She shook her head. “I never got close enough. I had to make money to support us. Libby is...” Her stomach dropped. “Wasa spender. She liked nice hotels and pretty clothes. I would get the money to pay for those things for her.”
“She didn’t work?”
Meiling sighed. Libby shone like the brightest star. It didn’t bother Meiling to work for both of them. Libby’s family had taken care of her for most of her life. She could support Libby. “No, she didn’t work. She was never attacked, not until Colombia, and I didn’t get the sense that it was the same people involved. If they had been looking for me, they would have tortured her to get the information on where to find me.”
“Would she have given them what they wanted to know?”
Meiling refused to cry. Libby could be selfish at times. Moody. Even temperamental. But she genuinely loved Meiling and regarded her as family. She shook her head and then reminded herself that Gedeon was blind. “She wouldn’t, at least she’d hold out as long as she could. She was stubborn, and if she thought they were going to harm me, she would do her best to make them believe she didn’t know where I was. Truthfully, she didn’t really know. She did always have my cell number.”
4
GEDEONlistened carefully to every nuance of her voice. Meiling was pushing down grief as best she could. He had an unexpected urge to wrap a comforting arm around her and pull her close, just as he had in the shower. The reaction was so foreign to his nature and that of his cat that he wanted to take a little time to examine it. Was it possible she was his mate? If so, why wasn’t his male pushing to claim her?
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. Femalessuch 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. Thebratyawanted 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 rulingpakhan. He had been so young, thepakhanthought 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 thepakhanand 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 everybratyalair 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 menwho 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.
He lifted his hand to the bandages covering his eyes, wanting—no—needingto rip the damn covering from them. Her hand very gently stopped his. It was all he could do not to knock her hand away. He was grateful for the years of discipline.
He hadn’t revealed one single thing about his childhood to anyone, not since he’d left the lair in complete and utter ruin with no way to repair itself. They couldn’t possibly come back from their loss of power. The powerful families around them had gobbled up their territories and swallowed their businesses, leaving them with nothing at all.
Gedeon had never wanted to claim his elite status or have it known he was the sole survivor of his bloodline. As far as he was concerned, the only thing useful about it was the gifts that came with it. His abilities that made it possible to run faster, be stronger, recall in detail information heard only once. He picked up languages fast. The list went on and on. He didn’t need to talk about what he was, or who he was. He didn’t want others to know. When he read the shit about him on the internet, things Meiling would have found, no one had a clue where he came from. Just Russia. No one knew about shifters. That was always kept secret.
He forced himself to continue with the conversation. Forced his voice to be casual, as if imparting information to her that she needed to know. Not that he’d witnessed firsthand. Not the kind of thing that had triggered a violentmonster in both him and his leopard that could never be taken back. That monster lived and breathed in him and needed attention all the time in so many ways.
“It’s more common than you think. Bastards believe if the woman isn’t cooperative, they should beat the hell out of her legs with a hammer to make sure she has no choice other than to do what they say. More than once, when I’ve gone in to stop them, I’ve looked at their phones and discovered text messages detailing just how to beat the woman into submission.”
He heard her take a deep breath. Let it out slowly. “Do you have clients that deal in human trafficking? These people, thesebratyafamilies, aren’t saints, Gedeon.”
“Are you listening to me? If they dealt in human trafficking, they wouldn’t be my clients. All of them know it. They know if they become my enemies, they haven’t long for the world. I make it my life’s work to go after these people. I don’t care about compensation for it. It’s a betrayal to me. The drug trafficking is always going to happen. It isn’t right and I don’t have to like it, but it’s going to keep going whether I’m around or not.”
“Do you run drugs for these families?”
“No. Never. I step in when something goes wrong. Someone doesn’t pay a bill and war is about to start. We don’t want that because now innocent civilians could get hurt in the crossfire. I’m called in to negotiate a settlement, or to collect the money owed. I have no direct interest in the product. I just make it known that there is a time limit, and we have to settle to my satisfaction. I’m the last resort.”
