Chapter Seventy-Five
Catherine felt sick to her stomach as Matt’s lips twitched into a gentle smile. She felt bile rise up to her throat. She wasn’t sure what had happened to him in the last few days but he didn’t look like he was in enough pain. Her breathing was irregular. Her lungs expanded painfully and then collapsed altogether.
“Catheri…”
Graham landed a hard fist in Matt’s jaw before he could finish saying her name. “What did we discuss? Speak only when spoken to.”
“How do you know?” Catherine asked, staring at Graham’s back as it stretched and bowed with his own heavy breathing.
Graham turned to face her. His black eyes scoured her face. “Toma spoke with the new chef at Shepherd’s Bar. After he described the state of some of the produce, he was able to figure out they were laced with wolfsbane. Toma poked around his farm and found a shed where he was growing the plant. But that’s not all he found, was it, Matty?”
Matt didn’t seem to hear Graham, instead he kept his eyes on Catherine. “You look beauti…”
Another punch landed in Matt’s gut this time. “Shut the fuck up!” Graham yelled.
Catherine looked at her mate and could feel the anger radiating off him in waves. It threatened to smother any other emotion. “Graham…” Catherine reached out and touched his fingers with her own.
He took her hand but kept his back to her as he stared Matt down. “He also helped keep Dominic’s blood in your system,” Graham
admitted.
“What?” Catherine’s own blood went cold. Tears threatened to run down her face but she fought them back. “How… how is that possible?”
“Tell her!”
“I…” Matt cleared his throat. “I didn’t have a choice, Catherine. I tried to…”
“Tell her, now before I bring the drill back out,” Graham warned.
Matt’s face turned even paler than before. He shook his head quickly and his attention went back to Catherine. As if fearing taking his time would bring the drill out faster, he spoke quickly. “He… he told me it wouldn’t hurt you. It was just a way to keep an eye on you. We wanted to know when you found and marked your mate.”
“What did you do to me, Matt?” Catherine asked. “Tell me, please.”
“Of course, I’ll do anything for you. I… Mr. DeAngelo would give me his blood. I would dry his blood and use the powder to grow some of your favorites. His blood would only affect someone bound to him.”
Catherine clasped one hand to her stomach and the other over her mouth. The first tears slid down her cheek and she turned so neither of the men would see her.
“What about the poisoning? The attempted kidnapping? Did you help them with all of it?” Catherine asked.
“I… I…”
“If I needed to find my mate, why did you try to take me before I did?” she exclaimed.
1/3
Chapter Seventy-Five
We were getting tired of waiting! It’d been five years of waiting for you!”
“Why?” she asked. “Why would you do this to me? I thought we were friends!”
“We were, we are. I had to do it, Catherine. He promised and it’ll be okay soon. He knows you’ve marked your mate. He’ll come and get both of us himself. It will all work out as he said.”
“Tell her,” Graham pushed. She looked between the two men glaring at each other.
“What did he promise you, Matt?” she asked.
Matt licked his dry lips and winced as he tried to straighten himself out. “Catherine…”
“Say it!” she screamed.
Matt flinched. “A chance with you!” Matt yelled back. “Dammit, look at me! I am old, mateless, childless. He promised me I could get the chance to move up the list for child bearing. He didn’t have a full blooded human yet. He said I could try after the lycan and wizard.”
Catherine couldn’t feel anything anymore. The moisture in the air, the cold seeping up through the soles of her shoes from the stone floor, the exhaustion from the night before all faded away as she stared at Matt in shock. Child bearing. She rolled the words around in her mind over and over, trying to make sense of them through her muddled brain. Child bearing.
Catherine spun and ran from the room. She made it just outside the cell door when she threw up. She felt Graham’s hand running slowly up and down her back. He held her hair back with his other hand. When her stomach was empty, she shifted and fell on her butt. She let her head fall back against the wall and took in deep breaths.
“I take it he told her everything?” Lucas asked from somewhere to her right.
“The worst of it,” Graham confirmed. She opened her eyes to find Graham squatting in front of her, watching her with concern. Lucas held down a bottle of water that she took with a nod of thanks. “Are you okay, Baby?”
Catherine nodded. “Is this what you did all night during your marking party?”
Graham smirked and the men around them chuckled. “Toma texted me right before the girls came over that he was on his way with…” Graham tilted his head in the direction of the closed door. “We came here for a few hours and got some answers, then we took a break and went out drinking, got a tattoo and then came back to make sure he’d told us everything.”
“It’s been a while since Grey had a fun plaything,” Jensen’s guard, Mark, laughed. Graham glared up at his friend who raised his arms in surrender before pulling a cigarette from his pocket and walking down the hall.
“We sat in our pajamas, ate junk food and compared our mates’ body parts,” Catherine whispered, still in shock.
Graham’s lips twitched before stretching into a full grin. “Who’s to say what’s more fun, huh?”
Catherine sighed. “I suppose our week of perfection is officially over.”
“Don’t worry, Baby. We are going to figure this out. I’ll talk with Jensen and…”
“You don’t need to,” Catherine interrupted. Graham took her hand and cradled it between his.
“Tell me.”
2/3
Catherine closed her eyes again. “I’ve been reading the journal Jensen gave me. There have only ever been eight gifted individuals throughout history. They were all full lycans. They all had a unique gift. They were all male.”
“You’re the first female gifted?” Theo asked.
“Apparently,” Catherine continued. “Another thing they all had in common is they’ve never been able to have children.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Toma spoke up.
“Yeah, Jensen had you,” Mark confirmed.
“Maybe something happened when he marked my mother. Maybe something to do with the transition, his gift, whatever it was, I am the first child by a gifted.” Catherine took a shaky breath. “Several of them were able to get their mates pregnant but they would always miscarry. A few agreed with the theory that the females weren’t strong enough to carry a gifted child to term.”
“But if a gifted was to carry her own child…” Graham said. His eyes slowly darkened. His teeth became bared as his lips curled back in a snarl. The hair along his forearms rose and his skin shivered. Hot fury radiated off him, threatening to scald her skin. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
She shrugged. “I didn’t put two and two together until last night when we started talking about your mark triggering my heat. It suddenly made sense. Why Dominic set me free. Why he wanted to know when I’d been marked. Why he’d been so patient. He needed my mate to activate not only my gift but my ability to become pregnant. He wants me to carry his child.”
“He wants to use the children to go to war,” Lucas breathed, his face pale in shock.
“Dominic DeAngelo does love the long game,” Graham whispered, his black eyes narrowing at the door holding Matt with murderous intent.
