He shook his head. "I understand that it must be hell to even consider killing your twin, but women have a way of being feral about their cubs. You're no different. Why is Amara still alive?"

"Don't you see, Dorian?" A shattered whisper. "For better or worse, she is his biological mother." The words were like hidden grenades, blowing up in his face. "She's the reason he exists - how could I steal her child and then get rid of her? How could I go to my son with his mother's blood on my hands?"

The emotional knives kept twisting deeper, harder. "So you somehow convinced her to give up maternal rights? How?"

"I had to speak to her on her level." An unflinching answer, a leopardess fighting for her cub. "I had to pretend I understood and accepted what she'd done. I talked her into making it a long-term experiment. She said it would be far too much work, but I said I'd take care of the long-term part."

"The infection - oh, Jesus. Omega?" It was such a vile thought the cat refused to believe it could be the truth.

"In a sense." A calm tone, but her hands were trembling so hard he saw her grab hold of one with the other to immobilize it.

Dorian let out a slow breath. "Does the Council know?"

"They didn't when I left and I highly doubt they do now. Only Amara and I know everything. Keenan knows a little - just what he needs to protect himself. I hate that he has to know anything."

"Keenan's a smart kid," Dorian muttered, pride thickening his voice, "and Amara will never betray you." Yet she was a monster who'd planned to kill her own child. The discordance between the two was harsh, allowing for no easy answer. "Zie Zen?"

"A former associate of our mother's. I asked him to tell this one lie without asking me why, and he did." She met his eyes. "Do you understand now why I will get very angry with you if you treat him with anything less than respect?"

He bowed his head. Sometimes, even a leopard had to admit being in the wrong.

Apparently satisfied, she continued. "Technically, Keenan has no biological father - Amara spliced together genetic material from an incredible number of donors, most likely so no one else would have a claim on the embryo. I used that. I told everyone his DNA scan didn't line up with Zie Zen's because we experimented on it in vitro. They believed us - after all, we are the DNA specialists.

"That understanding both increased Keenan's value as a hostage and kept him safe from discovery - while the Council was certain he was important to me because I was using him as an experiment, they didn't think to go beyond the DNA."

For the first time in hours, Ashaya felt a hard push at her mind. It was a surprise, but she held Amara back, the task far easier than it should've been. Something had changed in her. She checked her PsyNet shields again, relaxing only when she saw that she continued to remain anonymous. "We all knew about the idea of Omega," she continued, "but Amara became obsessed with it. Except, she didn't see the point in making everyone infertile. It would still leave the insurgents alive and able to agitate."

Dorian blew out a disbelieving breath. "Why worry about procreation when you could have control over life and death itself?"

"Yes. She decided to create a lethal and easily transmissible bioagent."

The coldness of the equation chilled Dorian's beast. At the same time, he was struck by Amara's almost childlike lack of concern for others. It made a twisted kind of sense if the DarkMind was involved - the twin of the NetMind was a child in many ways, a stunted creature with no real sense of the world outside its cage. "What did she base her virus on?"

"It wasn't actually a virus. Do you know anything about prions?"

"I've heard that somewhere." He frowned, thinking. "Mad cow disease?"

"Bovine spongiform encephalopathy," Ashaya said. "Prions are responsible for that as well as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies in humans. They're the most deadly infectious agents in the world because no cure has ever been discovered. The only reason TSEs haven't wiped us out is that they're extremely hard to catch."

"Hell." But he could see the logic of it, as Amara must've seen it. "Aren't prions proteins?" At her nod, he blew out a breath. "Easy stuff for her to work with." Ashaya and Amara could both see proteins without the need for a microscope.

"By the time I found out what she was doing," Ashaya said, her crisp scientist's voice beginning to grow ragged at the edges, "she simply wouldn't be stopped. The science, you see - it was brilliant, cutting-edge science." She seemed to be waiting for a response.

He shot her a dark look. "I'm not going to blame you for what she did. Go on."

"I heard Tammy say you could be charming. I haven't seen any proof yet."

Oh, his cat liked that. "I thought I was very charming when I petted you into orgasm." He shot her a look filled with sexual heat. "I plan to do more of that - right after I teach you about keeping secrets."

Her eyes narrowed, and color rode high on her cheeks, but the byplay seemed to have given her the will to go on. "I switched to damage control when I couldn't stop her - I pointed out that by killing everyone, she'd negate the reason for Omega in the first place. That's when she realized she'd need to work out a way to ensure the disease lay dormant until necessary. Once activated, there would have to be a means to either reverse it or slow it down. I was happy for her to work on that - to have a cure for prion diseases would be a good thing, but it's also such a difficult task that the answer's eluded scientists for over a century."

"You thought it would keep her occupied."

"Yes. But" - her next words were shredded with a violent mix of rage and pain - "I didn't know enough about prions then. They're notoriously difficult to culture."

Dorian didn't need her to explain the rest. "So she created a living petri dish." He imagined that was how Amara must've thought of it. To use a child in that way - it was a concept utterly abhorrent to his nature. And yet Amara was Keenan's mother. That was something that couldn't be ignored in any decision they made. Neither could his duty to DarkRiver. "Is he infectious?"

Chapter 34

Amara threw the glass beaker against the wall and watched the liquid dribble down the white surface without seeing anything.

"Sir?"

She glanced at Keishon Talbot, her assistant, and probable spy for Ming LeBon. "Get out before I kill you."

The other woman left without a word.

Amara threw another beaker, her mind chaotic. Ashaya had done something. The link between them, the one that nothing could break, it was getting weaker. It had always shifted in strength - from background noise to a pure telepathic bond when they both focused. But it was always there, easy to pick up from either end.

Not now.

Something was interfering with the transmission - Amara didn't know how that was even possible. She considered all the parameters and came to the logical conclusion: he was the cause. The intruder. He had to be destroyed.

Calm descended with the decision.

She stepped over the broken glass on the floor and headed outside - though the psychic link between her and Ashaya was erratic, it was enough to lead Amara to her twin. The guards would try to stop her, of course. But they thought of her as a polite, controlled M-Psy, like Ashaya. Of course, Ashaya had never actually been controlled, either, but that was their secret.

She picked up several loaded pressure injectors as she walked.

Chapter 35

Clay lets you get away with far too much, Ms. Smart-Ass. My mate is going to adore me so much, she'll do everything I say.

-  Dorian Christensen in a text message to Talin McKade, six weeks ago

Is he infectious?

"I won't let anyone touch him," Dorian promised Ashaya, "and the pack will stand by you." As he'd stood by their mates and children. "But we need to know."

"To catch it from him," Ashaya said, her voice thick, "you'd have to cut him open and ingest sections of his brain tissue. Amara got that idea from an obscure New Guinean prion disease called kuru. She tinkered with the protein until ingestion was the only method of transmission - she didn't want anyone to be able to steal her research."

Unable to put the car on automatic, he reached out and tangled the fingers of one hand with hers. "Is he terminal?"

"No." To his amazement, her face lit up. "Keenan is absolutely, utterly healthy and he'll stay that way. I don't know what Amara did to him in the test tube, but Dorian, he's a miracle... he has antibodies in his blood."

He wasn't a scientist. It took him a second. "He holds the answer to a cure for all prion diseases." Hard on the heels of that joyful realization came another, darker one. "He's also the key the Council needs to unleash Omega." It was a truth they could never be allowed to discover.

Ashaya nodded. "Amara has no idea about the antibodies - I sabotaged her tests. But no matter what, I knew it would come down to her or him." Her eyes met his and in them he saw a heartbreaking decision, the bloody protectiveness of a mother winning out over the ties of a bond formed before birth. "Age five was the point at which she planned to dissect his brain."

Jesus. "You were racing a deadline from day one."

"Yes, at first. Then two and a half years ago, when Ming began to pay her too much attention and she went underground, I thought he was safe."

"But she didn't forget him," he guessed.

A jerky shake of the head. "She considers him the first step in her most important piece of work."

Her fingers were clenching around his hard enough to bruise. She was, he realized, barely keeping it together. "You want to talk about something else for a while?" He wasn't up to subtlety at the moment, but he needed to take care of her.

She grabbed on to the offered escape with desperate quickness. "Yes."