“At this point, we’re willing to try anything,” he admitted. “The few codes we’ve managed to break lead us to believe it’s possible. It’s very possible.”
Liza had a photographic memory. She could watch certain moves, not so much dancing, which had interested her as a young girl, but in fighting, it was as though her brain could telegraph the moves from her sight to her actions.
And Claire, oh God help them, Claire could figure out a puzzle in seconds. Jigsaw puzzles, even the most difficult, were child’s play for her.
She could feel herself trembling, shaking from the inside out.
Shaking her head, she looked up at him, uncertain, forcing back the fear. She had to force it back to be able to think, to make sense of everything.
“I can’t be either of them,” she whispered. “How could I be, Stygian? It’s not possible.”
But it was possible. It was possible enough that dreams, nightmares and memories that weren’t exactly memories, that weren’t exactly clear, came together in her mind.
Lifting his hand again, he brushed the backs of his fingers over her cheek as he watched her with a quiet confidence she would do anything to be able to attain.
“I read an article before the rescues,” he said then. “Rumors of Breed creation had begun leaking, and some enterprising young reporter had written of the possibility. He stated unequivocally that the manipulation of human and animal genetics could never result in a living, breathing, intelligent being. Some things he stated seemed highly possible, but when in practical application, highly impossible. And I had to smile, because it was that very creature he had deemed impossible who was reading the article.”
“A deep-level core genetic test could reveal the truth,” she whispered. “The Clean Slate DNA manipulation can’t get past that.”
“Proving the truth won’t reveal the secrets,” he stated then. “And it’s the secrets Jonas needs to save Amber.”
It was the secrets they needed.
She stared back at him, seeing the long, ribbon-straight, soft strands of midnight black hair as they trailed around his strong face, the muscular column of his neck, the broad, broad shoulders and powerful chest. He was savagely handsome, and staring back at her with an intensity that made her feel as though she were the only woman in the world.
To him, she was the only woman in the world, she thought, astounded. Yet, she wondered how she could be so surprised.
She had waited for him.
She had waited for him to touch her, to bring her to life, to awaken her.
“We’ll go to the desert at daylight,” he told her then. “Just you and I, with Dog’s team watching over us. We’ll go to the crash site before going to the area where the sweat lodge was erected. Let’s go back, Liza. Let’s see if we can find anything you may have lost.”
“What if I don’t come back, Stygian?” Her lips trembled as tears darkened her soft gray eyes. Did she fear she would get sucked back into some never-ending reality where she could only watch the world go by, rather than experiencing it?
“I won’t let you go.” Tightening his fingers in her hair, he pulled her head back, staring through the darkness to the glitter of her gaze. “Never, Liza. You will never again be on the outside looking in. You’ll always be a part of me, and I’ll never let you go.”
She didn’t speak. As he loosened his grip on her hair, she laid her head on his chest again and, he knew, stared into the darkness.
“I couldn’t feel anything when I was there,” she said softly. “No remorse, no love or hate. No fear.”
“And now?” God, she was killing him. The emotions building inside her were like a blow to his heart.
If only he had been here to save her, to pull her from the darkness she’d been held in for so long.
“Now, I feel too much,” she said faintly. “I don’t know what I’m feeling, and I don’t know how to handle what I am feeling. I just wish, when I was younger, that I had known how to hold on to myself rather than allowing myself to fade.”
He would have held her to him, just as he was holding her now, until she was old enough to be his reality.
Or, would he have held the wrong girl, and eventually, the wrong woman?
The question raged in his mind as she fell silent and eventually fell asleep against his chest.
That wreck; everything had changed the night Claire Martinez had taken her father’s sports car, Liza with her, flying over a canyon and somehow missing the other side.
The two girls hadn’t been found for hours, and when they had been located, their fathers hadn’t called the EMS immediately. Instead, they had called together the chiefs of the Six Tribes, the medicine men of the Nation. Only after they had treated the girls had an ambulance been called and they had been taken to the hospital.
The accident report had been accessed by Diane Broen before she had arrived in Window Rock. Her suspicious nature had read something into those events that even the Breeds had been unable to decipher. Something even Stygian had been unable to figure out.
According to the blood tests and surface-level genetic testing, Liza wasn’t Honor Roberts. Her DNA was different, but the DNA used for those tests had been collected before the experiments conducted in the Brandenmore labs. The blood and tissue samples were those collected when she was a young girl, hospitalized for the wasting disease that had slowly been killing her.
Had a full-level DNA analysis been done? One that went to the very center of the genome, such as those done to detect recessive Breed genetics? After all, the serum used on the two girls had been derived from Breed hormones, while that used on the Breeds had been derived from both Breed and human hormones.
Barring that, had their DNA been compared to their parents’?
As he felt her slip into sleep, Stygian found his mind racing. There were too many questions, and far too many mysteries surrounding his mate and her friend Claire Martinez.
The fact, though, was that there was no evidence to even raise suspicion that Liza and Claire weren’t exactly who they claimed to be. Nothing but the fact that since they were children, no blood, tissue or saliva samples had been taken from either girl, even during their stay in the hospital after the wreck.
From the moment they left the hospital, their personalities had been different. Their looks had been altered from the plastic surgeries needed, supposedly because of damage caused from the vehicle crashing into the canyon.
The fact that no blood and tissue samples had been taken then was highly suspicious and riding the cusp of being illegal.
There were Diane Broen’s suspicions, there were Jonas’s suspicions and his own, but that wasn’t proof. There was no proof at all that she was anyone other than who she was supposed to be.
As he glared at the ceiling, he heard the faint hum of his sat-phone, which he’d set on the bedside table. Glancing over, the text message had him closing his eyes briefly.
Five minutes. Connecting suite.
The message was from Jonas.
Fuck, he didn’t need this.
Dealing with Jonas wasn’t something he wanted to do tonight, not while his own emotions were in such turmoil. Not while he was still trying to process the fact that his mate likely had no idea who she really was.
Not while he was still trying to get a grip on the suspicion that, somehow, the real Liza Johnson had ceased to exist somewhere around the time of that car accident.
In her place was Honor Roberts—but without Honor’s memories, or the knowledge of who she was or who she had been. And if Liza Johnson was actually Honor Roberts, then that meant Claire Martinez would most likely be Fawn Corrigan, the target Gideon Cross was rumored to be determined to kill.
With a tight grimace, he eased himself from the bed.