He framed her face with his hands. “I can’t lose you, Camellia. I can’t.” His voice was raw with emotion. He didn’t seem to mind that Kyle and Jeff heard him or could see the stark love that was so plain carved deep into his expression.
Camellia’s heart clenched hard in her chest. He was putting his emotions out there for her to see. For his friends to see. She was always so closed off. Always so afraid of getting hurt again and yet Jonas, who had suffered every bit as much as she had, was so willing to put himself out there again.
She brushed his lips with her fingertips, trying to find the right words to make him understand. “We’re so much stronger when we’re together, Jonas. You aren’t thinking straight. If you stash me somewhere you think is safe, all you’re going to do is second-guess yourself. You know you will. You’re going to think you should have kept me right with you.”
She could see that wasn’t enough to convince him. In her mind she chose an image of vines twisting together for strength. The roots of trees connecting underground and forming a strong system nearly impossible to defeat. Baby, she whispered softly, for him alone. We need to be together. The two of us. Just the way we were when we healed Kaden and Marigold.
Jonas pushed his forehead against hers with a soft groan of defeat. His hands slipped to her arms, fingers tightening there. “What am I going to do with you, Camellia?”
Keep believing in us for both of us. She couldn’t say it out loud the way she wanted to. Not with Kyle and Jeff right there. Maybe not ever. She raised her gaze to his, wanting him to see what was in her heart. She did love him already. She couldn’t admit it to him. She barely could admit it to herself. She hadn’t even shared it with Red, although she was certain Red knew.
I can do that, he whispered back in her mind.
“Are you two finished with your argument?” Jeff asked. “Because it was really lame as arguments go. Jonas, you disappoint me. You’re supposed to be all badass alpha. She bats her eyelashes a couple of times, and you just fall at her feet. What kind of example are you?”
Kyle nodded solemnly. “Ordinarily, I pay Jeff no mind. He’s basically a lunatic. In this case, I have to agree with him, Jonas. Even if you were ultimately going to give in, you should have held out a little longer.”
Branches of the Middlemist Red Camellia shivered and rustled all around them. One branch behind Jeff reared back and then rushed forward as if a heavy wind pushed it straight at the back of his head, where the blossoms slapped him. Kyle was treated to the same smack from the bright pink flowers. Petals sailed through the air, flying all around them.
“What the hell,” Jeff said, slapping at the branch. It was too fast, snapping back into place and waving in the breeze as innocently as ever. He regarded the towering shrub with suspicion. “What exactly was that, Camellia? Did you put some kind of spell on that plant? Some hex? Illusions don’t smack you in the back of the head.”
“Don’t be such a baby, Jeff,” she replied, giving a little sniff of pure disdain. “I’m sure the wind gusted a little. Didn’t you feel it? How could I have possibly caused the branches to move like that? I was—er—occupied with other much more important things.”
“Like what?” Jeff demanded.
“Looking into Jonas’s beautiful eyes. Don’t you think he has the most beautiful eyes in the entire world?” She poured dreamy into her tone. It was really difficult not to laugh when Jeff and Kyle exchanged a disgusted look.
“Pull your head out of your . . .” Jeff started, then stopped abruptly when Jonas made a single growly sound. “Out of the clouds,” Jeff corrected. “Are you even monitoring when those scouts are getting close? We have to alert our brothers in the field.”
“We need to know if the advance scouts are enhanced,” Jonas said, sobering instantly now that they were talking about their mission. “Crawley said the leaders of the battalion were enhanced. He claimed he didn’t know about the scouts, and no amount of questioning changed that answer.”
Camellia froze, one hand on Jonas’s face. “You just used the word ‘battalion.’ That implies a far different number than ‘troops,’ Jonas. When were you going to tell me you were facing a hundred to two hundred men rather than ten to twenty men? At the most, I thought forty.”
Jonas looked down at his hands and then back up at her face. “It didn’t occur to me these people would send a battalion after us, Camellia. Not once did I think that. I said ‘troops’ because I thought ‘troops.’ I considered the same numbers as you. It’s possible that’s where you got those numbers, right out of my head. When we questioned Crawley, we found we were facing at least a hundred men, possibly two hundred, all mercenaries Abrams and his banker friends hired. Abrams is a billionaire. He’s got so much money it’s sick. He and his friends—and all of them went to school with Whitney—formed a conglomerate together. They’re probably one of the most influential conglomerates in the world. They buy and sell governments. Take down presidents. I mean that in the true sense of the word. They have such a sense of entitlement by this time, they think they’re unstoppable.”
“They sound worse than organized crime,” Camellia said.
“That’s because they are,” Kyle agreed.
Jeff nodded. “These people have no problem hiring contract killers or sending soldiers on missions to be killed if it suits their agenda. They would trade lives in a heartbeat, wipe out entire villages or even a city of people in order to achieve their goal. They’ve done it before. They’ll do it again.”
“Sending a battalion to murder every man, woman and child of Teams One and Two is absolutely nothing to them. They want to rid the world of all GhostWalkers deemed flawed and, at the same time, teach Whitney a lesson. With Lily and Daniel in their possession, they’ll have something to bring him in line,” Jonas said.
“They sure don’t know Whitney if they believe that,” Camellia said.
“And they don’t understand GhostWalkers either,” Jonas said. “Because these assholes have no loyalty, they don’t understand it. They think because Teams Three and Four aren’t flawed in the ways we are, they won’t care what happens to us. They couldn’t be more wrong. If the conglomerate succeeds in taking us out, Teams Three and Four will hunt them to the ends of the earth. Once you’re a target of a GhostWalker, it doesn’t end until you’re dead.”
“What Whitney, the conglomerate or the other GhostWalkers are or are not going to do isn’t the point, Jonas.” She scowled at him. “The bottom line is you, Kyle and Jeff were knowingly planning—just the three of you—to sneak into the enemy camp, find the enhanced leaders of the battalion alone and kill them right under the noses of hundreds of armed men. And you want me to stay here, hiding, too far away to help you the best way I can, while you three put yourselves in that kind of danger?” Camellia couldn’t help feeling a little outraged. She wanted to shove Jonas right off the porch.