The Devil's Due Read Free Page A

nod without looking away from the girl, Devil made his decision quickly. “I’ll let Tiberian know and we’ll check her out in five years.”
    In five years she would be twenty-one and beyond the requirement that the network reveal any underage workers. And at twenty-one, her body would be mature enough, strong enough, to train for the Bureau of Breed Affairs as a human agent.
    The Bureau had been built from the ground up by Breeds, and only in the past years had they begun accepting humans into their ranks. But it was Devil’s hope that rather than joining the Bureau, she would instead join Lobo Reever’s security team in the New Mexico desert.
    As he watched, he couldn’t help but allow his curiosity to grow. A human that moved like a Breed. He was always of the opinion . . .
    If it looked like . . .
    If it acted like . . .
    If it sounded like . . .
    He wasn’t a great believer in coincidences either.
    At that moment, her head lifted from where she watched another trainee slipping around the form of a deserted building. Their eyes met. And in that brief moment, in that connection, Devil swore he saw a hell of a lot more than a human.
    Yet, she wasn’t a Breed?

ONE

    Katie—8 years later
    M ary Kathleen O’Sullivan, Katie to friends and family, had no idea so many reporters could exist in one place.
    Standing behind one of the protective filters that now covered each of her windows, she stared at the crowd of journalists vying for position, watching her home closely, microphones and notepads held ready.
    “The guardians of the masses,” her father had once called journalists. He now called them “those sons of bitches,” despite the fact that they were doing no more now than they had been when he’d made the first comment.
    “Katie, please come away from the window,” her mother requested, her soft, lilting voice heavy with concern.
    Katie, her parents had always called her. She guessed it beat “Fido,” or “Precious,” as several tabloids’ writers had dubbed her.
    Turning, she did as her mother asked, glancing at the other woman from beneath the veil of her lashes.
    Kella O’Sullivan had aged a bit in the past weeks. There were fine worry lines now etched in her once smooth forehead, while her emerald green eyes reflected a fear that hadn’t been there before.
    Her long, red gold ringlets were caught at her nape with a heavy silver clasp, displaying the family pearls she wore at her neck.
    Katie had often reflected on how alike she and her mother looked. The high cheekbones and slightly tilted eyes. Small, though sensually curved lips and the thick, unusually long red gold lashes that framed their deep green eyes. Eyes that Katie had never seen so clouded with worry and fear.
    Or had they been?
    Katie had always sensed the well-hidden concern that rode her parents, though she’d never truly believed she was the root of it. She’d always assumed the stress came from her father’s job as assistant chief constable of Northern Ireland, rather than from the freak of science their daughter was.
    Maintaining her poise, she returned to the wingback chair beside the gas fireplace her father had just installed in the three-story home she’d lived in all her life. That chair had been turned to face their “guests,” rather like an interviewee’s chair would face some emissary of power, such as the men sitting across from her.
    Callan Lyons, the Feline Breed Pride leader, was accompanied by Jonas Wyatt, the director of the Bureau of Breed Affairs, Wolfe Gunnar and Dash Sinclair, the Wolf Breed Pack leaders, Del-Rey Delgado, the Coyote Breed Pack leader, as well as the often elusive Dylan Killato, the European Wolf Pack leader determined to pull the hidden Breeds on his side of the world together, watched her, as she imagined the scientists that created her most likely had watched her: with detached curiosity.
    “Katie, I know you’re frightened.” Dylan leaned forward, the shifting silver