How would Shannon ever find them if Leni and Riley didn’t wait for her?
She would stay as long as it took for her sister to come home. And until that time, she would do whatever she had to in order to keep her sister’s child safe. Even if she had to take on Travis Parrish, his family, and the whole damn town.
With her thoughts turning too dark, Leni swallowed past them. “So, where is your home, Knox?”
“Wherever my boots take me.”
He said it matter-of-factly, no emotion at all. Yet his eyes said something different. Haunted, focused on some nebulous point in the distance. And now, she wondered. Was all of his relentless forward motion merely a habit to keep moving as he’d claimed, or a reluctance to reflect on what lay behind him?
Just when she was tempted to ask, his deep voice broke the quiet.
“The longest I’ve ever stayed anywhere by choice was Florida.”
She gaped at him. “The Sunshine State? That’s a risky choice for a member of the Breed, especially one with the kind ofdermaglyphsyou have. You’re Gen One, aren’t you?”
He swiveled a narrow stare at her. “I didn’t expect you to know so much about my kind.”
She shrugged. “Just because you’re possibly the first Breed male to come through Parrish Falls in recent memory doesn’t mean we’ve never heard of the internet or national news.”
He chuckled. It was a rusty sound, but she liked it. She liked the way his lips quirked with the hint of a smile as he resumed his focus on the drive.
Leni had her own reasons for taking an interest in his kind, but Knox didn’t need to know anything about the Breedmate mark she’d been born with. Her mother had cautioned her all her life to keep that part of her a secret from the outside world.
Apart from her mom and her best friend, Carla Hansen, Leni’s grandmother and sister were the only other people who knew that her father had been something other than human. Not Breed, but another kind of immortal. Leni never knew him. She had grown up knowing she was different, knowing she belonged to two worlds, yet feeling somehow separated from either one.
Knox was the closest she had ever come to glimpsing that other side.
In the diner she had placed him close to her age, despite the jaded, world-weary air about him. If he was first-generation Breed, he easily could have been born centuries ago.
“Are you really old, Knox?”
He exhaled a wry noise. “You sure like to talk. You ask a lot of questions too.”
“Sorry.” She shook her head and leaned back in the passenger seat. “You don’t have to answer. I’m just . . . curious.”
“I’m not as old as most Gen Ones,” he said after a moment. “I was born a Hunter.”
Leni swallowed. She knew the awful term—and the basics of what it implied. “You were part of that secret genetics program?”
He scoffed under his breath. “Genetics program. Is that what they call it on the news and internet? Dragos’s labs were a prison. My Hunter brothers and I were enslaved to the program.”
“I’m sorry, Knox.”
He lifted his shoulder. “No reason to be.”
But she was. Leni knew only the cursory details, but it was enough to send a chill into her veins. Young Breed boys created and raised in a laboratory, deprived of caring or contact, punished for any show of emotion. Shackled into obedience by collars containing concentrated ultraviolet light, which could be detonated on their master’s whim or command.
The Hunters were bred to be the strongest, most merciless Breed soldiers in existence. Trained killers. A madman’s personal army.
Brutal, highly skilled assassins.
No wonder Knox hadn’t flinched with Dwight in the diner tonight. No wonder he seemed to generate a cold, unmistakable menace simply by being in the room. She could only imagine what a man like Knox could do to anyone who truly crossed him.
He was more than dangerous.
He was death.
Why the idea didn’t send a jolt of terror through her, she didn’t want to know.
