He fought her ferociously, slashing at her with his hooves, kicking out with dangerous power, but she refused to back down, holding on to his neck, determined to suffocate him. The buck grew weaker, his attempts to fight feebler. As his thrashing and kicking grew less aggressive, her hold tightened on him until it was clear she had managed to secure her food for the next few days.
Rubin knew the controversy raged on about whether or not there were still cougars in the mountains, although sightings were reported all the time. Few people other than those living there believed it. He hadn’t thought he would see one, and certainly not on his property. He turned to look at Jonquille and his heart clenched hard in his chest. Her gaze was riveted to the scene, eyes filled with liquid so they looked silvery and haunting. Tears tracked down her cheeks. It was the last thing he’d expected when she was clearly a warrior.
“Jonquille.” He whispered her name and gathered her up without thinking, needing to hold her more than he needed to remain still and quiet for the wildlife around him.
Rubin pressed his back to the downed tree and put her in his lap, his arms around her. “What is it? Surely you’re not upset because the cougar needed to eat. She has young to feed.”
She rubbed her face against his jacket, trying to get rid of the tears. “I’m sorry. This is silly and I know it. I’m not like this. I’m really not.”
He caught her hand when she went to brush away the tears. “Sweetheart, just tell me what’s going on.”
“I don’t know why the memories are so close right now. That door opened and I can’t seem to force it closed.”
The little break in her voice tore at him. He found he was more susceptible to her emotions than he had first realized he would be. Her laughter. Her pain. When she was upset like this, it was very disturbing to him. When they were together, he wasn’t going to be able to function properly if she was sad or angry with him.
“You don’t want to hear these morbid stories.”
“I do. I want to know everything about you, Jonquille.” He did. The more he knew about her childhood, the more he understood her.
“One spring he brought us puppies. Whitney. We should have known better than to trust him, but he said it was to teach us responsibility. We could each choose one, and we were solely responsible for its care. We could have the puppy in our room, and it could even sleep in our bed with us if we wanted.”
Rubin could hear the way she tried to distance herself, the notes of horror in her voice, the strain when she told him, as if she couldn’t quite believe what had happened. He had studied Whitney the way he did every enemy they went up against. He was a logical man and gathered as much information as possible without emotion in order to better learn. One could look at something from every angle that way. Whitney was a true megalomaniac. He was someone obsessed with his own power. He was both a narcissist and a psychopath. He had no conscience. Rubin would never be surprised by anything anyone told him Whitney did, unless it was betraying his country.
He ran his hand down the back of her head, feeling the thickness of all that soft blond hair before plunging his fingers deep to massage her scalp in an effort to soothe her. Retelling the childhood story after locking it away where she refused to even look at it was obviously reliving it again. He wanted to tell her she didn’t need to tell him, he understood it was going to be bad, but she needed to share it with someone. He wanted to be her someone.
“All of us were so careful with our little charges. We were so happy that spring. We walked them and cuddled with them.” She kept dashing at the tears. “We all loved them so much. We were required to keep up with our studies as well as our training, but we could take our dogs with us as long as they behaved. We trained them even at an early age using the crates provided. All of us worked so hard, and Whitney acted like he was proud of us for the jobs we were doing. We kept them for eighteen months.”
She coughed and cleared her throat before looking up at him with pain-filled eyes. “He introduced a program to us he called survival of the fittest. At first the subject matter was all about nature and the food chain. We were kids, but we understood even though we were shown extremely graphic films. Then one evening instead of curfew, we were told to go to the arena that had been set up. We were to sit in the stands.” She pressed a trembling hand to her mouth.
“Jonquille, sweetheart.” He dropped his hand to the nape of her neck and tried to ease the tension out of her. She seemed so small and lost—very vulnerable—when before, in spite of her diminutive size, she was a little powerhouse. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“No, I do. Someone has to know besides us. There was no one to tell. He always got rid of our nurses after a few months. Even the guards, especially the nice ones. He only kept the ones that were very loyal to him, or that he could compromise in some way. We were little kids with no one to advocate for us and very confused as to what was wrong or right. Then there was Lily. She was treated differently than we were. We all loved her and thought she was one of us, but he didn’t do to her the things he did to us.”
Rubin felt very sorry for Lily Whitney. She had been officially adopted by Whitney, raised to believe she was his daughter. She didn’t know about his experiments or that he had “bought” the girls from orphanages. She couldn’t remember them at first. She didn’t know about the experiments he did on the soldiers. When she found out, she was horrified. Eventually, with both sides not trusting her, she married Captain Ryland Miller, a GhostWalker from the first team. She had rescued Team One from the cages they were in. They were being stalked by a murderer and it was impossible for them to escape, locked up as they were.
“What you’re saying is her puppy was safe, and the rest of you all had dogs at risk.” He kept his voice quiet and soothing as he continued to massage her neck.
“Exactly. That night was one of sheer terror for all of us. We were instructed to leave our dogs in our rooms, which we did. The soldiers were sitting around the arena and they were all excited, and there were other soldiers there as well, men we’d never seen before. Whitney was standing at the bottom of the stairs with his guards, just to the right of where we were all seated, and there were guards heavily around us. He instructed them to bind our hands and feet so we couldn’t move from where we were sitting.”
He could feel her heart pounding when his palm curled around her nape, his fingers gently resting on her pulse. He tasted anger in his mouth. He rarely felt the emotion, but he knew what was coming.
“They brought in a big dog. It looked savage and it was snarling. Its eyes were red and horrifying, like something out of a movie. Across from it, they brought in Flame’s dog. She was a sweet thing, and clearly, she didn’t know what was expected. None of us did. The crowd roared when that horrible animal was let loose. It rushed straight at Flame’s dog. She screamed and tried to break loose. All of us did. One by one we had to watch as our dogs were torn to pieces by various animals brought in to ‘fight’ them. Since our dogs weren’t fighters, of course they lost. They weren’t fit to live, according to Whitney. We were supposedly taught a valuable lesson. We hadn’t taught them to survive.”
She was sobbing and it was difficult to understand her. He held her tighter and let her cry, stroking her hair and murmuring soothing nonsense to her. What could anyone say to counteract the absolute cruelty of a man like Whitney?