“Who’s your mate? I know she’s close to you. Do you think I don’t feel her stealing my chance to live?” she screamed out in rage, her face twisting with it. “I won’t let you have her, Cullen. I swear to you I’ll reach out from the grave and destroy both of you.”
The smell of her desperation, her pain, sank inside him like a bitter breath.
He inhaled wearily; the memory of his hopelessness at that time, of her lost hope and ever-deepening terror as death neared, was a reminder of his failure of his wife.
Of his duty to her.
God knew he had understood her desperation to live, to survive. The spirit would fight for life at all costs in most situations. Even then, despite his own feelings of betrayal, if he could have saved her, then he would have. And every day he’d thanked God that the mating couldn’t come alive because of guilt alone.
“I’ll never let you have her,” Lauren whispered just before she slipped into a drugged sleep. “Do you hear me, Cullen? I’ll never let you have her. All you had to do was mate me. All you had to do was save me from this and I would have let you go.” Hatred gleamed in her eyes before they filled with terror and tears once again. “You were my only hope.” She’d believed that if he’d just loved her, then that would be all it took.
Nature wasn’t nearly that kind, though, was it?
He was a Breed; his life had been filled with the knowledge of his and other Breeds’ agony and terrors on a daily basis while in the research facility. What he’d sensed from Lauren in those final weeks before her death was a bleak addition to those memories.
The ringing of his sat phone pulled him from his musings and back to the present. Pulling the device from his back pocket, he slid it open after checking the caller ID and greeted the caller.
“Ranger? What’s up?” His second in command had charge of the Agency until Cullen’s return.
Whenever that might be.
“We have a problem.” Fury filled his second’s tone as it came over the line. “Dammit all to hell, Cullen, someone got to Morales, the surviving cartel assailant. They just found him in his cell, his throat cut. We hadn’t even had a chance to interrogate him yet.”
Cullen stilled, the fingers of his other hand curling into fists as they literally ached to slam into something.
“How the hell did that happen?” he snapped back with brutal fury. “Did you pull security coverage?”
“Techs say it was jammed during the time he was taken out.” Ranger’s voice shook with his own anger. “We took every precaution and the cartel still got to him.”
There was no reason for Cerves to come after his own man and take him out. If the story the assailant had given them at the scene was true, then he didn’t have much information to begin with. Cerves would be the one with details, not the muscle he used to get the job done.
“Pull in our contacts, see if there’s anything out there about the murder. I want to know why, Ranger, and I want to know now. Let me know as soon as you find out anything.”
“How’s Chelsea doing?” Disgust still rang in the other man’s tone. “And I didn’t get a chance to tell you Lauren’s parents came by Nation headquarters looking for you yesterday.”
“They caught up with me,” Cullen grunted. “And Chelsea’s doing fine. Bruised and sore, but nothing that won’t heal in time.” Except the memory of it.
“Yeah,” Ranger sighed. “The Holdens showed up at the house, then?”
“They were waiting with Chelsea’s family when I pulled in the drive,” Cullen told him heavily as he swiped his fingers through his hair and paced to the kitchen window, frowning as he stared into the desert beyond his house. “They stayed for a while.”
“Damn,” Ranger muttered. “How did they handle Chelsea being with you? You haven’t really had a relationship since Lauren’s death.”
No, he hadn’t. The knowledge that Lauren had deceived him so easily had been too fresh for those first years. Afterward, he’d been too busy running from that gut-deep hunger for Chelsea that he couldn’t seem to escape.
“We didn’t discuss it,” Cullen informed him, his words clipped, cold. “Look, I need to go. Find out what the hell happened with Morales, and do it fast. I want to know who’s targeted Chelsea, and I want to know why. That’s priority.” Not Lauren’s parents or a past he couldn’t change.
“Got it, boss,” Ranger sighed. “I’ll check in tomorrow one way or the other. You still have her Breed security for backup?”
“Backup’s taken care of.” Cullen stared outside, wondering what the hell was causing the disquiet inside him as he searched for any movement.
“Good to know. Call if you need me.”
The line disconnected.
Absently, Cullen slid the phone closed and returned it to his back pocket, realizing his eyesight was sharpening even as he let it rove over the early-morning landscape.
The sound of the shower pulled his attention from anything that might be outside and back to the woman ripping apart his nerves of steel. Instantly, his cock was hard, throbbing, pressing against his jeans with imperative demand. The scent of her filled his head, the faintest hint of her subtle heat, her arousal, reaching him as his tongue began to itch.