“Camellia, forgive me. I don’t do well any time Peter Whitney’sname comes up in conjunction with what he did to me. I still haven’t come to terms with some of the things I did before I knew what I was capable of. Now, at the first sign of anything new or different in me, a part of me panics.”
It was difficult for a man like him to confess this sort of vulnerability—this sort of weakness—to a woman he wanted to claim for his own. Yeah, maybe he had a bit too much pride, but damn it, no man wanted his woman to think he was weak.
He hoped she could hear the sincerity in his voice, because she had already distanced herself so far from him, he knew she couldn’t feel the truth. In a way, that was a good thing, because he still loathed the idea of having a fungus be a part of him. What did that even mean? Why had Whitney ever thought to put that in him?
Of course, if the fungus was the source of his early warning system, he could certainly see the value. Was that possible? If so, it was an invaluable resource, and one he shouldn’t have been so ready to reject simply because he didn’t like the word “fungus.” Or because it came from Whitney. Some of the enhancements he had given them had turned out to be assets once they learned how to control them, and Lily had taught them how to put up the barriers needed to protect their unfiltered brains.
Camellia sent him a vague smile, one that didn’t quite make it to her eyes. No longer entirely blue or silver but somewhere in between, her eyes had gone to those of a cat. He found himself looking at a focused leopard, not a laughing woman. He’d hurt her. Really hurt her. She’d spent a lifetime being regarded as a science project. No doubt the guards in the laboratory had called her a freak more than once. Probably often.
“There’s always a danger when listening to someone else’s private thoughts of hearing no good about oneself.”
Her voice was light. Just the right hint of amusement, as if she were sharing an inside joke with him, but he knew she wasn’t. Shewasn’t sharing anything of herself at all anymore. Not only had she withdrawn completely from him, but she’d also somehow cut him off from that extraordinary network he’d tapped into.
“Don’t do this, Camellia. My reaction had nothing to do with you. I’m just so damned tired of finding out all the different crap Whitney put inside me. Every time I know what I am and feel like I’m starting to get a handle on it, something new pops up.” He watched her closely, hating that an unguarded reaction had damaged the growing trust between them. “I never understood how I could sense danger so much faster than the rest of my team. I thought I had some kind of built-in radar no one else had. I mean all of us have the acute senses of animals. Leopards. Wolves. Owls.”
Deliberately, he named the ones he knew she would be drawn to because she had those in her as well. “But I always had that little extra something they didn’t. I was able to warn the team of danger long before anyone else felt it, and I couldn’t tell Ryland or any of the others how I did it. Now that I know, I feel especially foolish for having such a negative reaction to the very thing that saved my team so often.”
She kept that same practiced smile. “No worries, Jonas. I understand. Peter Whitney likes his little experiments with people.”
“Whitney.” Jonas growled. “That bastard faked his own death and left my team and me locked in cages in his laboratory, like we were fucking lab rats. At the time, most of our team couldn’t operate on their own without an anchor to pull the psychic energy from them. They had no way to stop the assault on their brains, and none of us knew what was happening. We didn’t know he’d messed with our DNA—that was something we never agreed to—so when some of us started getting hyperaggressive and others started manifesting strange new abilities, it made no sense to us. We didn’t have any answers and had no one to tell us what was happening. Not to mention, there were people trying to murder us.”
“He was probably sitting back and recording everything,” Camellia said.
“Probably.” That was exactly the sort of sick sociopath Whitney was.
Jonas let himself really look at her. She was quite beautiful to him. Different. Her unusual eyes were framed with thick dark lashes, and her dark hair contrasted with her pale skin. When he looked at her closely, he could see she had a dusting of freckles across her nose, like little specks of gold. Everything about her looked delicate, from her hands—the fingers of which were curled around the branch of a Middlemist Red Camellia bush—to her narrow rib cage.
She wasn’t emaciated by any means—she had hips and breasts—but she was well proportioned for her height, and she looked as if she needed protection. His protection.
Jonas didn’t look at women that way. He wasn’t a knight in shining armor. He didn’t want needy. Or clingy. He had never envisioned having a woman of his own, a permanent partner, in his bed and his life. Especially not once he was enhanced. He’d thought about it after watching Ryland with Lily and Nico with Dahlia. They worked, even when things got rough.
Jonas just didn’t think that sort of relationship would work for him—until he met Camellia. The instant he’d seen her, he knew she was meant to be his. He was born for her. It was that simple. Whitney had nothing to do with it. He may have brought them together faster than it would have taken normally, but Jonas knew the moment he laid eyes on Camellia he would have gone after her, no matter what.
He detested that he had hurt her.
“Why didn’t you come to our fortress, Camellia? You had to know who was living there. You get too much information not to have known that at least one of the women you grew up with wasin that compound. I’ve been trying to understand why you wouldn’t, but nothing tracks. If you thought we were holding any of your friends against their will, I doubt anything would have stopped you from coming to their aid. So why did you stay away? Why not come down and introduce yourself?”
Jonas didn’t take his eyes off her. He no longer had that deep connection with her, but he was good at reading people. Maybe it was part of his predatory enhancements, but he could read every little movement, every subtle hint or change of expression.
Her lips compressed just the tiniest bit as she bit down on the inside of her mouth. Most people wouldn’t have noticed that slight tell, but she had beautiful lips, and he was already very fond of them. Any small change in the shape or the way they glistened, anything at all, he was bound to notice. He also had extremely acute hearing, and he didn’t miss the way her heartbeat accelerated for just a second or two. Almost as soon as her heart sped up, she took a slow breath, and her pulse dropped back to normal.
Jonas had to hand it to her: Camellia was good. Extremely good. She wasn’t going to be easy to win over, and she wasn’t going to be easy to read. Most of the time, when he needed answers from someone, he could either charm them into lowering their guard, or he could slip his questions into the conversation and read their resulting physical response for answers. Neither of which were going to work with Camellia. He’d destroyed his chance at charming her, and her poker face was the best he’d ever seen.
But there was a reason she’d been avoiding the GhostWalkers, and he needed to know why.
4
Camellia took her time, breathing in and out slowly, not allowing herself to panic. Jonas Harper was in her garden, surrounded by her allies. She could escape if she needed to. She held on to that. For a short time, she’d had hope that she wouldn’t spend her life alone, but his unmistakable reaction to what she was, what she would always be, told her how she would be received no matter where she was in the world—even with the GhostWalkers. Even with the man Whitney had paired her with.
And that man—her paired mate, who couldn’t hide his revulsion of her—seriously wanted to know why she hadn’t approached the GhostWalkers once she discovered their compounds nearby? She had more than one reason, but why would she disclose them to someone she couldn’t trust? She wasn’t going to lie to him. She doubted if he would believe a lie from her. So she gave him a portion of the truth. “I’ve been alone so long that I didn’t know how to handle the thought of seeing anyone.”
Jonas continued to stare at her with his golden eyes. Completelyfocused. The eyes of a predator. She was looking at the hunter now, and she knew it. He wasn’t going to take a partial answer from her. He remained silent, waiting.
Camellia’s fingers inadvertently tightened around the branch, and she knew he noticed. His gaze didn’t shift toward that minute movement, but something about him conveyed his instant knowledge. She was a predator as well, but she suspected his hunter’s instincts were natural-born, a part of him long before he was ever enhanced. She recognized he was very, very dangerous. She had several advantages, one being she was always underestimated. Always. She had nearly given away one of her most important advantages.
He was still waiting for her to explain why she hadn’t approached the GhostWalkers or the women with them who’d once been her friends. She gave a light shrug of her shoulders. “I knew Marigold was going to stay with Ken Norton. She told me she was. I don’t trust as easily.”
She had nearly trusted easily, simply because her connection to Jonas had been so strong, partly because of the mycelium network but mostly through the Middlemist Red. He wasn’t even aware of that one, and she hoped he never became aware of it. She’d almost given it away with her talk of Whitney and his love of exotic flowers and greenhouses. She couldn’t imagine what kind of Frankenstein he’d think her—and him—if he realized the truth of what Whitney had done to them.
