Lynx Northern Shifters 3

intend to hold anything over me, you’re going to have to reintroduce us. I know how this works. He could already be dead.” His gaze flicked down to the picture. “He’s not looking particularly healthy.”
“We’ll feed him better. And I don’t mind a little introduction for a little cooperation.”
“What kind of cooperation?”
“For starters, I’d like a liter of your blood. It doesn’t have to be all at once.”
Fury flowed through Trey. He knew what Horton was searching for—the werewolf gene. He wanted the blood sent for DNA analysis. Horton planned to engineer a secret Werewolf Genome Project and use it to control shapeshifters. Trey couldn’t afford to hand him such power over himself and his family. Even his adult daughter, who wasn’t a werewolf but a carrier, would be a target if this information was kept in Horton’s secret hands.
Didn’t matter right now. He still knew how to play this out. “First, I see Jonah, then the blood.”
“That easily?” Horton sneered. “Please. What kind of fool do you think I am?”
Trey wanted to bare his teeth but couldn’t afford to overreact to the taunt, so he quietly said, “I think you know I demand proof.”
“Oh I can give you proof, no problem.” Horton pushed away from the table and rose. “It’s time for you to do as I say. If you don’t, Jonah will die of thirst, a pretty painful way to expire. Slow too. No one knows where he is, you see.” He looked down at Trey, watching him take in the information, trying to gauge how important Jonah was to Trey. “Therefore you will come with me.”
And Trey obeyed, much as it galled him, leaving his car behind at the coffee shop. He climbed into the passenger seat of Horton’s jeep and allowed Horton to take him God knows where. If he were purely rational, purely clinical, he would have attacked Horton anyway, killed him. He was a threat to a lot of people Trey cared about—his daughter, his niece and nephew. But Trey could not sacrifice Jonah, not without fighting his hardest to save him first.
    Jonah had learned to wait. At least he figured that was the one accomplishment that kept him going. First he’d been in a holding pattern before Trey, grieving for his lost family, unsure how to move forward or if it was possible to move forward. Then Trey had arrived, stormed Jonah’s defenses and left him naked in every way possible. No waiting during those three and half weeks that remained the most vivid days of his life. But afterwards, afterwards, there were endless months at home followed by a year and half searching and waiting—though at that point Jonah had lost track of what he was waiting for.
    Then finally here, with Horton and the guard he occasionally sent in his place, bringing supplies so that Jonah could barely hang on. He knew he was weakening. Horton had asked him, his tone joking, if Jonah had wasting disease. Because he was getting thinner and thinner.
    He wasn’t shifting, and Jonah had thought it was a way for him to save on the calories. But somehow the cat, jailed within him, was draining Jonah’s energy anyway. It didn’t help that Horton was deliberately not feeding him enough either.
    Jonah had considered his options and come to the decision that before he became too weak, he would have to kill Horton. But not yet. Jonah felt he had a few weeks, maybe a couple of months, until he hit that point of no return.
    If he did, he would die in here. Horton had made it clear that his death put the cell in complete lockdown. And no one was coming to the rescue.
Jonah could face death. He’d reached that point. Being a prisoner did that to a person, or at least to a lynx. But the lynx wanted to get that last kill in. Was straining for action. Perhaps it was good that it would be a few days before he saw Horton again.
Or that’s what Jonah had thought before he observed Horton through the barred door, punching in the numbers that allowed him to enter.
He clanged the door shut and looked across at Jonah who made it a point not to challenge the man. His lynx found Jonah’s way of stalking a little too slow and a little too stealthy, but was in fundamental agreement that their captor was being stalked. Jonah sometimes thought the reason his lynx stayed as quiescent as it did these days was because Horton was prey. There was a bloodthirsty side to him, hard to rouse, but strong once it had determined that an individual, be it Aaron or Horton, had to die.
It also interested