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see the same masculine beauty that was carved so exquisitely in his brother’s face. Her heart gave off a curious melting sensation. She had a strange desire to frame that face with her hands, to kiss every single scar and tell him none of them mattered. But she knew they did. Something deadly lay beneath that surface of destruction, and somehow it was tied up in each of those terrible slices made into his flesh and bone.
    Jack spread his hands out in front of him, held his right palm up. “It was just a suggestion.”
    “I can handle things here, no problem,” Ken said.
    Jack shrugged and stepped out of the room.
    “What was that?” Mari asked.
    Ken turned back to her, his face as expressionless as ever. “You don’t know?”
    Did she? Mari was so confused with her reaction to him, with her behavior and the fact that she wasn’t in terrible pain as long as she was close to him that she couldn’t seem to think with a clear head. He had admitted he’d given her painkillers; maybe they were making her thinking fuzzy, because nothing was making sense.
    Unless . . . It couldn’t be. She would know, wouldn’t she? Her mouth went dry at the thought that Whitney had somehow paired her with this man. Her fingers tightened around his wrist. “Come closer to me.” Whitney had many, many experiments, and his worst was combining couples—his breeding program. It was why she had convinced the others in her unit to allow her to join them one more time so she could personally speak to the senator.
    Violet knew her. Violet would vouch for her. Speaking to the senator and asking—begging—him to intervene was the only way she and the other women could continue to do their duty as soldiers. And if she didn’t get back to the compound fast, too many people were going to get hurt.
    “You know,” he said, his voice soft.
    She closed her eyes and looked away from him. She’d been trained as a soldier almost since the day she was born, and she was proud of her abilities. But suddenly, Whitney had pulled the women off the units and brought them to a new location, a new training center, and they’d become virtual prisoners. Whitney had paired some of the men with the women using some kind of scent compatibility. It was more complicated than that, but she had seen the results and they weren’t very nice. The men were obsessed, whether or not the women responded to them. And it didn’t seem to matter to most of them one way or the other. She and the other women had conspired to get one of them out of the compound to approach Senator Freeman and Violet in the hopes that he would shut down Whitney’s operation and return them to their units.
    Mari had never been attracted to any of the men she knew and respected, yet she was fascinated by a total stranger, her enemy, a man who would have killed her. She was not just attracted; the feeling was all-encompassing. She wanted to soothe away his hurts. She needed to find a way to take away the stark loneliness she saw in him.
    Somehow Whitney had paired her with this man. He didn’t act as if he reciprocated, and Mari was ashamed of herself. She detested the men in the breeding program for their lack of discipline and control, and yet she was acting nearly as bad. This was a horrible situation and one that wasn’t going to be easily overcome.
    What did she want anyway? To sleep with him, just as the men did with her? Did she think he was going to fall madly in love with her? There was no such thing. Love was an illusion. According to Whitney, it was their duty to sleep with their partner in order to have a child. So far, she had resisted, and she’d been punished numerous times, but the idea of intimacy with Brett, of all men—a vicious brute of a man who enjoyed inflicting punishments—was a little too much for her stubborn streak.
    Ken hadn’t pulled away from her, and she let him go, the heat of his skin burning into her palm. He refused to look away. She could feel his gaze