Stomping out of the back door, Beaumont made his way to a small garden area carved out of the rainforest with care. Someone had a green thumb, but Beaumont wasn’t seeking beauty. He needed somewhere he could justbefor a moment. Where instead of being the lead council, or devoted mate, or protective friend, he could wallow just for one damned moment over the death of his family and now the apparent use of his youngest son’s genetics.
Sitting on a small stone slab, the sun on his face and the muggy heat clinging to him like a hug, Beaumont could almost hear Eugenie’s voice.It’s not the child’s fault.She hadn’t been talking about Victoria, who was as sweet and as gentle as her mother. Eugenie had been referring to James, who at almost eight, was as much of a wild child as Beaumont could ever hope to raise. Fearless. Adventurous. Beaumont closed his eyes, recalling a time when he’d come home to find James perched on the stable roof ready to jump, and Beau yelling at him to get down from his safer position on the ground below.
You’ll get hurt,Beau had cried, ever trying to be the responsible one.
Daddy will catch me.That had been James’ response to seeing him ride up.Catch me, Daddy.And that time, Beaumont did.
Now there was a woman carrying his son’s genetics in the Putney kitchen. A woman who shut him out from the conversation she was having with Duron. A woman who was as close to family as Beaumont might ever see, and she’d shut him out.
Fuck, it hurt. And the logical part of Beaumont’s mind knew it shouldn’t. Selina didn’t know him. She likely had never known James either. She just had some random scraps of his beautiful boy’s genetics floating around in her body… and Beaumont had no clue how they got there.
“Wyatt just called.” Duron sat with a heavy thump beside him. “He’s working his way through the inner circle levels that idiot in the basement mentioned. He talked about taking out one of the three men we saw in town that day, and impersonating him, but I mentioned the scent similarity aspect, and he agreed it’s too risky. Scents are a lot harder to mimic than looks. It might take him a few days, but he’s hopeful if he can prove useful enough, he might get a meet and greet with the Devil by the end of the week.”
“Do I even want to know how he’s supposed to prove his usefulness?” Beaumont snapped and then shook his head. “Forget I said that. You didn’t deserve that, and neither did Wyatt. I know what side Wyatt is on. But her in there…” He flicked his finger back in the direction of the kitchen. “I haven’t got a clue.”
“Why does it matter?” Duron asked, and as Beaumont went to snap at him again, because by all that was holy he was on his last fucking nerve, Duron persisted. “Think about it logically. Her in there doesn’t matter—not to us. Pushing for answers from the unwilling… from what I saw, she will never break, much like I wouldn’t if questioned about you or my friends.”
The stark truth was like a punch in Beaumont’s gut. All the pictures Duron saw, and had shared with him from Selina’s experiences, were Duron’s own. The cages. The beatings. The starvation and neglect. The intolerable abuse.
“I’m sorry,” he said, although if there were ever two more pathetic words in the English language, those two were it. “I let emotions, and long dead hopes blind me. I just felt, if I knew who this damned father was that Selina keeps mentioning, then I might be one step closer to resolving something about what happened to my family. I can’t help thinking now, there’s a link between this Devil’s organization here and the murders in California, but for the life of me, I don’t know what it is, and believe me, I am well aware of how crazy this all sounds.”
He didn’t say anything, but Duron leaned gently against Beaumont’s shoulder as the two men stared out at the rainforest. His solid body and quietness of spirit helped Beaumont think logically, which was what he needed to do.
“You stayed at the Thalassa compound, didn’t you? Before coming here?”
Duron nodded.
“The Thalassas recovered a number of records from Andromeda’s ship before they sunk it, am I right?”
“Todd and Kelvin Thalassa are still working through them in between spending time with the babies.”
“And those records have details on shifter families, people who were stolen, experimented on, and things like that?”
Duron’s face shuttered. It wasn’t a physical thing as such – Duron’s expression didn’t change, but Beaumont could feel the difference in his mate.
“I have no idea, but I believe so, yes.”
Knowing he would have to address his mate’s issues real soon, Beaumont hated any distance between them already, he did need to follow his train of thought. “The idea is Urt used the council funds to organize labs so that scientists and trainers could manipulate genetics, because he wanted to be able to shift into a dragon.”
“He was an idiot.”
The assassins seemed to like that word a lot, but Duron wasn’t wrong. “Andromeda, supposedly human, but then later found to be Urt’s mother, managed to stay alive for five hundred years, but stunk of death due to the type of magic that was imbued into the floorboards of his ship—am I right? The magic from the kraken parents.”
“Supposedly. Markov and Cassius, along with the dragons, destroyed the ship. I wasn’t there then.”
No, you were off doing council funded jobs, killing people because you felt you didn’t have a choice.“We’ve always assumed the experiments conducted in places like the one you and your friends experienced, all stemmed from the work Andromeda was doing. A form of outsourcing. But this shit here in Paraguay… this isn’t connected to Andromeda’s work, is it? They initially set up with council funding, but then this Devil person came along with his wads of drug money and started funding the creation of the perfect killing machine.”
“Records seem to indicate that’s the case.”
“I’ll send a message to Todd Thalassa, to see if I can get hold of the information that came from the lab they created Nico and Teilo in.” Beaumont pulled his cell phone from his pants pocket, opened his email app, and started typing quickly.
“Todd doesn’t have them.”
Beaumont stopped typing and looked up.
“They’re here in the Putney house. Kylo took some of the stuff from a shifter’s office in the police station, and then some extra records found before they blew the compound up, where Ben’s mates were left to die.”
“Here in the house all along…” Sighing, Beaumont deleted his message to Todd and shoved his cell phone back in his pocket. He would go and look, in a minute, but he had something else to do first. “Duron, mate.” He waited until Duron looked at him. “You have some fears, discomfort, something in you, you’re blocking. I can tell you are, but I don’t know what it is. If I’ve done something, anything, to annoy you, or worry you… I need to know what it is so I can fix it. I don’t ever want there to be secrets between us. You can tell me anything.”
