“I knew that she couldn’t be trusted. I figured the best way of testing her loyalties and of finding out the truth was to change her. We injected her when she was first taken. My spies in your lab suspected you had a sexual connection. It stood to reason she’d be even more driven to you if I used your protocol on her. Whether she was aware of it or not, she would be impatiently driven to you. The mating drive often impedes all logic. And as brilliant as she is, I needed something quite powerful to impede her logic.” Paulson turned to the two guards at his back. “Lock them both in the cage. Maybe a few days of watching her mate suffer up close will make her more tractable. You see, she may not have found out the solution I want, but I know she is fully capable of it. Just as you knew it, Gregory.”
“You just decided you weren’t willing to wait for her to come to it on her own?” Kincaid snapped and snarled when the guard came forward, reaching for Jenesis. He jerked her behind him, even when she instinctively rumbled a threat of her own, gnashing her teeth at the guard. She recoiled suddenly, her hand jerking up to her mouth. He knew the pain she was in immediately. It beat through him instinctively as well as with memory. Her jaw would be hurting incredibly as her teeth made room for the fangs that wanted to explode free for the first time.
But he couldn’t spare her the attention and affection, the comforting he would have given to her under other circumstances. Whatever else happened, he could not let them be locked up in that cage again. As strong as a Morphate was, titanium was stronger. Kincaid lurched toward the guards, growling fiercely at them. Both guards responded in kind.
All right. Three Morphates to two, and one of his two had no idea how to be a Morphate. Still, he’d fought worse odds.
“Big mistake,” Kincaid hissed through his fangs. “I’m not an Alpha for nothing. And being a Morphate doesn’t make you Alpha, Paulson.”
Jenesis felt Kincaid spring away from her and into the trio of men. Her theory about the savagery an Alpha male must be capable of was nothing compared to what she was seeing. Kin went for the guard on the right first, savagely ripping his head half from his shoulders. The opposite guard pulled his weapon and began shooting wildly at Kincaid, forcing Paulson, who was in the way, to hit the deck or suffer being shot. The first guard hit the floor in a bloody, twitching mess as Kincaid turned on the second man standing.
That was when she saw the first shot hit her mate’s body. It was a shoulder shot, entering the front left shoulder and blowing a hefty hole out the back.
Jenesis would remember very little of what happened next. The sight of her mate being attacked triggered everything Morphate inside of her all at once. Fangs and claws exploded in a fury, as did the vicious lunge of her body. Before Kincaid could even move forward, she was on the second guard, biting his firing arm with all of her strength and ripping at it in a head-shaking motion like a dog with its favorite bone.
The torsion against the guard’s shoulder ripped his arm free of its socket. The Morphate guard screamed as muscle and sinew detached. He fell to the floor, leaving his arm between her jaws as she shook blood over herself and her mate.
Paulson saw the way of things and made haste for the door. He was only interested in more backup, and the alarm button was just outside.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Kincaid snapped, burying his claws into the man’s legs. Once he had hold of the doctor, he hauled him hard toward the cage. He missed the door by a few feet, allowing Paulson to rebound in full Morphate glory.
“I’m an Alpha in my own right,” he growled. “Did you think I wouldn’t make sure of that?”
Paulson ripped into Kincaid with vicious swipes of his claws. Hauling all his weight forward instead of back, he made for Kincaid’s throat. What he got for his trouble was a blindsiding headbutt from the left as Kincaid Gregory’s mate made her bid to help and protect him. Paulson raked at her even as he fell to the ground from the power of her charge. He caught her along the side of her face, tearing her from forehead to chin.
His most recent mistake in a lineup of many. Kincaid was on him in a heartbeat, teeth in his throat, compressing . . . rending.
Kincaid left Paulson much the same way Paulson had left him when he’d had him shot through the throat. He didn’t care. He didn’t even feel satisfaction over exacting some form of one-on-one revenge. The price of it had been too high. And he turned instantly to the one who had paid that price.
Adrenaline and Morphate mutation aside, she’d never been injured so badly before. She’d recoiled in shock. Kin went to her quickly, his arms wrapping tightly around her.
“I know it hurts, honey,” he soothed softly.
But just the same he had to force her up on her feet. The hallway was empty beyond the open door, but for how long? He wouldn’t have them doing to her what they had been doing to him for the past few days. He bent to press his lips to hers in an encouraging kiss; then sweeping her blood from his lips with his tongue, he urged her into the hall.
Epilogue
Kincaid entered his penthouse apartment, the one he had lived in before moving above the labs in an effort to keep a closer eye on everything. The building wasn’t very high, characteristic of all the historic buildings in Dark Philly. But he occupied the top two floors, the rest remaining empty for when Nick, special clients, or visiting Morphates came to town. But this apartment had a beautiful stone terrace, patiently cultivated greenery bringing a bit of living landscape to the spectacular view of the City.
He found Jenesis there, as usual, her knees pulled up to her chest and a cup of tea resting in her hand as she stared off into nothing. Her face was healing, the raking wound a soft pink and nowhere near as bad as it had been two days ago. In fact, it was almost indiscernible, if not for the darkened pigmentation that came from her insistence on sitting out in the sun. But that, too, would be gone by the next day. He wished he could say the same for the shock and depression she was in.
But he wasn’t going to push. He’d be the last person to push. So he kept talking to her, as if she were present and attentive.
“Well, the lab was gutted and Paulson’s gone, as expected,” he said. They’d been in Mexico. It wasn’t easy to rally forces to invade the lab in a speedy manner. His position as a Morphate Alpha held little sway with Mexican authorities. As far as foreign countries were concerned, Morphates were the problem of the Federated States. So he’d had to wait until the Alpha Council could rally a force to send after him. They’d had to go Black Ops because technically Morphates had yet to be given permission to travel outside of the country. Hell, they weren’t even allowed to live outside of the Dark Cities.
He pushed his testiness about that aside. That wasn’t where his major concern rested at the moment.
“They torched the place this time.” Much in the way Paulson had destroyed the Philly lab. It had infuriated him to hear about it while being held captive, but seeing the aftermath had hurt. Especially considering there had been loss of human life in the process. Dark Philly didn’t have the fire departments it needed yet. And even though the building had been fitted with the latest in fire prevention, it hadn’t been enough to prevent injury and death from collapse and explosion. The Morphates had all survived, of course. Again, not his main focus.
“Can I get you something to eat?”
“I’m not hungry for food.”
He’d been reaching to pluck a dead leaf from a plant in an absent need for occupation, but he froze a moment and then turned quickly to face her. She’d barely said a word to him since their escape. He’d started to wonder if he didn’t have what it took to help her after all. Maybe he ought to get her professional help; something none of them had had the advantage of originally.
Then her distinction struck him. Suddenly a wash of insecurity crept over him. Just because they’d connected so quickly in the stress of Paulson’s lab didn’t mean she’d want anything to do with him now. Just because his Morphate self wanted no one else but her and had come to grips with that a wh
ile ago, that didn’t mean she would feel the same.
“I . . .” He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t bring himself to offer her alternative sources of blood. The dead leaf crumbled in the clench of his fist. “You can use me for that, you know. I won’t . . . I don’t expect . . .”
“Don’t expect or don’t want? After all, I’m not human any longer. I’m the doctor who made you. And now the thing you hate most about yourself as well. I can hardly blame you.”
He was across the patio and kneeling before her in an instant, her elbows in his hands as he drew her up, the cup she’d held falling to the stone and shattering, tea splashing over his pants.
“I don’t hate you. I hate nothing about you.”
“Do you say that because your Morphate makes you? My Morphate says the wildest things to me. I suddenly understand how you separate the two halves of yourself in your mind.” Her eyes went wet as she looked down into his. “How arrogant you must have thought me, lecturing you on how to mesh your two selves, how to find your lost humanity. With this raging inside of you, how could you?”
“You’re saying that now because you’ve not fed yet.” How had she managed to go nearly five, six days without doing so? he wondered suddenly. When he’d first awakened, there was no stopping him. He’d taken the first female he’d gotten hold of. It’d been that way for almost everyone. “Are you doing this to punish yourself? Or because you know what it will mean once you’ve crossed that point? Feeding won’t change the facts. You are Morphate now, Jenesis. You are part of this clan.”
“Tailor-made. Lucky you.” She reached to touch her fingertips to his lips and he could smell green tea on them. Sugar. A touch of honey.
“I’d have been much happier if you’d stayed who you were.” He cursed when he saw the hurt that entered her eyes. “Shit. I mean . . . I don’t want you to have to go through this. Am I going to lie to you and tell you I’m not glad that I’ll be able to touch you without ripping you to pieces? No, I never wanted to hurt you. I held back every single time I touched you, trying not to hurt you. But I’d rather do anything other than watch you struggle with this. I wish I’d never been so selfish as to think it was a good idea that you put yourself at risk like you did. If I’d been thinking, I’d have considered this possibility. I’d have realized that no one should get within inches of that maniac. Certainly not someone I—”
“Certainly not someone you felt should be your mate.”
He closed his eyes and sighed.
“You know what? I’ve been a fuckup. I see that so damn clearly now. I wish I could take back at least half the times I acted the ass to you. But please don’t let that keep you from feeding. I’ll . . .” God, was he able to? “I’ll promise you not to touch you in any other way if that’s what you want. I hope it’s not what you want because I haven’t been able to think straight since the day I first laid eyes on you, and that’s only gotten more intense with time. I understood that before Paulson got hold of you.”
“Did you? Or is that just a convenient truth?” she wondered as she examined his features closely.
“Nothing I say will ever make you believe that unless you want to, so I’m not going to argue with you about it. However, I will say . . . I have a long time to redeem myself, if you see fit to let me.”
She gave him a weak smile. “That’s true. I could make you pay for your obstinacy for a very long time.”
“You do recall that I’m Alpha?” he growled in soft warning to her.
“You do recall that I am Alpha female?” she countered.
His heart caught tightly, wanting to soar and yet afraid to.
“You need to feed first,” he tempted her softly.
And suddenly she flashed ferocious fangs in his face, a hissing growl spitting out of her an instant before she sank them into his neck.
Clothing disappeared from both their bodies, more torn away than stripped off. When she straddled him to impale herself on him, it was with very little preamble or foreplay. None was needed. The bite itself was a form of foreplay that could not be matched. And the understanding that she now could fit him perfectly inside of herself meant much less to him than the way she was smiling down at him, licking his essence from her lips and touching her fingertips to his face with a fondness that Morphate ferocity on its own would not have allowed room for.
Or so an outsider might think. The initial feeding and mating was coarse and harsh, but by his third orgasm there was none of that left, and everything tender and human took its place. She was growing tired by then, still not accustomed to her new self and still several days deficient in her nutrition. But that would come in time.
Everything would come in time.
The Science of Pleasure Page 11
