The vicious leopard, always raking and clawing to kill, had gone quiet, but he wasn’t amorous. Gedeon had his own suspicions about Meiling and where she came from. It made even more sense now that he knew she had a price on her head. She had too many gifts. Amur leopards were rare, that was true. They were on the verge of extinction, and the male shifters were mostly to blame. There were only a few left in the world. Females were extremely rare. Females such as Meiling had been all but wiped off the face of the earth—deliberately.
“I’m sorry about Libby, Meiling. I couldn’t save a single one of those women or children. Not one. I despise the people involved in those kinds of operations. I don’t take any case involving human trafficking and all clients I work with know it.”
“That wasn’t your fault, Gedeon. They had a plan to murder everyone the moment anything went wrong. You couldn’t have known that.”
“I should have known it. That’s what these kinds of people do. They have no regard for human life at all. I grew up in one of the most vicious lairs there was. My mother’s legs were beaten so badly she couldn’t walk so she wouldn’t resist anything they did to her.”
He heard her hastily cover a gasp. She was intelligent. Very intelligent. She didn’t think in terms of who or what she had to be. Or even why there was a price on her head—but no doubt she had considered why he was faster and deadlier than other leopards. Why he could absorb languages so quickly and his mind worked at such a rapid rate.
The Amur leopards had three elite leopard families with unbelievable skills. The bratya wanted them stamped out in Russia. The rulers in China wanted them gone. The lairs in North Korea wanted them dead. Gedeon’s father had been murdered along with his older brother and sister. His mother had been enslaved. He had been taken by the ruling pakhan. He had been so young, the pakhan thought he would be able to shape him into an asset.
In North Korea, the family of elites had been wiped out entirely, parents and children murdered in the dead of night. Like Gedeon’s family, a friend had betrayed them and opened the doors to their home to the frenzied mob. Those genetics, whatever they had been, were gone from the shifter world, and those plotting had triumphed.
The elite family in China had been set upon, the parents, two daughters and two sons all murdered. One man, loyal to the royals, snatched up the third daughter, a child of barely two, and disappeared with her. No one noticed she was gone until they were burning the bodies to ensure the leopards weren’t found. No one had any idea who had saved the child or where she had been taken. From that moment on, the search had continued.
Gedeon had honed himself into the most dangerous leopard imaginable. He killed the pakhan and every male member of his family. He killed his lieutenants. He hunted down every single male who participated in the murder of his family. In those early days he made his reputation as frightening to every bratya lair and family as possible. He had done so without giving away the fact that he was the remaining child from the family they had murdered. No one knew where he had originated.
He wished he could see Meiling. He had only caught that one glimpse of her in the jungle. She was very small and slender with shiny ebony hair and dark eyes. He was absolutely certain he was right about her being the missing child from the elite family in China. Her family had been murdered. His had been too, all but his mother, and she would have preferred it. He couldn’t think about that or he would become as vicious as his leopard, and he didn’t want Meiling to see him that way—not when he was trying to recruit her.
“Gedeon.” She whispered his name and then her fingers brushed his arm gently. “I’m so sorry. No wonder you despise men who deal in human trafficking.”
“I killed them all. Every last one of them. You need to know that about me. All those things you found out when you did your research, they’re true.” He was rolling the dice admitting his true nature to her. “It’s even worse than that.”
“Do you expect me to condemn you for killing the men who trafficked your mother? And who brutally hurt her to keep her from running?”
“You mean took a hammer to her legs?” There was no keeping the bitterness out of his voice. When that door cracked open, it was as real and as raw as when he’d witnessed it as a child. He found he was shaking and that embarrassed him. He wasn’t used to feeling his emotions or putting them on display for others. That made him feel vulnerable, especially since he couldn’t see a damn thing.