It was one of the rare times he hadn’t sensed the baby’s pain when in her presence. For now, despite the hell she’d been through in the past two years, she was at peace.
“Just keep your voice low and you won’t disturb her,” Jonas assured him.
Wiping his hand over the back of his neck, he pushed back his frustration before grimacing. “They attacked, as we knew they would.”
Jonas nodded, thoughtful for a moment before replying.
“Malcolm’s team moved in the minute they thought she was unprotected,” he murmured as Stygian watched him closely. “I was listening to the reports as they came in. Lawe and Diane are fine, by the way. They’re heading back to the hotel now and should show up in the next five minutes.”
“She kicked his ass then?” Stygian asked with a grin as he thought of the cocky, traitorous Malcolm.
“Was there any doubt?” Jonas grinned. “She’s a hell of an addition to the Bureau, though Lawe has definitely bowed out of the assistant director position.”
That wasn’t really a surprise.
“Lawe prefers the field and now he has a mate to share that with,” he agreed as Jonas’s lips tightened.
The director had been certain Lawe Justice would take the position of assistant director.
Those who knew Lawe had known better.
Jonas glanced at the monitor then, watching Liza thoughtfully, before murmuring, “Ms. Johnson wasn’t alone either, was she?”
Stygian grunted at the comment. “That girl is never alone. She had two shadows on her ass and two lying farther back from the minute she left her house, just as she’s had every morning. And they’re damned good. They’re always damned good. And she knew they were there.”
Jonas turned his head, his brows lifting curiously at the information. “Really?”
“Damned straight,” he growled. “To add to it, she has a deactivated earbud tucked completely out of sight in that dainty little ear of hers and three skin tags. One on each hip and one on her left shoulder.”
“Then her shadows are friendly?” Jonas leaned back in his chair carefully, propping one expensively shod foot on the coffee table as he ensured not so much as a shift of movement disturbed his toddler.
She didn’t budge. One little hand lay at his neck, the other beneath her cheek. The soft pink-and-white frilly dress she wore looked at odds against the black shirt and shoulder holster it lay against on Jonas’s chest.
“The shadows are friendly.” Stygian nodded. “Between her and them is the enemy.” He sighed. “The ones I glimpsed the other morning as she went to work are not part of Dog’s team. But we already knew that.”
Jonas nodded slowly as he gently, rhythmically, rubbed his daughter’s back.
She was the reason Jonas was there; the reason he was searching desperately for ghosts.
“What do we have, Stygian?” he asked as he stared out over the tiny head tucked beneath his chin.
The girl’s once-brown locks, still thick with a slight curl, were now tricolored. Golden blond and sunset red streaked the once dark brown strands as though nature hadn’t yet made up her mind what color the child’s hair would be.
“Hell if know.” Stygian breathed out roughly. “She’s important to someone though—damned important. She and her housemates, Claire and Chelsea Martinez.”
“Cousins,” Jonas said softly.
Stygian nodded. “Before the attack on Malachi’s mate, only Liza Johnson and Claire Martinez had these shadows, though. Chelsea picked up hers after her sister’s attack.”
“Liza was bait this morning then,” Jonas suggested.
Stygian nodded. “The earbud was active until Braden and Megan rushed her to the Dragoon. It disconnected before she entered the vehicle and hasn’t reactivated since.”
“You have the frequency locked yet?”
Stygian nodded again. “We managed that before we took the Jammer over it. Their connection should be interrupted for the next few hours.”
“Let’s let her wait for a while then,” Jonas suggested. “See if her shadows come out of the woodwork again. I want an ID on them.”
“You think if we hold her here long enough they’ll make a move?”
That was Jonas, manipulating and calculating as hell when he was after something.
Or someone.
In this case, he was after two women and two Bengal Breeds. The two girls had disappeared twelve years before, and many believed they were dead.
Of the two Breeds, they knew one was alive and killing his way through the lab techs and scientists who had run the secret experimental labs of the pharmaceutical company Brandenmore Research.
“I don’t think they’ll make a move.” Jonas smiled. “Unjam the transmission, let’s track it back to her friends when it reactivates and see what they know.”
Stygian’s brows arched. “They could have abandoned the link once it was jammed. That seems to be normal procedure.”
“But we also blocked the locator tags,” Jonas pointed out. “If she were important to you, what would you do?”
Clenching his jaw, Stygian knew exactly what he would have done, whether she was important or not. She was a woman and part of a mission. There wasn’t a true Breed alive who would have walked away.
A true Breed was one whose sense of loyalty and honor was greater than those of the Council Breeds, whose honor was closer to those of human criminals.
Which was exactly where most of the genetics of those particular Breeds—Honor Roberts, Fawn Corrigan and the Bengals Judd and Gideon—had come from. “I’m a Breed,” Stygian finally stated after considering Jonas’s question of the choice he would make. “Her shadows are human. They’re wild cards.”
Council Coyotes were more human than Breed, more mercenary and merciless than loyal.
Council-loyal Breeds weren’t known as the most fastidious or the most reliable. They were a boil on the ass of the Breed communities and avoided at all costs.
Or until the Council sent them out. In that case, any and every Breed associated with the Breed communities jumped between them and their goal.
This time, Stygian was certain the Council’s goal was the same as the Breeds’: the search for the four victims once held by the pharmaceutical giant Phillip Brandenmore in a secret genetic and medical experimental lab.
“Wild cards or not, they’re protecting someone,” Jonas disagreed. “They’re not imprisoning or attempting to apprehend or control. They’re shadowing, and they’re protective. That’s the difference.”
Crossing his arms over his chest, Stygian glared down at the director. There were times when Jonas seemed amazingly naïve when it came to humans, which was surprising considering the Breed’s stone-cold manipulation tactics.
Jonas smiled back at him. “Review the vids the enforcers have made of her shadows,” he suggested. “That’s what they are, literally, and she knows they’re there. She communicates with them often through that damned ear link and she has affection for whoever’s on the other side of that transmission.”
“I’ve watched the vids,” Stygian growled.
He hated to admit it, but Jonas just might be right.
“You’re a hell of a commander, Stygian,” Jonas stated then. “But the lone Wolf thing you like to do hasn’t helped you to understand humans.”
“Who wants to?” Humans weren’t exactly his preferred type of company.
Coming into the Bureau hadn’t been easy for him, but once his team had begun mating and settling down, Stygian had found himself at a crossroads. The paths he had been offered weren’t exactly ones he would have preferred.
Train a new team, or take the position Jonas offered and command a team already trained and needing only a commander willing to guide them? They were Breeds he had known, Breeds he’d fought with on at least one occasion, and Breeds he trusted. But nothing was the same as the team you’d fought with, gotten to know and could count on no matter the situation.