Bonds of Justice

CHAPTER 37

Clay, having driven straight from lunch to take up a watch position around his alpha pair’s home, looked at Sascha as they walked outside her and Lucas’s cabin. He wasn’t as close to her as some of the other sentinels, but he deeply respected the woman his alpha had chosen. She was strong, and she made their pack strong.

“I didn’t say anything to Max,” he said, continuing a conversation they’d had on the phone on his way over, “didn’t want to get his hopes up. But can Noor help Sophia?” His adopted daughter—the owner of a great big chunk of his heart—was part human, part Psy. She’d also formed a soul-deep friendship with another gifted child, Keenan. And that amalgamation of factors had created something amazing.

Sascha put a hand on his arm to steady herself as they stepped over a fallen log, easy with claiming the skin privileges that were a packmate’s right—but that she’d never presumed on until Clay had told her it was okay. “I asked Faith to see if her father could get us Sophia’s medical scans after you called.”

Anthony Kyriakus, Clay thought, was an enigma, a Psy Councilor with an apparent heart. “He came through.”

A quick nod, a tendril of rich black hair escaping her braid to curl over her cheek. “Tammy, Ashaya, and I all had a look at them.” Her expression was bleak when she glanced up. “According to those scans, her organic brain is fine.”

Ah, damn. “That’s what the kids fix, isn’t it?”

“As far as we know—yes. But the fact is, we’re learning as we go with Noor and Keenan.” She caught a leaf that had floated down through the gold-hued forest light, worrying it between her fingers. “Js have also been a mystery since the dawn of their existence. My best guess is that the damage is psychic and cumulative. When I met her . . . I sensed this incredible will containing a vast pain.” Her voice was taut, her bones strained against her skin. “Her shields aren’t broken—they’ve been worn away by a thousand slow drips of acid.”

Clay shoved a hand through his hair. “Is there anything that can be done?” He wanted to help the cop who’d been a friend to his mate when she’d been alone, who’d shed blood in the hunt to find a monster experimenting on vulnerable children like Noor.

Sascha looked so distressed, he knew the answer before she spoke, this empath with her huge heart. “I was going to try to see if I could do something on the psychic level, but according to a note in her file, she’s a minor anchor.” A single tear streaked down her face, her sorrow so heavy he could feel it in his bones. “She’s mainlining the Net—and that Net is slowly going insane.”

Clay released fisted hands to reach out and close one over Sascha’s shoulder. “Did she ever have a chance?”

Sascha’s fingers gripped his in painful sympathy. “No.”

Max returned to his apartment to discover that Morpheus had defected for good. The well-fed cat was purring happily on Sophia’s coffee table when she let him in. “I missed you today,” she said with a smile, but he saw the shadows under her eyes, the new lines of strain on her face.

Heart tight with the force of what he felt for her, he waited only until the door was closed before cupping her cheek, before taking her mouth in a kiss that held as much savagery as tenderness. She responded with a moan low in her throat. “Max, wait.”

He bit her lower lip, furious with her for what she would soon do, the betrayal she would soon commit.

Her eyes shimmered. “Max.”

It wasn’t the tears that stopped him. It was the way she said that, the way she looked at him. Not afraid of him, but for him. “What is it?” He gripped her hips, unable to let her go.

She dropped her forehead against his chest for a moment. “Will you hate me, Max?”

“Every moment of every day.”

“Good.”

Anger whiplashed inside him, at this woman who needed him to remember her. Didn’t she know he’d never forget? “What,” he said, his voice rough with rage withheld, “did you want to tell me?”

A long breath and she raised her head. “While I was in the Net, I did some searches outside the parameters of the case.” Those unusual eyes shifted away, then back. “I found some information for you.”

He wasn’t used to this kind of evasion from her. “If you don’t know that I’ll stand by you—”

Her fingers on his mouth. “I know.” Glittering eyes, a tone that left no room for doubt. “I don’t want this knowledge to hurt you . . . and I know it holds the capacity for enormous pain.”

He took her hand, kissed her knuckles. “I’m tough. I’ll survive.” That’s what he did—survive. But this scar, Sophie’s scar, was never going to heal.

She placed her hand on his cheek in gentle affection, and he knew she understood what he hadn’t said, the hurt he hadn’t vocalized. “River may have been alive as of two years ago.”

His heart stopped. When it kicked out again, he found himself shaking his head, his hands clenching on her—he’d searched for River ever since he became a cop, through every known database and come up blank. “Why would there be anything about him on the PsyNet?”

“His path crossed with that of a human researcher doing a study on adults who’d been drug addicts as children.” Gentle words, a worried gaze. “That researcher’s paper was footnoted—and linked to—by a Psy scientist’s paper on Jax addiction.”

“Where—” he began, but Sophia was already pulling away to pick up a sheet of paper from beside Morpheus’s purring body. Taking the printout, he went straight to the part she’d highlighted.

There it was. River’s name in black and white. The citation noted that the subject had been free of addiction since his fourteenth birthday, when he’d voluntarily entered a program run by a charitable organization.

“Max.” Sophia’s fingers closing over his wrist.

It was only then that he realized his hand was trembling. “They just used first names—this could be someone else altogether.”

“It’s an unusual name and coupled with his age at the time the paper was written, and the addiction . . .”

His mind wasn’t working too well. He looked up, to see her holding a small piece of notepaper. “What’s that?”

“The phone number of the researcher who wrote the original article. He’s currently lecturing at the University of the South Pacific and is stationed in Vanuatu.” There was a near-painful hope in her eyes. “You should be able to get him in his office a little later on, check if it’s your brother.”

Reaching forward, he tugged her into his arms, crushing the feminine softness of her to him, burying his face in her hair. “You don’t know what this means.”

Her fingers dug into his back, her emotions as clear as if she’d spoken.

“You do, don’t you?” he whispered against her ear, the scent of her a balm across his ravaged soul. “You know exactly what this means.”

“Family, Max. You’ll have family.” Fierce, hopeful words. “You won’t be alone.” After I’m gone.

Max clenched his hand in her hair, drawing back so he could look down into her face, so he could speak with his lips against hers. “We,” he said. “We’ll have family.”

Her eyes filled with light, with untrammeled happiness. “Max.” She pressed a kiss to his jaw just as his cell phone began beeping.

It was Bart. “Bonner’s escaped.”

“How is that even possible?” Sophia stared at Max when he shut off the phone and told her what had happened. The prison was underground, all access points securely guarded. Even the emergency exits were set with pressure-sensitive alarms that would activate upon perceiving anything bigger than a field mouse.

Max’s anger was a cold, hard thing. “He had an ‘accident, ’ had to be taken to the medical bay. From the sound of it, he’d been working on the doctor for months. He must’ve convinced her he was innocent.”

“Even so”—Sophia couldn’t imagine the sly evil that was Bonner back out on the streets—“the doctor couldn’t have had the necessary clearance to get him out.”

“But she had access to tranquilizers—she took out the warden, then ransacked his office for the override keys.” Max clenched his jaw so tight, he could hear his bones grind against each other. “Manhunt’s in progress and they’re fairly certain he’s driving the doctor’s car.”

Sophia sat down on the arm of the sofa, her fingers digging into the fabric. “And the doctor?”

“If she’s lucky,” Max said flatly, “she’s already dead. If she’s not . . .” He knew Sophia understood better than anyone what Bonner was capable of, the pain that would be the doctor’s reward for being foolish enough to believe in a sociopath.

A quiet nod. “Do you need to join the manhunt team?”

“I can liaise with them from here.” Bonner was not going to fucking steal Max’s time with Sophia. And—“They have the numbers on the ground.” The team was huge and growing bigger by the hour. “What they need me to do is predict where Bonner might go, update the search grid as we get sightings.” The first thing that had come into Max’s mind had been Bonner’s twisted interest in Sophia. “Sophie, there’s a chance he’ll head to you.”

Sophia swallowed, nodded. “I’ll be with you the majority of the time, and when I’m not, I’ll be in secure buildings. I’ll take one of the security officers with me if I need to go out on my own.”

He loved her for not making him fight to protect her. “Right now, he’s on the ground, so there’s not much danger.” But if he managed to get on a flight . . . “I’ll alert Enforcement here, let DarkRiver know so their network can keep an eye out.”

“Why is Enforcement having such trouble tracking him? Wasn’t be embedded?” Sophia asked, referring to the transmitter all violent offenders had placed under their skin for the duration of their sentence.

“He managed to disable it soon after his escape—most likely possibility is that the doctor dug it out for him.”

Sophia took a deep, trembling breath. “Will she—the doctor . . . satisfy him for a period?”

Max’s stomach turned. “He’s been behind bars long enough to have built up his needs.” Refined his perversions.

“What can I do to assist?”

He didn’t want her anywhere near Bonner’s evil—she’d walked into the void enough for ten lifetimes. “Take another look at Quentin Gareth—I have this gut feeling there’s something we’ve missed. Especially with Tulane out of the running.” He told her what he’d discovered at Amberleigh Bouvier’s house.

“Interesting—the dynamics of Nikita’s workforce.” A reflective statement. “I’ll look at Gareth’s file now.”

As she did so, he hunkered down to cross-reference the location of the D2 penitentiary with Bonner’s known bolt-holes, sending the list to the manhunt team as soon as it was in any kind of shape. “He’s smart,” Max told the team over the comm line that he’d secured, after discussing the possibility that Bonner might try to get to Sophia, so that they could put alerts on the relevant routes. “I don’t think he’ll go anywhere near his old hidey-holes.” But the team would still have to check each and every one, just in case. “I’ve also sent you some properties I know were his, but that I couldn’t ever legally link to him—those were never in the police files, so he didn’t have a right to see them during the trial.”

“Fuck it, Max—why can’t he just die and do us all a favor?” The lead on the team, a man who was legendary for never losing his cool, broke for a second before taking a calming breath. “We’re sure the doctor’s already dead—dogs led us to a patch of forest not far from D2. Lot of blood.

“Some of it was Bonner’s—they cut out the transmitter there. From the high-velocity spray, he thanked the doctor for her help by slitting her throat. He’s never been this impatient before—we didn’t even have a chance to save her.”

Max shook his head. “The doctor was a necessity.” A tool. “She was too old to satisfy him in any other way—in his mind, she was probably happy to die once she’d outlived her purpose.”

The other cop shook his head in angry disbelief. “What do you need from us?”

“Any confirmed or credible sightings—send the details to me as soon as you get them. Even a general direction will help me narrow down possible sites. With the amount of money he has at this disposal”—and Max knew there were Bonner family members who still believed in the innocence of their blue-eyed boy—“he could go anywhere.”

“We’ve got the airports covered.”

“Good. He might try to fly domestic”—especially if his fixation on Sophia was stronger than his drive to find other prey—“but I don’t think he’ll leave the country. He enjoys being a star here too much.” Ending the call after a few more quick words, he went to sit beside Sophia on the couch. “Now we wait.”

Sophia couldn’t stand to see the weight on Max’s shoulders, the strain around his mouth. “Don’t hurt, Max.” She cupped his cheek, her emotions stripped bare. “Bonner doesn’t deserve to have you beating yourself up for his evil.”

“Sweetheart.” Max’s kiss was so tender, tears burned at the backs of her eyes. It felt different—more than sexual, more than intimate. If felt as if he was handing her a gift she didn’t understand. Holding on to him, she gave herself to the kiss, gave herself to Max. When his lips wandered over her cheek and down her jaw, she shivered and wove her fingers through the thick silk of his hair.

Nikita could wait, she thought. The whole world could wait. Tonight, this moment, she was stealing for her and the strong, loyal, beautiful man who’d seen every broken part of her—and yet looked at her as if she was perfect. “Max. Don’t stop. Not today.”

Lifting his head from hers, he rose to his feet in a smooth move that spoke of a very masculine strength. When he held out a hand, it felt impossibly right to place her own against his palm and allow him to lead her to the bedroom, to watch him put his fingers to the buttons of her shirt, slide them out of the slots one by one.

His knuckles brushed the side of one breast, making her shiver.

“Cold?” An intimate murmur against her neck as he dropped the shirt to the floor and moved to curve his body around hers from behind, a hard, sleekly muscled male with an arousal he made no effort to hide.

She’d never felt more alive, more sensuous in her femininity. “No.”

“Good.” His hands shifted up to close over her breasts through the practical cotton of her bra. “If I bought you naughty lingerie”—shaping her, possessing her—“would you wear it?”

Joy rippled through the sensuality, a piquant spice. He was as determined as her, she thought, to make this time theirs, something no one would ever be able to steal from them no matter what the future held. “How naughty?”

“Very.” He pinched her nipples lightly—a quick, sharp bite—rolled them between his fingers. “The pieces might even make you blush.”

Heat was already rising over her body, but it was a languorous, seductive thing. “That sounds like a dare.” Reaching back with one arm, she tangled her fingers in his hair, holding him to her. “And I accept.”

A smile she could feel against her skin as his hands slid off her aching flesh. Dropping her own arm to the side, she let him undo the clasp of her bra, then reached up to pull it down and off her body. “Why is it”—she shivered as he kissed the top of her spine, went lower—“that I always end up naked while you remain dressed?”

A husky masculine chuckle, his lips moving over her shoulder, his hands on her hips. “Because I’m a smart man.” Playing his fingers across her abdomen, he undid the top button of her jeans. “Take these off for me.”

That slow, slumberous heat flamed, burned, but she took a step forward, lowered the zipper and then—taking a deep breath—pushed down both the jeans and her panties. Leaning forward to pull them off her feet, she could barely hear anything through the thunder of her heartbeat. Max didn’t say a word until she straightened back to her full height. But then he spoke . . . and she melted.