He had seemed very large, towering over her when she stood close, but when she stepped back, she could see he probably wasn’t quite six feet. He was lithe, sinewy, his muscles defined. He reminded her of a jungle cat, flexible, capable of flowing silently over the ground and concealing himself in very small spaces.
“Whitney did put trackers in all the women, but he guessed you would find them, so he had an artist design tattoos with the ability for a satellite to track hidden powder chips he embedded in either the leaves or petals. They’re like dust particles. Fortunately, his ability to track is intermittent, and most of the women have had the particles removed from their tattoos. In the meantime, from what I understand, they’ve blocked him from tracking the tattoos, unless he’s found a new way to do it.”
Why was it such a surprise that Whitney hadn’t done one single nice thing for the women? Not one.
“So he knew where I was all along? Why wouldn’t he come after me?”
“As I understand it, he did send his men after a pregnant woman.”
“Rose.” She whispered her name.
“She’s safe,” he assured. “She’s married to a GhostWalker on another team and very well protected. It was a hard-won battle though. Her husband and another GhostWalker on the team nearly died, but she’s good and so is the baby. She had a boy.”
Camellia turned away from him, not willing for him to see how much that news affected her emotionally. Rose had made it out, was safe and had a little boy. She was married. “Who did she marry?” she asked Jonas deliberately. Another test.
Rose had told Camellia that she had begged Whitney to pair her with Kane after Kane had been transferred away from the laboratory. She didn’t want Kane to be the only one living in the hell of needing to be with just that one person physically when she felt she had been the one to ask Whitney to bring Kane into the program after she’d refused every other partner. Rose had watched him, a guard on the grounds, from her window for weeks before she decided on him and had asked Whitney to partner her with him.
“He’s on the third GhostWalker team, and he is the biological father of her child. He was a guard assigned to the base where Whitney was conducting his experiments. At the time, it hadn’t been discovered. Kane, along with another member of that same team, brought out evidence against Whitney. Unfortunately, Whitney had too many friends in high places, and he was tipped off and was able to go underground. In any case, Rose is married to Kane Cannon.”
Relief swept over her. Not once had Jonas lied to her. She honestly didn’t know how to trust him, but she wanted to. She wanted to just be a normal person and have a conversation about what was going on in the outside world.
“I believe the reason Whitney didn’t send anyone to get you is because once it was discovered the tattoos had the tracking devices in them, the trackers were jammed,” Jonas continued.
That made sense. “Do you live in one of those homes down below me? I just discovered them about a month ago. That’s the steepest side of the mountain, and I had never explored in that direction before. I caught sight of those compounds and ran like a rabbit.” She forced a laugh, trying to cover up the fact that while she was telling the truth, a part of her didn’t want to talk about the GhostWalkers. “I had no idea anyone was so close to me.”
“You’ve been up here a long time. You must have gone down into town for supplies,” Jonas said.
Right away, she noticed he hadn’t answered her question. She took another couple of steps away from him. Distance was good. She didn’t want to keep breathing him into her lungs. It was too intimate. Standing close to him in the night was too intimate. And the sound of his voice was too addictive. The more he spoke, the more she wanted to get close to him, to beg him not to leave. The chemistry between them was pretty explosive.
“There’s a much easier route for me. I go straight down on the other side. I can’t take a chance of breaking a leg, so until I had everything in place, I didn’t explore too far from home.”
He visibly winced at the idea of her breaking a bone. “It must have been difficult the first few winters you spent up here without supplies.”
She shrugged. “I was free, Jonas. Freedom makes up for a lot of things.”
He nodded. “We were put in cages for a brief period of time, nothing in comparison to what any of you or the other women have gone through, but it was enough to let me know I would never do well in prison. Not to say I haven’t gone into a cage a time or two to get a fellow GhostWalker out since then.”