Wallace laughed. “George and I are unfamiliar with each other.”
She blinked. “I tracked you on a list we found of traffickers. You’re partners.”
“Think again,” he said in an almost sing-song voice.
She thought rapidly through the events of the last three months. “Wait a minute. You hacked my email and falsely tied yourself to George Contingent?”
“Of course, I hacked your email. It was rather easy to do.” He tsked. “You’re not nearly as secure as you think.”
“But why?” she asked. “A Kurjan wouldn’t protect a human smuggler.”
Wallace tapped his smooth jaw, seemingly comfortable in his crouch. “I could care less about George or human children. It was you, Leah. You’re the female I needed to draw in, and I used George to do so.”
Her eyes widened. “Wait a minute. Why?”
His gaze raked over her. “Once I discovered the searches you had conducted on me and my smuggling operation, I was intrigued.”
She ran through possible scenarios and came up with nothing. “I don’t understand.”
His brows drew down. “Perhaps you’re not as smart as I thought. Kurjans don’t traffic humans.”
“Oh, crap. You’re trafficking enhanced females.” That made a sick kind of sense. She’d heard of the Kurjans kidnapping enhanced women for mating, so perhaps the documents she’d foundhadincluded him…just not as a co-conspirator with George. “How would a Kurjan like you get lumped in with the human list we compiled from the internet?”
He shrugged, his wide torso moving the air around them. “Quite easily, as it turns out. We use some of the same transportation methods as other traffickers.”
Bile swirled in her stomach. So, he didn’t care about those poor kids in the slightest. About any humans, most likely. “You’re sick.”
“I might be, but once I traced you back to the source, I discovered you were mated to a Maxwell. That fact kept you alive. Otherwise, I would’ve just found and ended you. My people have been hunting you for decades.” He licked his blood-red lips, his tongue also too red. “You’re much too important to just kill, so I falsified some of the data that included Mr. Contingent so you’d come looking for me.”
She reared away. Bile tried to rise up her throat, and she swallowed it down. This obviously had something to do with the Maxwells, and irritation clocked her that he hadn’t fully informed her about his mission. Well, the mission that didn’t include squiring her to his headquarters. “What does this have to do with Jasper?”
“Everything.” Wallace patted her thigh, careful to keep the sequined dress between them.
She looked down to find sequins all over the ground. Apparently, her dress hadn’t been made as well as she had hoped. “Jasper left town,” she lied. “He’s nowhere near here right now.”
“He will be,” Wallace said, finally standing.
She had to crane her head to look up. The Kurjans were notoriously tall, and this one had to be almost seven feet. “Jasper isn’t coming to get me. I’m not bait.”
“You’re the loveliest bait I’ve used in a long time,” Wallace said. “I assume Jasper will receive our texts sometime soon. Our scouts tell me he’s out of range, but we’ll get to him.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand this. Why are you going after Jasper?”
Wallace’s eyebrows rose, and he crouched again. “You know the story about the Maxwells and my uncle Baston, don’t you?”
“No,” she burst out, trying to yank her arms free. The chains held. “Jasper mentioned something about a long-time feud. What about?” The male should’ve told her everything.
Wallace dusted off his hands by clapping them together. “There’s really only one thing that would cause families to feud for more than three thousand years. Do you know what that is?”
“They’re morons?”
He chuckled. “You’re funny. I like that. No. A female is the only force strong enough to keep males wanting to draw blood for millennia.”
“Not me.” Leah drew back.
“No, not you. Although, I can see the appeal.” His gaze raked her again.
She shivered. Thank goodness he couldn’t touch her without getting a horrible rash. “Then who?”
