Hawk's Revenge: Lone Pine Pride, Book 3 (16 page)

“That it does,” Brandt agreed. “But first we have to get to full-term. Which, with cross-breed pairings, has been quite the challenge. With pairings of the same breed, our shifters seem to be so fertile we’ve had to develop birth-control shots to keep our population from rising too rapidly, but cross-breeds are a different story.”

Moira nodded. “We have so many old wives tales about what happens with the offspring of cross-breed pairings, but we have no real data. And here at Lone Pine, with so many different breeds mixing, more and more cross-breed pairings seem to be popping up.”

“Which is where you come in.” Brandt turned to her. “So what can you tell us about your work, Dr. Russell?”

“Call me Rachel.”

Chapter Twenty-One

“Dude. Are you really the Hawk? Like,
the
Hawk?”

Adrian eyed the young soldier looking up at him with what could only be described as glazed hero-worship. “Just call me Adrian.” He hadn’t been
the
Hawk in a while.

The kid’s jaw dropped. “Holy crap, you are. I thought you were a myth! One of the guys was telling a story the other night about you being like…what’s his name? The Greek dude who ferried souls? Only you did it for shifters. Ferrying them from hell back to the real world with new names and shit.”

“Charon.”

“Right! Only you’re, like, ex-Special Forces, right? Green Beret or something?”

“Army Ranger.”

“Dude. I can’t believe you’re real. I thought you were just something shifters had invented to make themselves feel better when everyone was disappearing without explanation.”

Adrian kept his gaze trained on the tree line from the crow’s nest guarding the perimeter wall, wondering if he just ignored Soldier Junior if he would take the hint and go away.

“Dude, if you’re the Hawk, what are you doing here?”

No such luck.
“Perimeter watch.”

“Well,
yeah
. But why aren’t you out freeing more of us?”

“I’m not a superhero, kid. I can’t do anything without someone on the inside sneaking the shifters out to me.” If he had been the ferryman, Rachel had been Persephone, trapped in the Underworld.

“So you just stopped?”

“We didn’t just stop,” he snapped, wondering if he had ever been that young and obnoxious. “They caught us. First me. Then her.”

“But you got out.”

“Yeah.”

“And now what? They win?”

Adrian wondered if punching the kid was frowned on. “They don’t win,” he snarled. “We’re still fighting them.”

“But you’re here.”

He didn’t have anything to say to that. The fucking kid was right about that much. He could say he was still recovering, but that felt like a cop out. He could say he was looking after Rachel, but what was he really doing? Hiding out.

He’d lost more than his wings during his time at the Organization. He’d misplaced that piece of himself that made him the Hawk. The one this kid gawked at like he was some kind of miracle worker.

He
wasn’t
doing everything he could to bring down the Organization. He was doing everything he could to protect himself and protect Rachel.

The next Organization raid was scheduled to leave tomorrow morning. He should be on it. But would Rachel be safe without him? He couldn’t help remembering the tiger stalking through the woods. Or the feel of her hot and eager in his arms. And he didn’t know which one was more dangerous.

He didn’t know if he could be the Hawk, reclaim that part of himself, and still keep her safe.

He could speak to Grace. As soon as he had a shift break, he would go back to the infirmary. The Hawk had been dormant too long.

“When they first brought me in,” Rachel avoided saying the name of her former employers, even though it was just Brandt, Grace and Moira with her in the office, “none of the captured female shifters were catching and the human females they impregnated with shifter sperm kept miscarrying. For the human women, fertilization wasn’t the problem—there was something about their body chemistry that seemed to be incompatible with the fetus. By studying some of the other data on hand, it became apparent to me that the physical presence of other shifters could cause both humans and shifters to produce a unique hormone. I became convinced that the isolation of our subjects was limiting this hormone which made it impossible for the women to carry to term.

“It made sense to me that the hormone would be required for reproduction—a sort of biological failsafe to prevent shifter children from being born in an environment where there were no other shifters to care for them. The presence of a shifter father—or other shifter support system—would cause the mother to produce the hormone and enable her to carry the child to term.

“I was unable to convince my employers to lessen the isolation of my subjects, but I was able to isolate and reproduce the hormone, which I injected into our subjects as a supplement. The human women continued to miscarry—though much later in their pregnancies—but the real breakthrough was when I applied the hormone to shifter females. Their fertility instantly skyrocketed.”

“But we’re surrounded by shifters,” Grace interrupted. “That shouldn’t be a problem with us.”

“With cross-breeds it might be,” Rachel explained. “The hormone is very breed-specific. If you are, let’s say, a lynx mated to a bobcat, your body might not produce the hormone at all without another lynx in the vicinity. Though they’re both felid species, the hormone appears to be extremely picky.”

Moira nodded. “Lion shifters living in prides would be more fertile, flooded with that hormone. As would wolves in packs. That would also help explain why even our more independent shifters tend to feel the need to bond into family units far more frequently than their animal counterparts.”

“We called it the community hormone. Several of our shifter subjects associated the injections with a feeling of comfort or home—some even reporting hallucinating familiar scents as a side effect. The humans were less affected, but the feelings generated seemed to be positive there as well, just to a lesser degree—it would be logical for shifters to seek out that sensation in the wild. The comfort of the community.”

“I understand this shifter community hormone makes the mother’s body a fertile environment for the fetus, but what about the babies themselves?” Moira asked. “What would they shift into?”

“Even after I began having some success, I was never allowed to see the mothers through to the end of their pregnancies, so while I believe there were a handful of successful births, I never actually saw the children or learned if they could shift. In the wild, certain animal species can create hybrids—lions and tigers can have offspring together—but based on genetic testing of the fertilized ova, it appeared the breed of a shifter child was determined almost entirely by the breed of the mother—the only exception to this being the very rare cases of humans carrying latent shifter DNA being impregnated by shifter males.”

All three of her listeners straightened sharply. “Humans with latent shifter DNA?” Brandt pressed. “We’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“It’s rare.”

“Do you have it?” Grace asked, which shouldn’t have surprised Rachel.

Of course they would think she would be more sympathetic to them if they shared some genetic marker, no matter how buried. Rachel had wondered herself, when she first saw that certain humans carried the shifter gene. She was an orphan, after all. Her parents could have been anyone or anything. But then she’d performed the test on herself.

“I’m just human.”

She imagined she saw disappointment on their faces—she wasn’t one of them after all—or perhaps that was just her projecting.

“So this hormone, that’s the magic bullet?” Brandt asked.

“It does a lot, but some pairings are simply incompatible. The fetuses aren’t viable in any environment. Ursine-feline, for example.”
Or avian-human, like her and Adrian.
Not that she should be thinking along those lines. Lately, he didn’t even seem to like her, even five minutes after loving her senseless.

“And you have data on which breeds can successfully cross?”

“At the fertilization level, yes. I had reams of it which should be in the computers taken from the raid of the lab where I was found. We had hundreds and hundreds of samples—every mature shifter brought through Organization labs was harvested for reproductive material.”

“
Jesus
.”

Rachel whipped around at the raw curse from the doorway behind her.

Adrian stood in the hall just outside the office’s open door, horror and disgust warring for dominance on his face as he stared at her. He turned on his heel, stalking away without a word.

“Adrian!” Rachel scrambled out of her seat and after him, replaying what he must have heard in her head.

She’d been talking to colleagues, people who were as fascinated by the science as she was, but to a shifter who had been experimented on, she didn’t know how it would have sounded. How much had he heard?

The way he’d looked at her…

She caught him near one of the patient rooms, catching his arm between both of her hands in an attempt to slow his rapid stride. He spun, startling her with the quick about-face and caught her by her arm, half-dragging her into the patient room and kicking the door shut behind them before dropping her arm like the touch of her skin burned him.

“
Harvesting for reproductive material?
” he snarled, stalking to the far window before spinning to face her with the breadth of the room between them. “Did you do the job yourself or did you have assistants for the hands-on portions? Did you get bonuses if you got us off quickly or were you paid by the hour?”

“Don’t be insulting.” She tucked her arms against her chest, defensive.

“What am I supposed to be, Doc? How many little hawks were you trying to breed from me?”

“None. They never drew sperm from you. I rescheduled the procedures whenever they tried to do those things to you. I couldn’t do much, but I swear I tried to protect you from whatever I could.”

“So of all the tests you were perfectly happy to watch them perform, you drew the line at that one. Lovely. Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“Can anything make you feel better?” she challenged, her own anger rising. “We both know you’re never going to forgive me, so what are you doing with me? What do you want? Every day it’s hot and cold. You want me, you hate me, I get it, but I am sick of being the villain in this pairing. What more do you want me to do?”

“I want you to be who I thought you were!” he shouted.

She froze, startled as much by the raw honesty of his words as the volume.

“I want you to be the woman who would never betray me for any reason,” he went on, quieter now, though there was no lessening in the fierce intensity of his glowing yellow gaze.

She met his eyes, though it was a struggle to do so. She felt like she was shaking apart from the inside out. He would never forgive her. “I’m sorry I was too human to live up to your lofty ideals.”

“So am I.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

I want you to be who I thought you were.

He hadn’t meant to say that. He hadn’t even known he was thinking it until the words were out of his mouth and then the profound rightness of them had sent shockwaves through his soul. He couldn’t seem to forgive her for not being the woman he’d wanted her to be. He
hated
all the reminders of who she was, what she’d done, because she was supposed to be his. His mate. His everything. The one who would never,
ever
betray him for any reason. Not even to save the lives of a hundred others.

Because he wasn’t sure he would have made the same call. He might have let all those shifters she saved fry if it was a question between her and them. And he wasn’t sure if that made him a better man or far, far worse.

Rachel was still stunned and he took advantage of her shock to stride past her and out of the building. Grace was there. Grace would watch over her. Right now, he couldn’t be around her. He couldn’t be around anyone.

He’d rushed back to the infirmary after his stretch on the perimeter. He’d been on edge all day on the wall, worrying that someone would make an attempt on Rachel the first second he wasn’t watching over her. But when he’d hurried through the infirmary, chasing the sound of her voice, her words had begun to penetrate and his blood had chilled.

He’d known she was an Organization doctor. Obviously, he’d known. He remembered. But hearing her talk about her subjects like they were nothing more than genetic material to be acquired and manipulated…it had shifted something dark inside him, reminding him once again of those awful months.

He’d been fighting his memories of last night all day and this was the perfect example of why. He couldn’t let himself want her. Couldn’t allow himself to believe she was who he’d once thought she could be to him. Wanting her was a weakness that had destroyed him before.

It wasn’t just that he wanted her to be the ideal that he’d envisioned before they met. He needed to be able to trust her and he didn’t know how he was ever going to be able to let himself do that. He didn’t even know what he was doing with her anymore, what kind of role he was playing.

He jogged away from the busy pathways of the main compound, reaching instinctively for his wings and hissing with frustration when his hawk remained stubbornly dormant.

He needed to fly. He wasn’t whole without his wings. That piece of himself, his hawk soul, was missing, perhaps forever, and it felt like an amputated limb he was left struggling to balance without.

There weren’t many avian shifters left—he knew his parents had feared that he was the last of his kind—and now even he had lost his wings. Surrounded as he was by other shifters, he was still as alone as ever. Separated from those so like him, but so crucially different. Separated from his hawk. Separated from Rachel.

He’d been alone much of his life—isolated even in the band of brothers that was the military. Ever since his parents died, he’d kept his own counsel and he’d never minded the solitude. He was a solitary creature. It suited him. But now he ached. Ached for the mate who was not to be. Ached for the hawk that had abandoned him.

Adrian ran, pushing himself through the snow that had fallen the night before, and his soul ached.

“I take it our little birdie left.”

Rachel’s head snapped up at the dry voice from the doorway. When Adrian had run out, she’d dropped onto one of the beds, momentarily defeated. She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there before Grace found her.

The lioness eyed her, reading something on Rachel’s face that made her step into the room and flick the door softly closed. “You okay, Doc?”

Rachel released a soft, exasperated breath. “I don’t know what I am anymore.”

Grace plopped onto the other bed, facing her. “That sounds like a good start. Like that whole
the wise man knows first that he knows nothing
bullshit.”

Rachel snorted. “Something like that.”

Grace waited, surprisingly patient, until Rachel found herself spilling everything she’d been holding on to for the last week—hell, for her entire life.

“It isn’t fair,” she said. “I lived my life by the rules, always trying so hard to be perfect so my parents would never regret for a second the choice they made to love me. My mother worried that I pushed myself too hard. My parents were wonderful. Love was never conditional for them—they were so good to me. I never understood why God decided to bless me with them. Why me, right? So I tried to be perfect enough to earn it. Always doing everything exactly right.”

“How’d that work out for you?” Grace said dryly—clearly not a woman hindered by playing by the rules.

“It worked great until I fell in with the Organization and my parents passed away and all of a sudden I was in a new cage. Lies and danger and trying so hard to do the right thing. Always wondering if I was doing more harm than good, never free to be myself. Always playing three different games, trying to stay ahead of suspicion.”

Rachel pinched the bridge of her nose, a headache starting just thinking about those years. “It was so isolating, so lonely, and then Adrian came along and I felt like I could relax with him—even though I knew it was stupid. I knew I shouldn’t let down my guard, because the Organization was watching. Always watching. And then they wanted him.” She swallowed thickly. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to get out of the cage I was in—so I made the shitty call. I told myself the Organization would have captured him anyway and that I should use the opportunity to gain trust so I could save more shifters. I told myself it was the greater good, but I hated who it made me. So I pushed back. I freed more shifters, I freed
him
, and the Organization put me in an even smaller cage. Their pet M.D. Until y’all found me.”

She closed her eyes, remembering the moments of adrenaline and hope. “Waking up in that cabin with a chain around my ankle was the first time in my entire life I can ever remember being truly free to be whoever and whatever I am. No pretense, no expectations. Here I may be a prisoner of sorts, but I’m more free than I’ve ever been. I could love it here, if Adrian would just let me. But he’s too busy hating me. Everything is just
wrong
.”

Especially the way she felt for him. “I can’t figure him out,” she heard herself confessing to Grace. “One second he’s angry, the next he’s protective. He touches me so tenderly I just fall apart, then pushes me away and won’t even look at me.”

“He’s a man. He doesn’t know what to do with all the feels,” Grace said in what Rachel was coming to recognize as her usual dry way. “If it’s any help, he refused to leave you if I wasn’t personally guarding your cute little ass. So he’s clearly got a hard-on for keeping you safe.” She shrugged. “That’s something.”

“Am I really in danger?”

“From most of the pride? No. But there are one or two who might still want a piece of you.”

“Like Dominec.” Rachel shivered, remembering the man with the heavily ridged scars twisting his face.

“Maybe,” Grace admitted, though she didn’t sound certain. “None of us really know him.”

“But he’s part of your pride. Your…family.”

“Sort of. Keeping Dominec around is kind of like having a pet dragon. Some days it makes you powerful and some days it makes you barbeque. Can’t always tell which kind of day it’s gonna be.”

“So I should listen to Adrian.”

“In terms of your protection? Not a bad idea. He knows his shit. As far as the rest of it? Hell, what do I know about damaged shifter men with more instinct than brains? All I can do is wish you luck, girl, because if you decide you want him, you’re going to need it. Now, you ready to look at some prisoner mug shots?”

If you decide you want him…

Those words haunted her for the rest of the afternoon as she looked at the photos and identified nine of the remaining thirteen prisoners. Most were harmless—the most aggressive having been killed in the riot—but Rachel flagged two of the guards as assholes to keep an eye on. For a moment she thought one of the women, a cowering brunette with her hair covering most of her face, might be Madison Clarke, but when Grace told her the name on the woman’s badge was Marta Torres, she vaguely remembered a receptionist by that name and kicked herself for seeing bogeymen everywhere. Madison would never let herself get taken alive. Adrian’s paranoia must be rubbing off one her.

If you decide you want him…

The words still echoed in her brain into the evening as she explained the hormone therapy to Kathy and her mate and worked alongside Dr. Brandt to create a balanced hormone cocktail for the pair, listening with half an ear for Adrian’s return.

If you decide you want him…

Funny how she’d never before thought of it as a choice. Ever since that snowy night when he’d first swept into her life, he’d occupied a central point in her world in a way no other man had, filling up her thoughts and taking up space in her hopes. But was he really what she wanted?

He was strong and loyal and stubborn and moody and so intense she felt as if every second she spent in his presence saturated her soul and fired her senses. There was more feeling packed into a minute with him than in a month without and she wanted more of that intensity. More of the way he touched her when he didn’t seem to realize he was doing it. Gentle, solicitous, taking such care with her in a way that was automatic.

If only he didn’t stop himself from that automatic affection whenever he noticed he was doing it.

Was he what she wanted? She felt stronger when she was with him, like the most fierce and authentic version of herself. She wanted to be that woman. The one he inspired her to be. Not a perfect angel, but something much more real.

And not the woman he seemed determined to think she was.

So yes. She wanted him. But only on her terms. Only if they could start fresh and move forward, without the past hanging over them like a guillotine blade always waiting to fall. If they couldn’t have a fresh slate, then there was no point punishing herself wanting him. She’d taken everything he’d thrown at her, scarcely defending herself because on some level she’d felt like she deserved it, but that was over now.

No matter how many defining moments she had, no matter how much she told herself she’d changed, she was still that little girl trying to earn love. She’d spent half a lifetime trying to earn it from her parents and now here she was, ready to spend the other half trying to be worthy of Adrian’s affection. Something had to give.

She was done being sorry, done apologizing. He would either accept her thousand attempts to make amends and forgive her, or she would find a way to separate herself from him. She didn’t want to leave the pride—she liked it here—but she would, if they would let her. If that’s what it took to get away from Adrian.

It was time they both decided if they wanted this. If he wanted her, he needed to get past her past. If she wanted him, she had to show him how. Starting now.