The Beast Within. Suzanne Mcminn
thundered in his chest. Fiery grief stung his heart, all the worse for having been so deliberately, carefully, suppressed for so long.
She wasn’t supposed to be here. She didn’t belong here, could never belong here. Her presence went against every plan, every strategy, every hope in hell he had of ever getting off this island.
And he did mean hell. Callula Island was his own personal level of Dante’s Inferno, a never-ending nightmare that had begun the night his laboratory had exploded around him.
He focused on the things he had to know, the answers he’d needed from the moment he’d heard the helicopter flying over Callula. Since Paige had landed, he’d stalked her, soundlessly, through the woods.
“How did you know I was on this island?”
“Dub.” The admission was low, hoarse. She struggled against him. Her frame was slight, her limbs slender, but she was stronger than she looked.
He met her eyes, and as he’d known they would, her eyes stabbed him, hated him. He knew what she must think. She would think he’d betrayed PAX. She’d believe he and Phil had planned to steal their own research, sell it—the activation serum they’d spent years developing along with the containment serum. She’d believe he’d set fire to the lab—a fire in which Phil had ultimately died—to cover up the crime. A fire in which, ironically, their research, their work, and both the serums had been destroyed. She’d believe all of that and more, and she had to keep believing because it kept her safe. But that didn’t make it any easier for him.
Those secrets, those truths, couldn’t be revealed to her. His innocence was an empty badge of honor.
“Who else knows I’m here?” he asked.
How long had he thought this harbor would last? He was grateful Dub had held out this long. His cousin had always lived on the shady side of the law, and keeping Kieran’s secrets from government agencies wouldn’t have been a stretch for him. He had no doubt PAX would have questioned Dub relentlessly, but Dub hadn’t broken. His cousin hadn’t known the exact reason Kieran was hiding out, but Dub would never turn him in to the authorities. But he’d told Paige, and that was in many ways worse.
“No one,” she said. “Just me.” She struggled in his hands again, kicked at him, hit his leg with the toe of her boot. A slash of pain, meaningless in his world of pain, seared his calf. “Let go of me, Kieran.”
“You have no idea how much I want to do just that,” he growled. Every second that he faced her killed him a little bit more.
Her devastatingly blue eyes were nothing like he remembered. Her soul was in her eyes, that’s what he’d always said about Paige. But now her eyes were hard, protected. She’d changed, and he knew he was to blame. Her life had never been easy, and he’d made it a hell of a lot harder. Guilt, ever near the surface, twisted its knife.
“What about the helicopter pilot?” he demanded, fierce because he couldn’t allow himself to be otherwise. For her sake, she had to keep hating him.
“He doesn’t know why I came here,” she said, her voice low and angry.
Good. He wanted her angry.
“He didn’t ask?”
“I paid him double his normal fee. That was the end of our conversation.”
“He knows you’re here. That’s bad enough.”
“I’m not here to cause trouble,” she told him, her body still humming with tension
“That you’re here at all is trouble,” he ground back. More trouble than she could imagine. “Swear to me no one else knows you’re here, Paige.”
“No one knows. I told you. Dub wouldn’t have told me except—” She broke off, looked away for a horrible beat in which Kieran felt as if his chest was being crushed and he didn’t even know why, then she said, “I want a divorce, Kieran.”
He let go of her. She nearly stumbled backward, as if she hadn’t expected it in that instant. He barely held his own ground. Of course. Why hadn’t he foreseen it? How had he managed to so block out every agonizing thought of the wife he’d so loved that he hadn’t realized one day she would want a divorce? That she would want to move on, make a new life without him?
Was she in love with another man? He almost choked, stopping himself from blurting out the too-revealing question. He couldn’t bear the answer, and in truth, that was why he hadn’t let himself consider the question in these long two years. He couldn’t afford to think of Paige and her life without him.
As if in some kind of surreal dream, he watched her reach inside her rain slicker and pull out a folded pack of papers. And a pen. Paige was always prepared. He almost laughed in bitterness then he saw the brittle shield of her blue eyes slip, saw beyond the steely shield of anger and hatred.
Pain.
Behind the anger, she was hurting, as he was. He would have given anything to tell her the truth—except her life, which was what it could cost.
“If I sign that paper, they’ll know you found me,” he said harshly, as if he cared more about himself than her. That’s what she had to keep thinking. Kieran just knew he didn’t want to sign that paper.
“You mean PAX. I’m leaving PAX. They don’t know or care what I do anymore.”
He didn’t ask why she was leaving PAX. He didn’t have to. Paige was a passionate spirit. She did things full throttle—or not at all.
He had broken that passionate spirit, at least when it came to PAX. He had disillusioned her the night he’d thrown away her trust.
She’d been so bright and full of hope the day he’d met her early in their training for covert operations. They’d both been recruited into the PAX League’s secret under-layer that simmered just beneath its public façade, and if anything, she’d been more eager than he for the wonders it offered her brilliant mind.
The world knew the PAX League as a private foundation dedicated to the philosophical pursuit of global peace. They engaged in human rights missions, environmental campaigns, and charitable projects. And while all those public endeavors were true and beneficial, it wasn’t all PAX did.
To over two-thirds of the employees in the PAX League as well as the world, PAX meant peace in Latin and stood for nothing further than the organization’s devotion to that cause across the globe. But in truth, PAX was an acronym for Paranormal Allied eXperts. Deep in the heart of PAX’s Washington, D.C., building lay a beehive of secret laboratories and experimental studies dedicated to research into the mystical, telepathic, transformational sciences that was leading the world into a new era of defense. Peace through PAX.
As a secret PAX agent, Paige had carried on what had begun as a marine engineering project into research in remote underwater communication while Kieran had become part of a mission to develop superpowers of vision, hearing, and strength through combining wolf and human ectoplasm.
Then his laboratory had exploded along with his life. He’d woken to find himself not only a fugitive…but a monster.
And if he didn’t get rid of Paige, and soon, she’d find out, too.
“You know that the agency knows everything. Hell, Paige, they probably already know you’re here. You’re a link to me.”
“Then sign the paper.”
She made a twisted logic. She was right, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He’d had some insane idea that he could fix everything, if he just had enough time. But that wasn’t true. He couldn’t fix everything.
He couldn’t fix what he’d done to Paige.
All he could do was sign her damn paper and hope by some miracle of miracles that PAX would never know Paige had been here. She hadn’t come here for his signature, he realized suddenly. She didn’t need his John Hancock to get a divorce.
She