Cross Breed (Breeds #32) Read online

  Berkley Titles by Lora Leigh

  The Breeds

  CROSS BREED

  ELIZABETH'S WOLF

  WAKE A SLEEPING TIGER

  BENGAL’S QUEST

  RULE BREAKER

  STYGIAN’S HONOR

  LAWE’S JUSTICE

  NAVARRO’S PROMISE

  STYX’S STORM

  LION’S HEAT

  BENGAL’S HEART

  COYOTE’S MATE

  MERCURY’S WAR

  DAWN’S AWAKENING

  TANNER’S SCHEME

  HARMONY’S WAY

  MEGAN’S MARK

  The Nauti Boys

  NAUTI SEDUCTRESS

  NAUTI ENCHANTRESS

  NAUTI TEMPTRESS

  NAUTI DECEPTIONS

  NAUTI INTENTIONS

  NAUTI DREAMS

  NAUTI NIGHTS

  NAUTI BOY

  Anthologies

  TOO HOT TO TOUCH

  OVERCOME

  (includes novellas “The Breed Next Door,” “In a Wolf’s Embrace,” and “A Jaguar’s Kiss”)

  ENTHRALLED

  (with Alyssa Day, Meljean Brook and Lucy Monroe)

  NAUTIER AND WILDER

  (with Jaci Burton)

  TIED WITH A BOW

  (with Virginia Kantra, Eileen Wilks and Kimberly Frost)

  PRIMAL

  (with Michelle Rowen, Jory Strong and Ava Gray)

  NAUTI AND WILD

  (with Jaci Burton)

  HOT FOR THE HOLIDAYS

  (with Angela Knight, Anya Bast and Allyson James)

  THE MAGICAL CHRISTMAS CAT

  (with Erin McCarthy, Nalini Singh and Linda Winstead Jones)

  SHIFTER

  (with Angela Knight, Alyssa Day and Virginia Kantra)

  BEYOND THE DARK

  (with Angela Knight, Emma Holly and Diane Whiteside)

  HOT SPELL

  (with Emma Holly, Shiloh Walker and Meljean Brook)

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Lora Leigh

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Leigh, Lora, author.

  Title: Cross breed / Lora Leigh.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Berkley, 2018. | Series: A novel of the Breeds ; 32

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018014298| ISBN 9780425265482 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101612521 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: LCSH: Genetic engineering—Fiction. | Paranormal romance stories. | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction. | Erotic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3612.E357 C76 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018014298

  First Edition: September 2018

  Cover photo by Claudio Marinesco

  Cover design by Rita Frangie

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  • CONTENTS •

  Berkley Titles by Lora Leigh

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The World of the Breeds

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  EPILOGUE

  Breed Terms

  About the Author

  Thank you, Christina.

  Your anticipation, your joy in the chapters, chapter by chapter, made Cassie and her mate want to shine and go out of their way to please.

  I, Cassie, and Dog thank you.

  And to my son, Bret— you’ve followed this path with me since Cassie first arrived, watched my dreams come true and stood by me through each story written and each story published. You’re the child romance raised and one of the strongest anchors in my life.

  •THE WORLD OF THE BREEDS•

  They were created; they weren’t born.

  They were trained; they weren’t raised.

  Tortured, experimented upon.

  Now that they’re free, they’re hunted.

  Eighteen years ago, a small pride of feline Breeds—humans genetically mutated and altered before conception with the DNA of the big-cat predators of the Earth—revealed their existence and shocked the world with the undeniable proof of man’s evil.

  “Science,” screamed their creators, who fought to excuse the demented, depraved experiments.

  One hundred and fifty years of death, blood and inhuman practices, of experiments that killed, maimed and forever scarred the incredible beings that science believed they had breathed life into.

  The Breeds were taught they had no soul.

  Their creators were to be their gods. Those men and women, hearts blackened by greed and evil, held the power of life or death.

  More death, sadly, was discovered than life.

  The revelation of those first six feline Breeds led to the discovery of the labs and confinement cells that held still endless more—who were sometimes enraged, all burning with hatred for their captors and desperate for freedom. And the tales they told of their confinement horrified the world.

  Daughters kidnapped across generations, used as Breeders, then terminated without thought to the lives destroyed.

  Families wailed in the streets and on screens across nation after nation. They sobbed at the horror their children, sisters and grandchildren suffered. They screamed for justice for the children, no matter their genetics or mutations, and raised their fists in demand for atonement.

  Yet more revelations of those who had escaped, had been slipped out as babes, and other experiments performed in vitro came to light.

  Whole families were devastated to learn they were to live in fear that their adopted children or the children conceived in vitro could one day be tested and torn from their arms to be placed in labs where experiments practiced on them were even more demonic than those done to animals in the past.

  A cry of horror echoed around the world. A demand for atonement swept through the countries whose politicians and military involved themselves in these atrocities.

  Chaos reigned in the capitals across the world. Marches by the hundreds of thousands swept across nations, and for months, the screams echoed to heav
en itself. Voices were raised to right this horrible wrong.

  The companies revealed to have provided funds for the depraved, horrific experiments saw their stocks crash, and entire corporations were destroyed. Some burned to the ground in the madness of the fury the world felt that their governments, their militaries, had contributed to something so evil.

  Government leaders in nation after nation toppled amid the fury until it threatened to decimate whole administrations unless those governing found a way to preserve the lives that had suffered so terribly.

  Here, the Breeds found a voice.

  They were creatures genetically enhanced to sway public opinion, to pinpoint weaknesses and strengths and use them to their own advantage. The genetics of fallen heroes and villains came to the fore as the Breeds stood before the masses and calmed their fury, suggesting their leaders ensure Breed freedom.

  Their genetics were drawn from the greatest minds in generations—long-lost warriors, military leaders, skilled orators, legal geniuses and scientific monsters—and mixed with those of the most cunning and predatory hunters alive.

  They understood deception and how to use it. They knew compassion but also the need for force. They became the weapons their creators envisioned, but they were now using those talents against their tormentors.

  What science had created and military minds had thought to control, they now found themselves helpless against; they were forced to sit down with creations who held such a fine understanding of legalities, deception and self-preservation that they were able to use the very laws of democracy against the democracies shaking beneath the threat of destruction.

  But freedom is still a chimera, a dream the Breeds are reaching for. Because even the laws drafted to protect them can’t silence the voices that rose against them.

  “God didn’t create them,” the minority screamed, their voices drowned by those demanding justice.

  Allowing the Breeds to move freely would dilute God’s genetic design, the purity of human blood, they argued.

  They were ignored.

  They were the minority.

  They became the shadow that haunts the Breeds.

  And nearly two decades later, the battle isn’t over yet.

  It’s only begun.

  • PROLOGUE •

  She was only eighteen and she knew she would die soon. Here, on this beautiful island Seth Lawrence owned, surrounded by the protective strength of a Breed force unlike any other, Cassie knew she wouldn’t leave alive.

  She had seen her own death.

  It wouldn’t be tonight, though. Not yet. But it was coming. She would have to die so others would live.

  Stepping past the wide double doors that opened into the huge atrium, she looked up at the glass-domed roof allowing the night to slide into the enclosed garden and had to fight back the bitterness. The anger.

  Turning, she met the eyes of the Breed Enforcers standing behind her, their gazes resolute but compassionate, and snapped the doors closed as they watched her silently.

  “Ask to enjoy the gardens at night and this is what I get?” she muttered, swinging around to let her gaze go over the massive enclosure of brick and glass surrounding it.

  The grass beneath her feet was surprisingly real. A wide stone walk led into the shadowed greenery, the lush, heavy growth and sultry scent of moisture and fragrant blooms pulling her into the depths of it.

  The atrium, Seth had called it. It was a damned greenhouse and nothing more. A well-protected, stone-and-bullet-resistant-glass-enclosed room with only one entrance, the wide doors she’d stepped inside.

  This was just perfect. It was infuriating, and she could feel the wild need for freedom clawing at her senses.

  Moving farther into the lush greenery, she could find little pleasure there. Despite her bare feet and the feel of grass beneath them, she found no satisfaction here. Just as she found no satisfaction in the deep, wide pond trickling in the center of the trees surrounding it.

  The trees were heavily leafed and beaded with what appeared to be dew. The moisture actually came from the water that misted from pipes running along the steel frame supporting the glass above.

  The scent of the night wasn’t here. The chirp of insects, the scuttle of creatures created to stalk such shadowed beauty, wasn’t here. It was sterile. Created by man rather than by nature.

  Just as she had been.

  She hated it.

  At least on her balcony she could smell the night, the creatures that inhabited it and the sea surrounding Lawrence Island.

  On her balcony there was a chance of sensing him … the man, and she knew it was a man, who watched her through a gun’s sights.

  Here, there was a chance that he would search the night for her.

  That he’d go ahead and take the shot rather than waiting.

  Swallowing tightly, Cassie lowered herself to sit on the rough, flat boulder bordering the pond, then shed the matching robe covering the thin, sleeveless white gown she wore. Drawing her feet up to rest on top of the stone, she looped her arms beneath her knees and rested her chin on them as she stared into the trickling water.

  What was wrong with her? She knew how dangerous it was to allow herself to stand on the balcony, in clear view, a target to any enemy with the intent to kill her. What force had drawn her there, pushed her to stand there in full view?

  Though few wanted to kill her.

  The price on her head was for her abduction, her virginity intact when she was turned over to the scientists secretly working with what remained of the Genetics Council.

  She was Cassandra Sinclair.

  She was unique, not just in her genetics but in her birth. Breed sperm had been used to inseminate her mother’s egg without any alterations to the ovum. The same as a hybrid, a Breed born of a Breed-human mating.

  But she was even rarer than that. She wasn’t created from a single animal species’ genetics, but two. She was created from both Wolf and Coyote genetics. The good and the bad. The proud, enduring Wolf DNA altered and forever dirtied by the taint of the Coyote DNA.

  Such a beautiful animal, the voice whispered through her memories.

  She’d been five, standing in nothing but the white panties she wore, shuddering, sickened by the touch of the bastard’s fingers on the mark at her shoulder. The shadow of a paw print. A genetic marker. But as she grew older, another shadow began marring her flesh, one even her parents were unaware of, one resembling that of jagged slices made by claws. The mark of the Coyote stained the flesh just over her womb.

  “She was created to whelp monsters,” her father sneered as Cassie shook with tears and disbelief.

  A part of her had known he wasn’t her real father. Unlike her mother’s, her father’s scent didn’t resemble hers. Her momma’s scent resembled hers. And her mother loved her.

  “She’ll whelp my little monsters,” Terrence Grange, drug lord and murderer said, chuckling, then lifted his arm, and a second later the weapon he carried exploded and her father was dead.

  She knew he was dead. He fell to the floor, blood spilling from his chest as he stared at Cassie with hatred.

  Thirteen years. It had been thirteen years since that night, and still, Cassie remembered every second of it as though it had happened only moments before.

  She would whelp monsters.

  Many said she was the monster, though.

  The point was moot, because she’d be dead. She’d seen the blood explode from her head, watched herself falling, and in that vision her eyes had slowly closed as her father’s howl of rage spilled into the night.

  She’d never been kissed, never been on a date. She was carefully protected, and those who protected her feared Dash Sinclair—her true father in the most important ways—far too much to risk lusting after her. She socialized within the Breed community, rarely among non-Breeds. And if by chance on those rare occasions a human male showed her any attention, then it wasn’t allowed for long.

  Whoever had watche
d her while she was on the balcony earlier that day lusted for her in ways she’d never felt with the young men her own age. There had been a sense of maturity, of experience, in the hungry gaze focused on her. She’d felt it, like a wave of heat reaching out for her. Curious and hungry. He knew who she was, and he didn’t care.

  If he abducted her, she wouldn’t be a virgin for long.

  As that thought drifted across her mind, she felt him.

  She didn’t smell him; there was no scent to warn her. She felt him.

  Her heart raced, her breathing became faster and she could feel the whisper of the air drifting through the area, against her. It eased past her gown, stroked her flesh, sensitized it.

  What an odd sensation. She’d never felt that before, until him.

  “If you’re caught, they’ll kill you.” She didn’t shift, didn’t try to call out to the guards standing outside the doors.

  She wasn’t frightened of him, though she sensed she should be.

  She should be terrified.

  “Think they will?” The amused drawl was teasing, playful, his accent just a bit alien. “They didn’t know I was here when they checked the area before letting you in. And they were quite thorough.”

  He remained behind her, hidden within the heavy foliage that had brushed against her back as he sat down. And she let him stay hidden, because she didn’t want to know … She liked the feel of his warmth against her back as she felt him lower himself behind her, the warmth of his breath against her neck.

  “You know they will.” Her voice trembled. “Are you here to kill me?”

  How wrong it seemed that what she was feeling now would be for the Breed who would kill her. And he was a Breed. She could sense it, feel it, though she wasn’t certain which designation of Breed.

  “Do you want to die?” Amusement laced his voice, amusement and something more, something dark and shadowed.

  Something hungry.

  Her eyes closed as she felt a caress against her hair, fingers twining in it, testing the curls, as a hum of appreciation stroked against her senses.

  “I’ll die either way.” She stared into the pond, wondering at her own cowardice. “I won’t leave here alive, you know?”

  Silence met her question, but she knew he heard her, knew he hadn’t left. She could feel him in the air she breathed, in the slow caresses in her hair.