She fit so easily with him. He inhaled, drawing her into his lungs as he lifted his head. He found it so interesting that the majority of the time, it was impossible to catch her scent, especially since he had such an acute sense of smell. She sometimes exuded a subtle fragrance, but not when she was about to go into the field. When it was time for battle, her scent completely disappeared, just like now.
I can’t find your scent at all. Is that Red protecting you?
She nodded slowly, her blue eyes looking up at him. That’s one of the many things that help us disappear. You can’t be tracked through scent either. Haven’t you noticed?
He had been told by his team that even those with acute senses of smell couldn’t detect him at times. Yeah, he’d wondered, but he certainly hadn’t suspected a plant protecting him.
The four of them left the garden together. As they did, Jonas made certain to remove all traces that might lead Abrams’s scouts to Camellia’s garden. As he did so, grass and dirt pushed up behind where they walked. Little tendrils of fog began to rise along the trail and snake among the trees.
A wolf howled, this one sounding a little closer than before. Somewhere in the distance, another answered the call and then a third. A good minute passed. A fourth howled. Once they got on the main trail, Camellia and the three GhostWalkers began to run in single file, Jonas in front, Jeff bringing up the rear. The four waited nearly five minutes as they ran just in case the sentries had more information to deliver.
You’ll want to let Logan’s men know that there are four scouts heading their way. Three coming together although spread out. The fourth is hanging back, Camellia reported to the others. They’re running. We’re running. They’re about an hour from us.
That puts them about two hours from Logan’s men, Jeff calculated.
Jonas was well aware they only had an hour before they would be sneaking past the enemy scouts. He tried not to notice that the fog was nowhere near what it needed to be. Darkness had fallen, but there was enough of a moon to reveal any tracks on the ground to an enhanced scout. It was only a matter of time before they could see things the teams didn’t want them seeing. Jonas wasn’t worried for Kyle, Jeff, Camellia or himself, but he didn’t know the capabilities of the two men Team Two had sent to keep the enemy’s forward scouts from reaching the compound.
He had met the two men, of course. Antonio Martinez was a man who tended to stay in the shadows, much like Jonas did. You rarely noticed him, if ever. No one spoke of him or drew attention to him.
Wait. Who? Camellia’s voice was pure accusation. Her running faltered and she stepped off the trail, halting, both hands on her thighs, head down. Antonio Martinez?
The moment she stopped moving, they all froze. Jonas couldn’t help the flash of hurt at her first feeling of betrayal. He stopped himself from reacting. Of course her mind would go there first. Antonio had been a guard at one of the laboratories she had been imprisoned in. He’d been there with Kane Cannon, a member of Team Three. Both men had been assigned when Whitney was still in good standing with a number of power brokers in Washington.
“You know him?” Kyle asked.
“He was a guard at one of the facilities where I was a prisoner.” Camellia kept her head down as if she were trying to catch her breath from running.
Jonas knew she wasn’t having any trouble breathing. She was clearing her mind, pushing aside the first conclusion her brain had instinctively jumped to, which was that Jonas had betrayed her and was possibly selling her out to Whitney or to the government. She knew him. Believed in him. She was in his mind. Jonas kept his mouth shut and his thoughts ruthlessly corralled. He had to let her work it out, even if the time it took her to do it felt slow to him. She struggled with trust. He couldn’t blame her for that.
He had grown up in a loving environment. His heart hadn’t been battered and scarred by one betrayal after another. Just watching the way his team had handled her arrival gave him a little insight into what her life had been like. She was used to it. She’d been expecting betrayal and mistrust, and she’d been right. He had thought his endorsement of her would be enough, but it hadn’t been. That had shocked him. It had been an insult. He tried not to allow her reaction to Antonio’s name feel insulting to him.
Finally, Camellia lifted her head, her eyes so intensely blue they looked like two bruised cornflowers pressed into her face. “I’m sorry, honey. For a minute, all I could think about was Whitney’s torture camps. At the facility Antonio guarded, Whitney was conducting all kinds of experiments. He tortured us under the pretense of learning what would break a soldier. He kept inserting more and more horrific genetic materials into us. At the same time, he would tell us he was enhancing our psychic abilities. Already some of the girls were far past their ability to cope without filters.”
“Antonio wasn’t guarding you,” Jonas reminded as gently as possible. “He was sent there to guard the compound, just as other guards were. They had no idea what Whitney was doing.”
She rubbed her temples, as if she had the beginnings of a headache. “Perhaps not at first, but it would have been impossible to ignore the screams of agony coming from his laboratory. It wasn’t soundproof. That was one of Whitney’s biggest beefs. Eventually, he demanded that anywhere he worked, he have the best security with his own handpicked soldiers, and everything was soundproofed.”
“That’s because of the three soldiers testifying against him to a committee in Washington. Kane Cannon from Team Three. Malichai Fortunes from Team Four. And Antonio Martinez from Team Two. All three of those men were targeted after that. Sent time after time on suicide missions, often alone. If their team leaders hadn’t sent backup without anyone knowing, all three would be dead. They risked their careers and their lives to try to save you women and get Whitney arrested and brought to trial.”
“I should have asked you,” Camellia conceded.
Jonas wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her tight against his chest. He wondered how Ryland and Lily were going to fix their problem when trust had been broken between them. Trust was so fragile. Camellia was trying. He could feel her making every effort, but it was so difficult to overcome her past. And the two of them could share one another’s mind. That should have made it even easier to trust one another.
“I understand, honey. You good now?” He hated to rush her, but he could feel danger coming closer with every passing second. “We have to get a move on.”
The fingers of fog were drifting up from the ground, darker in color than before. Taking on a purplish hue. Instead of fingers moving through the trees, the fog appeared as dark, spinning masses, growing in size, the threads clotting together as if magnetized until they became a bank of rolling clouds. The fog spread out and raced along the ground, low and so dense that the trees appeared to rise up out of the mists with no anchor to earth.