Page 43 of Conquered Betrayal
“We’ve found something,” Marley called from the cockpit, breaking our silent standoff. “You better come in here.”
14
LANDON
I pressedher hands to the wall, my bear reveling in the submissive position, and breathed in the vanilla scent at the base of her throat.
“God, the things you do to me,” I groaned against her skin.
Leaning away, I lifted the gray business skirt upward, then stilled. A black lace thong and matching garter belt held up her stockings—I’d died and gone to heaven.
“Did you wear these for me?”
She nodded, her breaths leaving in short bursts. I stroked the blade of my hand over the slip of silk between her legs, her thighs shaking in need. “I love it. You’re so damn sexy.”
I wanted to tie her up and make her scream with pleasure—but we weren’t there yet.
Soon.
* * *
Marley’s voice came from the tricked-out room full of monitors, startling us out of our staring contest. Our eyes locked on one another, Jolyn and I stood at the same time, the coffee table separating us.
My heart pounded with everything she’d told me. I’d understood she knew about shifters after talking to Walker last night, but having heard her story, of why this was all happening, tilted my whole reality.
I wracked my brain for what else besides the collar would have been on the download she’d stolen. I’d set up that secondary lab for shifters on my staff to work on shifter-related tech. The collar was shifter-specific, but other projects were shifter-inspired. A human working on them would have asked too many questions. Later, I hadn’t needed the second lab. We’d made leaps and bounds in the tech community, and any new development from Urick Enterprises was seen as unique innovation, well-padded from anything pointing directly to my kind—like the shifter-proof comm she’d been using earlier. How she’d gotten in and out of a lab run by shifters without being detected was the real miracle.
She’d said her brother knew who shifters were just by looking at them. How was that possible? Had it been a lie to control her? Or was there truth behind the statement? Wouldn’t he have told her that I, too, was a shifter before she came to work for me?
From the way she spoke, she remained ignorant.A blessing or a curse?Because after all she’d revealed, all her honesty, I was still lying to her.
Even though I’d moved away from Goldenlach Ridge after I’d graduated for school, I’d heard through my mother, or one of her friends, that Jolyn had stopped attending school in favor of tutors her senior year, something about the public system not being good enough for her. Now I understood the truth. It had been because of what she’d witnessed in that forest that day. My heart ached for her.
That day was one of the most tragic of my life. I remembered seeing a flash of color in the trees right after Kane had attacked Tom, the other grizzly shifter. It must have been her, but I hadn’t scented anyone, and there’d been so much going on at the time, I hadn’t thought of it further.
Tom had been attacking hikers all spring. No one had known it was him until we’d stumbled across him and his kills. In the chaos of the scene, Kane killed Tom, trampling the already-dead woman in the confusion, and later thinking it was his fault she was dead because he’d once again lost his sense of self.
If that day hadn’t happened, Kane, Walker, and I might have been in completely different situations: Walker using his spot-on intuition to do business at my side, and Kane in the development room with his designs instead of hiding away from society. My plan from the time I was fifteen was for the three of us to work together. While we were walking in the woods that day, Walker told us about his plan to join the military. I’d been about to tell him to come to Vancouver with me, to join me in business instead, when we’d heard those screams.
I straightened my shoulders. Jolyn may have set everything in motion, but she wasn’t responsible for her brother’s actions. She’d been a victim too, and for longer than I’d understood before today. All the time she’d worked for me, I should have realized, and it made me sick to my stomach that I could have done something—that scent of nerves that always hung around her. But she’dseemedhappy. Now she admitted she didn’t know the definition of the word. My chest squeezed painfully.
“Jolyn?” Marley called, and the name made us move.
We found Jolyn’s friends sitting side by side in front of four monitors, a bunch of digital file folders on one screen. The fresh paint smell was stronger here than anywhere else, mixing with the ozone from the computers. The pair glanced at me, then Jolyn.
“Do you want him in here?” Marley asked. “It’s sensitive stuff.”
I prepared to argue my case, but before I could speak, Jolyn nodded.
Marley turned to her screens. “Two big things. One, I found another property in the area. A bottling plant. I need to do some more research, but I think we should check it out. And two, I cracked a bunch of files marked with the name we found earlier, BDX-32. There’s a shit ton of stuff about it in our newly acquired intel.”
“Like what?” Jolyn asked, gripping the back of Marley’s chair while I leaned against the wall so I could see all the monitors at once.
“A lot of sciencey stuff, like what sort of hoops a person would have to go through inventing a new drug and getting it approved by the FDA.”
“Sounds like something my brother would have a hand in.”
“Exactly.” Marley tipped her head at the screen full of file names. “Then I found ones labeled Test Trials. This one has a time stamp from about six months ago.”
