Read Online Hakan Severin by Alexandra Ivy, Laura Wright - Free Book Online

grip.
    “Is there any mention of her mother?”
    Payton pointed a finger toward the last picture of a pretty, dark-haired female with jade green eyes.
    “Not directly, but this looks like it might be a photo of her.”

 
     

CHAPTER 5
     
     
    Hakan abruptly straightened and paced from one end of the shadowed library to the other.
    Inside, his cat roared, demanding vengeance for the helpless female Pantera who’d obviously been abused since she was a mere cub. Unfortunately, until they knew exactly who was behind the secret lab in The Haymore Center, he had no true enemy to battle.
    “Hiss was right,” he at last said between clenched teeth.
    “What do you mean?” Payton studied him with a wary expression and just for a crazed minute he was nearly overwhelmed by the urge to haul her back up the stairs and keep her in the bed until she agreed to complete the mating.
    Okay. It might be arrogant to assume that after twenty years of denying the attraction between them, she would be eager to bind herself to him just because he’d decided it was time.
    And maybe he deserved to do some squirming.
    But dammit, she wasn’t the only one who’d suffered. Couldn’t she at least give him a lifeline? A smidgeon of hope that she wasn’t going to make him wait forever?
    Then, with a muttered curse, he forced himself to focus on what they’d just discovered.
    The mess he’d made of his personal life was going to have to wait until they’d identified and destroyed the people responsible for holding Reny captive.
    Dammit.
    “Hiss always swore that his family was still alive, but the elders insisted they’d been killed in a fire,” he explained, belatedly wishing he hadn’t dismissed his one-time friend’s insistence that the elders were lying to him as the grief of an orphan.
    Payton frowned. “Could he have been involved with the Center?”
    “No.” Hakan paced back toward the desk. “The bastard might have helped the disciples of Shakpi, but he was genuinely shocked by the blood tests that revealed Reny is his sister.”
    “The kidnappers did try to negotiate to get their hands on Hiss,” she reminded him.
    His hands clenched at his side. “And now they have him.”
    She studied him in confusion. “How? I thought he was being guarded?”
    “Yeah, that was the general assumption,” he said. “But right before I left to follow you, Parish learned that someone had taken him out of the Wildlands.”
    She stiffened. “A Pantera?”
    Hakan didn’t blame her for her painful assumption. Once he would have sworn that no Pantera would ever betray them. Now they’d discovered that no one was above suspicion.
    “No, they believe it was a human.”
    She studied him with an anxious expression. “And you still don’t think Hiss is involved?” she asked.
    Hakan shrugged. He’d been shocked and deeply wounded when he’d discovered that Hiss had been working with Shakpi’s disciples, but he’d accepted the truth without hesitation.
    He’d known his friend had suffered throughout his childhood. It made sense he would try to punish those he held responsible for his pain.
    But this…
    He shook his head. “It doesn’t feel right.”
    She blinked, studying him as if she thought she might have misheard him.
    “Feel right?”
    “Geeks depend on facts and logic. A Hunter uses his gut instincts.”
    “Hmm.” Clearly unimpressed with the idea of depending on intuition, she returned her attention to the computer. “I’ll stick with facts and logic.”
    Hakan moved to stand behind her chair, watching as she scanned through the medical documents that were in the file.
    “Is there anything that reveals what the humans were doing to Reny while she was here?” he asked.
    “It looks like they were taking several vials of blood from her every week.”
    “Were they testing it?”
    She continued to scroll through the information that all looked like Greek to Hakan.
    “They wouldn’t need that much blood just for