“It means I will know what to shoot him with if he turns out to be a threat to you.” Liam held up a hand to stay her automatic protest. “I’m not making snap judgments, trust me. I will do a great deal of research on everybody who comes anywhere near you. Equal opportunity suspicion, I promise.” He laid his hand over his heart and aimed that troublesome smile at her again. Devon sighed a soft laugh, resisting an urge to throw something at him because he so easily confused her feelings. “Tell me who in this house is Morphate and who is human, Devon. I’ll have Colin leave a list of names with you and you can return it to me later.”
“I don’t know if I like this request, Liam,” she said with a dark frown. “It seems so …”
“What it is, Devon, is caution and logic. I’m not going to pussyfoot around your hang-ups with racism. Morphates can only be killed with irradiated mercury and I want to know how to kill your maid, your butler, and your damn poodle before the day is out. You understand? Anything that can hurt you, I have to know how to hurt first. It’s as simple as that. And if you’re worried about that pompous ass you call a secretary, you damn well ought to be, because he is high on my list already.”
“Just because he is being careless with his smart phone doesn’t give you cause to suspect him! Or is it because he’s careless and a Morphate?”
“I suspect him because I was standing next to him in a room with at least five others when I learned enough about you to find plenty of opportunity in which to kill you.” He ticked examples off on his fingertips. “I know you’re going to Milan in October. That you’ll be attending the runways in Paris for the new fashions. Oh, and you’re giving a charity speech at the Crescent Foundation Ball in November. Screw the smart phone, Devon. The idiot is blabbing your private schedule from here to Timbuktu because he’s a thoughtless, bragging piece of shit who makes himself sound better than he is just because he’s riding your sexy little coattails.”
Devon had visibly paled, her bottle green gaze turning quickly contrite. “I see,” she said softly. “I hadn’t realized. I apologize.”
“Stop apologizing. All I’m saying is it’s a problem that needs to be fixed. As soon as possible. I know it generally sucks when you trust someone and that person makes mistakes, but your life is in danger, Devon. Mistakes cannot be forgiven right now, and they cannot be ignored as potential threats in disguise.
“Someone is making it easy for your enemies to find you. You were out of the house for barely three hours this most recent night you were attacked. I know we weren’t followed by any conventional means, so how did an assassin find you so easily? Unless they knew your schedule in advance, I can’t figure it out. And as sharp as their senses are, Morphates can’t track without following a path. We would’ve seen them. You would have seen them. Sensed them.” He sighed heavily. “I’m going to have your phone lines secured. You ought to use landlines only. It’s easier than you think to trace cell calls. Keep the cell with you always though. Even in the house. You never know when you might need it and I want you to get in the habit.”
“This is impossible!” Devon jerked herself out of her chair, her hands slamming down on the tabletop. China bounced and clattered as she flung herself away, marching over to the windows so she could look outside. “I can handle inconvenience, Liam, but they will win this war if I become paralyzed by fear.”
“Not paralyzed. Cautious,” Liam corrected as he quickly came up behind her. His large hands engulfed her shoulders, sending warmth up over her neck and down her arms until she shivered. She felt his face gently nuzzling the top of her head and she forced herself to resist the urge to lean back into his strength. She had a long, dangerous road ahead of herself, and she couldn’t afford to depend on anyone. Especially not a human. He’d already risked death once thanks to her overconfident behavior.
“My freedom is being destroyed, and it will only get worse,” she whispered, her pain tightening Liam’s insides like wet leather left in the sun. “Whoever is targeting me is only the first to know about these weapons. Imagine when other Morphates begin to find out what I’ve done.”
Liam sighed, long and low, knowing she was probably right. He couldn’t resist the urge to pull her back against himself, one of his arms crossing her chest from shoulder to shoulder. She reached up to clasp his forearm, accepting his comfort though she wouldn’t look away from the view outside the windows.
“Believe me, we’re going to make it clear to your enemies that you are off-limits. Once you make a mark on them, everyone else will think three times before facing you down. Then, after the weapons enter mainstream production, there will be nothing they can do about it.”
“Except to exact revenge. Morphate clans never forget a slight. They live a very long time and have very long memories.”
“Maybe if you make a strong enough and shocking enough show of force, they will never bother you again,” he suggested, the silk of her hair brushing against his lips.
“What could be shocking enough to quell Morphates? Not even my weapons will change their unmitigated thirst for revenge, believe me.”
“Discover which Alpha is after you and destroy his clan,” he suggested softly. Devon whirled completely around in his hold, her eyes wide and horrified. “Hey, you wanted a mercenary,” he reminded her. “That’s a mercenary solution. I don’t particularly like the idea any more than you do—it’d kick up a hell of a hornet’s nest if we screw up—but I don’t see much in the way of a resolution otherwise.”
Devon felt ice running down her spine, her heart aching as it sped along violently. She pushed away from him, wrapping her arms around herself. She was furious with her people, enough to have created weapons of death and debilitation, but Liam was suggesting a form of genocide. She couldn’t blame Liam for his cavalier attitude. Her people had given him no cause to think well of them. But she couldn’t do what he suggested. She might be willing to cut a swath with mercury through them to make a statement if she was forced to, but she could never permit extermination.
“I could never authorize something so brutal. I haven’t the authority or the right. Only the Alpha Council does, but even they shouldn’t do so.” She looked at him with stunned jade soft eyes. “How can you even suggest an act of genocide?”
“Honey.” Liam narrowed thoughtful eyes on her a moment. “I said destroy, not murder. There’s a huge difference.”
“I …” She shook her head hard, as if trying to resettle her brain. “You need to explain.”
“I’m talking about a multi-level assault that would incapacitate the clan. The eventual goal being dispersion. If you can weaken the cohesion that holds a clan together, you can destroy it. And that will show the remaining clans that you mean business and that you aren’t going to run and hide.” He grinned when her already wide eyes went even rounder as she began to understand. “I’m not saying we are going to pull it off with a zero-gas-cloud count. You wanna kill a beast, you gotta chop off its head, and that means going for the Alpha.”
“Tell me,” she demanded, springing over to him and clutching at his shirt. “Tell me what you mean by incapacitation!”
“There are three things that give Morphates power. Their money, their physical prowess, and their confidence in their superiority. Take away the first two and the last one takes care of itself. Once doubt and fear begin to erode the connectivity of the clan, the members will start to peel away like layers of an onion. Once the Alpha loses face …” He trailed off, knowing that no one knew better than she did how the hierarchy of an Alpha-run clan went.
“Oh my God,” she breathed, delight rushing up over her entire body. “Of course! It’s like a hostile takeover! You buy the stock out from under them. Sneak up and woo away the employees … Liam!”
“If you think you can identify the Alpha, I think my guys can handle the rest.”
“Yes! Oh, yes!” She leapt at him, her arms wrapping around his neck as she hugged him. He chuckled, sliding his arms around her and cuddling h
er close, enjoying her squirming enthusiasm. It didn’t bother him that she’d momentarily thought him capable of such barbarism as genocide. It came with the career. And she did not know him well yet in spite of the incredible connection they seemed to have developed between them already. But she was learning.
Meanwhile, he was able to take in the scent of her hair and the feel of her warm, soft body as she laughed happily in his ear, making him smile that he could help her and please her. It’d already become important to him. Dangerous, to be sure, to start to feel attached to one’s principal. It had the potential to lead to mistakes. Emotions clouded a man’s reactions and clarity of sight.
Still … she was a special woman. It took a special being to take the assault she was facing and yet not desire ferocious retaliation of her own. What she wanted was that a lesson be learned. Equalization. An awakening, however rude it might be, to the wrongness of superiority among intelligent beings.
They were all fine ideals, but Liam wondered about the human half of the equation. Human unpredictability could make this weapon into the most volatile invention in history since the atomic bomb. Just because Devon wouldn’t lower herself to the level of her enemies, didn’t mean that others wouldn’t. It tautened his nerves just thinking about it, making him realize he had unintentionally signed NHK on for a potential war. Granted, bodyguards were always in the middle of two factions, determined to protect one from the other, but this had the potential to ripple out into the world with a huge effect. Taking an active part in the controversy was not something he could choose to do on behalf of his people. Fairness required him to tell them the truth of things and ask them straight out how far they were willing to take themselves in this game.
Liam stepped back, releasing Devon as he went, feeling his skin tighten when she looked at him with a touch of bewilderment. She was so damn sensitive that she had already begun to feel his tension.
“What?”
“I have to tell my crew, Devon. Who you are. What you are. Everything to do with this. They have a right to know: to choose if they’ll stay on for this. I’ve also been out of the loop around here for three days and I gotta get back in.” He reached to run a distracted hand over his hair, unknowingly making it spike and curl in all directions.
“I don’t mind if you tell your crew. You’re right, they deserve the choice. However, please ask them not to repeat the information. I … The staff ’s completely human and they don’t know I am Morphate. All except Carter, as you guessed,” she said.
“Not a problem. Thanks for breakfast. I have a lot of work to catch up on, okay?” he said, reaching to brush a thumb over her chin and jawline. “But at sunset, you and I are going to start playing with those new weapons you keep promising to show me, okay?”
“I’d be happy to,” she laughed.
Devon watched as he hesitated, his thumb clinging to her skin just below her cheek. Then he shook his head in bemusement and that thumb moved slowly back to the sensitive pout of her lower lip. Liam’s fingers curled up snug beneath her chin and tilted her head up ever so slightly, his mouth playing with a frown and small lines appearing between his brows.
Then he turned and left the room quickly, almost as if he were afraid that if he tarried, there would be developments beyond his control. Devon wrapped her arms around herself, a little quiver of thwarted excitement rocking through her.
That man, she thought, was just too damn tempting for his own good. Certainly too damn tempting for hers. The question was, what was she going to do about it?
Torque lowered his binoculars and leaned back against the trunk of the enormous oak. The tree had been generous enough to provide a well-concealed perch for himself and Rhiannon as they observed the compound. Rhiannon was on a nearby branch, straddling it with muscular thighs encased in riding leather. She was watching him, waiting for his latest observations with the patience of an adolescent. She was plucking at her Harley T-shirt’s decal irritably, and she was pissed off that they hadn’t yet found an opportunity to get to Devona.
But he was working on it.
“She has this estate of hers well thought out,” he observed. “And these private security people really know what they’re doing. If we were humans, it would be impossible for us to get into that house.”
“Right, but we aren’t humans,” Rhiannon drawled, rocking her hips so her legs swung a bit on either side of the branch. She set her hands on the bark in front of her, the entire position and movement looking as if she was riding a hobbyhorse.
Torque grinned. Rhiannon always had to have something between her legs. Tree branches, her Millennium Edition Harley-Davidson motorcycle, or just about anything or anyone else that crossed her path. Torque got a hell of a kick out of that. He and Rhi had worked in groups together before, but most dispatchers for Ambrose Clan worked alone. It was the first time they’d ever been paired up. Despite her impatience, she was all business, and he liked that.
“Yeah. There’s also a good chance those aren’t regular bullets in those guns either. They’re expecting someone like us to show up eventually. Ambrose hasn’t exactly been sending subtle messages.”
Rhi rolled her eyes in agreement. “Not to mention that the traitor whore will sense us if she is awake when we get close enough. This will be a waste of our time if all we do is kill a few humans. They will just find more to replace the dead ones. They always have more.”
Torque agreed with that observation with a grim nod. “We have to wait until she moves off the property then.”
“We’ve been here for nearly two days and she hasn’t left yet,” Rhi observed.
“She will. Then we follow and we watch and we wait. I’ll go for the mark, and you can lay waste to the rest of them, clearing the field for me.”
“Mmm,” Rhi purred eagerly. “Look at the size of some of them. They will pop like nice, fat, juicy grapes!”
“Yeah, well, there’s only one that worries me, Rhi. That big bastard right over there.”
Rhi narrowed her eyes on the human male she could easily see striding over the lawn. Like the rest, he wore all black, a shoulder holster and a hip weapon besides. He was a center point. A leader. Most likely the man in charge of the security detail. He never got more than a few feet at a time without someone running up to him to ask something, or his electronic devices calling his attention. But all the while those eyes would roam not only the property but as far beyond as he could manage. Those sharp eyes had encouraged them to move their vantage point back deeper into the tree line.
He’d come out of nowhere. In all the time they had been surveying the situation, they had never once seen him. Not until about three hours ago when he had walked out of the house for the first time. There would be no mistaking or missing a man of his size. He was huge. And while that meant little to a Morphate, this was apparently the human who had set up this situation well enough to keep even Morphates away from their target within. That deserved some respect and some caution.
“So you want me to take him out first?”
“That would be the best, though we’ll stay flexible to the way the situation presents itself.” He raised his binoculars, studying the giant. “You know, here’s what I don’t get. If Devona has invented all these bright and shiny weapons, why are these guys only armed with bullets? Wouldn’t it make sense to arm your own protection forces with the new prototypes?”
“You mean so we can kill the puny humans and steal the weapons off their corpses?”
He grinned at her. “Exactly.”
“I don’t really care why. Bullets and guns are something I can handle real easy. So we just thank our luck, you know?”
“Yeah. I know.”
“How damn lucky can you get, I ask you?”
Inez glanced up from her kneeling position at his feet, where she was helping him clean and inspect equipment. She frowned, her hands going to her hips as she squinted her eyes against the setting sun.
“What in hell are you talking
about?”
“I’m talking about Liam,” Kellen said with an exasperated indication of his hand. “Look at him! Healthy as a horse after getting envenomated only three days ago! What are the odds that he would get thrashed and end up in the care of the only person in all the world with an antidote? Hmm? Tell me that’s not luck.”
“He’s also the only one of us to get tagged twice in their lifetime. Is that lucky, you think?” she countered with a snort meant to express her obvious feelings about the ridiculous things that impressed men.
Kellen frowned and looked down at her darkly. Inez cocked her head and waited for his comeback. Instead, he went just a little bit still, and stared at her for a long minute. Inez lifted a brow at him in curiosity, glancing around herself as she tried to figure out what had caught his mind. She usually could tell what he was thinking at almost any given moment, but she was at a loss this time. To her surprise, he reached down and touched her forehead, his fingertips running over her tautly pulled back hair, following the line of her part. Then he seemed to realize what he was doing and he withdrew with a jerk.
Kellen quickly crouched down so he was eye to eye with his partner.
“You got tagged. The only thing that saved you was that vest you had on.” His gaze dropped down to her breasts, once again hidden safely behind the light armor. “Whatever you call it, I say it was luck and I’m damn grateful for it.” He shook his head once, slowly. “I don’t like the idea of telling my little buddy his mommy won’t be coming home.”
Inez gasped in a breath and her hands balled into fists. “Kellen Gordon, don’t you dare! Christ! You are the only man I have ever worked with who hasn’t treated me like some special case just because I have tits and a kid!” One of her fists struck him in the shoulder where she knew it wasn’t protected. The strike knocked him off balance and he sat down hard on the ground.
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