He had made a grave tactical error and Del-Rey knew it. The anger that had festered inside him over the years had overlooked the intense, all-abiding loyalty Anya felt for her family and friends. Del-Rey was a man who believed in retribution. He had been such a man all his life, until he sat here now, staring into the darkness of his own soul, and realized he had wounded a treasure he hadn’t known he’d held.
He had known from the moment he met her that he was going to betray her. It was the way of the world. He couldn’t fully trust. He never gave complete control or complete trust to another person, outside of Brim. Just as he had known that retribution would be dealt to the guards’ leaders, as he had always dealt it. He had always killed before. He’d pulled his punches because of Anya. He hadn’t killed, he had only wounded. Her father and her cousins would know they had been dealt with fairly. They were men of war. War had different rules than the fairy tales young women such as Anya lived within.
She was sleeping. Finally. Del-Rey sat in the chair beside her bed, dressed, his head in his hands as his elbows rested on his knees. He had sat down there the minute he could withdraw from her, as soon as the knot that had been swollen in his cock had receded enough for him to pull away from her. He had jerked his jeans back to his hips and sat. To keep from falling to the floor.
And he had remained there as she silently folded herself onto her side, tugged the blanket over her shoulders and cried silently until she went to sleep.
She hadn’t sobbed again. She hadn’t cursed him or railed at him. She had retreated into herself, and he had no idea how to pull her back.
He lowered his hands and stared at them. Large hands. The hands of a warrior. A killer. These hands had held her beneath him. His teeth had held her in place. His cock had knotted hard and deep inside her.
He had never done that. In his entire sexual life, he had never done that to a woman. Why this woman?
He rose to his feet and fixed his jeans before jerking his T-shirt on. He could hear Brim, his second-in-command moving up the steps to the second-floor bedroom. Del-Rey opened the door as the other man reached it.
Concerned light blue eyes stared back at him.
“Vehicles are here,” Brim reported. “Those women downstairs are pissed off though. Watch your back.”
He didn’t blame them. Hell, someone should shoot him.
“Have you contacted Haven?”
“Messages have gone out; no answer,” Brim reported before inhaling with narrowed eyes. “Something isn’t right here, Del-Rey. You took the girl?”
Del-Rey growled. Anya was none of his business.
Brim shook his head. “Her scent has changed, shifted, and yours as well. Something whacked is going on here.”
That was the understatement of the century. He looked back at Anya.
“Get ready to move out,” he told his second-in-command. “Have them send Haven another message. I need their doctor. Now. This can’t happen again, Brim. I don’t know what the hell happened in here, but it can’t happen again.”
He closed the door and moved back to the bed.
“Anya.” He whispered her name and she flinched.
Was it so horrendous, his touch? The greatest pleasure he had known in his life, and now she flinched from him.
“Get dressed. The vehicles are here and we’re moving out. Now. I don’t think you want to risk any attempt I would make to try to dress you myself.”
He tried to make her angry. It didn’t work. She pushed the blankets from her as though the exhaustion that gripped her was painful. He watched as she found her clothes and went to the bathroom, closing the door behind her.
He didn’t hear her sobbing, didn’t hear her crying. But he could smell her, and what he scented clawed at his chest. Somehow, he had managed to douse that fiery flame that was so much a part of her. At this moment, his Anya smelled of defeat. And Del-Rey felt it. For the first time in his life, he knew the taste of defeat.
CHAPTER 2
THREE WEEKS LATER
If there was one thing in Del-Rey’s life that he knew with all certainty, it was himself. He was a Coyote Breed, and as he informed the Breed Ruling Cabinet weeks later, he admitted to some of that Breed’s worst traits. Calculation, manipulation. The ability to look at a situation and instantly size up the roadblocks and dangers inherent in it and find a way over them. He wasn’t a charge-into-the-fray type of guy. He was a slice-their-throat-in-the-dark animal, and he fully admitted to it.
For ten years he had connived to ensure that he and his people were part of the recognized Breed society. He was, after all, a man who liked to be on the winning side. Breed freedom was the winning side. But now, the stakes had been raised. Because of his mate.
Hell, he’d never caught so much as a whiff of information about mating heat between Breeds and their lovers. Who could have imagined that the Breed genetics would turn against them in such a way and would torture their females as it did?
Of course, how else did a Breed have a hope of holding his woman once she learned the animalistic nature that came out with mating heat?
He considered it a trade-off. Rather like the flesh wounds he had ordered for Anya’s family in retaliation for the risks she had taken for six years. If he had walked away