dread dropped like a brick in her belly.
“No, he’s not an accountant. He’s a Gypsy prince who’s going to destroy the facility.” His tone of voice and expression never changed.
He was a sociopath.
“Does he know what’s going to happen if he shuts down the power?” She meant the F-16 with the containment payload.
“I think he’s hoping for it.” He patted her arm. “But don’t worry, we’ll be safe. The Aeternali were expecting him. Troops are already outside preparing for war.” Ian held the door for her to enter into the observatory bubble.
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