Forbidden Embers

by Tessa Adams

  She fucking destroyed him.

  He’d deliberately asked her about the lab, had watched her closely as she answered. Had waited for some sign of guilt, of remorse, of knowledge about what was going on there, but she’d been a blank slate. Two days ago, he would have believed it was because she was a hell of an actress. Tonight, he’d been afraid to hope that it was because she really didn’t know anything about the virus or what her father had done.

  And if that was the case . . . He let out a shuddering sigh. If that was the case, there was no way he should be able to look himself in the fucking mirror. Because then he was as bad as all of her factionnaires, huddling around her, keeping secrets and doing their best to destroy her in an effort to save themselves.

  Sickened, disgusted and afraid for the first time in he couldn’t begin to remember when, Logan bent over the sink and splashed water on his face. Tried to wash away his guilt and confusion as easily as he did the sleep from his eyes. It didn’t work, but as he was drying off, he saw something in the mirror that sent his world spinning off its axis.

  It can’t be, he told himself as he squinted at the mirror. It can’t be, he repeated as he looked down at his right arm in shock.

  It can’t be.

  It can’t be.

  It can’t be.

  But it was. Jesus Christ, it really was.

  His tattoos had changed, shifted a little, so that the jagged lines on his arm had somehow come together in a faint band around his bicep. A mating band.

  The first of the three that formed when a dragon met the woman he was destined to be mated with for the rest of his life. When complete, they would lock he and Cecily together for the rest of their very long lives.

  He stared at the intricate black ring in disbelief, shocked at how beautiful it was. He’d seen them before, of course, on his mated friends’ arms, had always known that they were incredibly artistic, but he’d never realized just how gorgeous they really were. Probably because he’d never paid much attention to them before, and because the band had never been his. Or maybe it wasn’t the band that was so beautiful, but the feelings that brought it forth.

  Unable to stop himself, he traced the band with his finger, learning all of its twists and turns. It was surprisingly delicate—like Cecily—yet sturdy, too, the links and connections well-defined.

  He told himself to stop looking at it, to pretend he’d never seen it, but he couldn’t stop touching it. It felt amazing. Warm, mystical, welcoming. It felt like Cecily. It felt like he’d always imagined home would feel, if he ever managed to find it.

  How could he have known? How could he possibly have guessed that after four hundred years he would find his home? Here in the middle of enemy territory.

  The thought jerked him out of the fantasy he hadn’t even known he’d been weaving and landed him in the middle of reality with a solid thump. He was an idiot, a fucking idiot, to get caught up in the magic of it even for a second when he knew the truth.

  This story didn’t have a happy ending.

  How could it? He had lied to her from the very first minute he’d met her, had accepted her invitation into her clan with only one goal on his mind: to destroy everything she wanted to save. And even if he didn’t, even if he went against every instinct he had and settled for simply destroying the lab, he couldn’t take back the fact that he had lied to her. Had betrayed her trust. Had coldly and deliberately used her.

  Besides, he couldn’t just let everything else go. Not after meeting her Conseil and getting up close and personal with so many of her factionnaires’ thoughts. Cecily might not be the evil incarnate he’d once imagined her to be, but the people she was surrounded by were. There was no way he could leave her with any of them alive. Every single one of the Conseil had to go—including those who Cecily considered her friends.

  No, there was no future for him and Cecily. Despite the fact that he wanted her like he’d wanted no other woman, despite the fact that he had fallen in love with her, despite the fact that he was well on his way to respecting her and what she was trying to do, he couldn’t pretend that everything was going to be all right.

  If he stayed with her, if he stayed here and abandoned the Dragonstars, he would forsake every ounce of self-respect he had. If he tried to make it work, if he destroyed the lab in secret and killed off her Conseil the same way, and then she somehow found out, he’d be dooming her to only half a life. After they’d bonded completely, after their mating was complete, if she found out that he had betrayed her, it would destroy her. Mates didn’t betray each other, didn’t lie to each other, sure as hell didn’t build a life on deception.

  No, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t finish the process, couldn’t let the bond complete itself. If he did, they’d both be damned. And while he already was, he could not stand the thought of bringing Cecily down with him. Which meant there was only one thing for him to do.

  He had to lock his feelings for Cecily away, hide them so far inside himself that even he forgot they were there. If he did that, if he succeeded in convincing her that he didn’t care about her, then the mating ring would fade and Cecily would be all right. She could marry someone else, have children with someone else, and never be the wiser. And while the thought of her letting some other man touch her made him furious, made him ill, the thought of destroying her was a million times worse. If he did anything else, if he tried to believe in fairy tales or the fact that she might someday be able to forgive him, then he would end up ruining not only his life, but hers, as well.

  It was the right thing to do. Not the easy thing, but the right thing.

  Dragging on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, he slipped out of Cecily’s room through the back patio door. With the wonder of the mating band still a fist in his gut, he didn’t trust himself not to climb back into bed with her and make love to her until the bond was firmly in place and she was irrevocably his. So he’d spend the rest of the night wandering the compound and trying to figure out how to turn off his feelings for her once and for all.

  And the next time he saw Dylan—if he ever saw his king again— he would tell him that he was full of shit. Finding his mate was anything but wonderful.

  In the meantime, he had something else to tell his king. Closing his eyes, he concentrated on building the mental bridge that would allow him to contact Dylan across more than a thousand miles. When he reached him, he settled down on a nearby bench and told Dylan all about the Shadowdrakes and their vendetta against the Wyvernmoons. By the time he was done, Dylan had already mapped out a plan on how the Dragonstars could ally themselves with the other clan.

  When he was done, he figured he really had to hand it to himself. He’d been on the Wyvernmoon compound for a little more than twenty-four hours, and already he’d started the ball moving toward their ultimate destruction. And his own.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Cecily was in a crappy mood as she walked into the restaurant on the east side of the compound, where she was supposed to meet Gage. She was the one who had asked for the meeting, away from the west side of the compound, where the factionnaires usually hung out, and she needed to be on top of her game if she was going to win him over to her side. Yet she’d never felt worse.

  After making love to her so completely that she had cried, Logan had been nowhere to be found when she woke up. She’d waited for him for hours, even as she told herself she wasn’t. When he hadn’t shown up by ten o’clock, she had even tried to reach out to him telepathically. But he hadn’t answered her, and he hadn’t returned before she had to leave for her lunch meeting at one o’clock with Gage, and now she was beginning to feel like a three-day stand.

  Which was fine. It wasn’t like Logan had made any promises to her, after all. But he should have been honest with her. He should have told her how he felt, not made love to her like she was the only woman in the world. Maybe she was overreacting—maybe he had another explanation for where he’d run off to—but she didn’t think so.

 
Add to that the fact that she’d been digging through her father’s office and found a series of bills that amounted to millions of dollars, all from a research lab she’d never heard of. When she’d called the number, it had been disconnected, with no forwarding number, which seemed odd, considering it was the kind of place that should want clients to be able to find it. Especially if those clients had given millions upon millions of dollars.

  She’d planned to ask Logan to look into it, but since he was nowhere around, she was going to have to figure out how to do it herself. She was starting with Gage, because, along with Julian, he had been her father’s second-in-command. She figured if Silus had been draining the clan’s coffers, Gage was one of the few who might know why.

  Not that she really needed the why, she supposed, but she couldn’t help it. Her father had been working on something big toward the end of his life. She’d known that, even though he had never trusted her enough to let her see it. This lab, this money, had to be related to that. And if it wasn’t, she wanted to know what the hell it was.

  Gage stood when she approached the table, dropped a swift kiss on her cheek before helping her tuck her chair into the table. His solicitousness surprised her. Though he’d always treated her like that, lately she’d felt more like a plague sufferer around him than a beloved friend.

  “Hi, Gage. How are you?” she said as she laid her napkin on her lap.

  “I’m . . . cautiously optimistic,” he answered, with a sparkle in his eye that she hadn’t seen for a long time.

  “Really? You want to tell me why? Because I have to admit that optimism is not exactly what I’m feeling at this point.”

  Before he could answer, the waiter approached and poured her a glass of the wine Gage had ordered while he’d been waiting for her. She figured it said a lot about her life of late, and just how much things had deteriorated between them, when she took one look at the open bottle and wondered if it was safe to drink or if he had poisoned her.

  And this was the factionnaire she trusted most. The one she had planned on asking to marry her to give the clan a king. God, her life really was shit, wasn’t it?

  “You’re a woman, Cecily. I told Silus he underestimated you, but your father was a stubborn man. He wouldn’t deviate from his own ideas to save his life. I often asked him why he even bothered to have a Conseil.”

  “And what did he say?” she asked.

  “That it was a status thing. Any king worth fearing had a group of ruthless and powerful advisors next to him that his enemies could point at with fear.”

  “Nice man, my father.”

  Gage shrugged. “He wasn’t all bad.”

  “Maybe not, but I’m having a hard time seeing the good in him these days.”

  “You’re not the only one.”

  His response surprised her, and she studied him for a minute, trying to read the handsome face that was almost as familiar to her as her own. But nothing seemed out of place. Gage’s long-lashed blue eyes shone with sincerity. His full lips smiled convincingly—she even caught sight of the dimple at the corner of his mouth that she had teased him about when she was a teenager. There were no new lines of strain or worry, no circles beneath his eyes to signify sleepless nights. Nothing at all that said he’d been staying up late worrying about the clan, as she had.

  Which, she supposed, was an answer in itself.

  Deciding to lay all her cards on the table in an effort to gauge where he stood, she reached into her purse and placed the file folder she’d found that morning on the table between them.

  “What’s this?” he asked, taking a lingering sip of wine, as if to tell her that her earlier suspicions had been completely unfounded.

  “I was hoping you could tell me. I found it in Dad’s study and can’t seem to figure it out.”

  Gage glanced at the thick pile of papers. “They’re invoices.”

  “I know that, Gage. Invoices that total close to forty million dollars. That’s a pretty big expenditure for the clan, and I was hoping you would be able to tell me what it went toward.”

  He shook his head, shrugged. “They look like lab invoices to me. Maybe for equipment or something?”

  His voice was sincerely puzzled, his eyes appropriately shadowed. But she’d known him long enough to know that when he rubbed a finger over the bridge of his nose, there was more to a story than he wanted to say.

  She thought about the information Logan had given her the night before, and took a shot in the dark. “Do these invoices have something to do with why our lab is so closely guarded?”

  His eyes shot to hers. “What do you know about the lab?”

  And I’ve got you, she thought triumphantly. “What do you know about the lab?”

  “It’s not my really my area. Wyatt, Dax and Dashiell are in charge of security over there. You should probably talk to them.”

  She made a mental note of the names, and didn’t know whether she should be pleased that her three favorite factionnaires were still doing their jobs when everyone else seemed to have decided that duty could go to hell, or if she should be upset that they were obviously involved with something that Gage was doing his best to keep quiet.

  “I will. But you were my father’s second-in-command. I have a hard time believing he spent forty million dollars last year alone, and you didn’t know anything about it. Just like I can’t believe that a smart, experienced guy like you doesn’t think it’s odd that the lab is locked up tighter than the White House. And I know you, Gage. I’ve known you my whole life. If you think something’s odd, you don’t stop digging until you get to the bottom of it.”

  He drained his wine, but she noticed that he didn’t pour himself another glass, even though it looked like he could use it. The words on a bumper sticker she’d seen once came back to her. Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get me. “Come on, Gage. Tell me what the hell is going on. You owe me that much.”

  The waiter picked that moment to come up to take their orders, and Cecily considered waving him away. But she changed her mind at the last second, decided it might be best to let Gage stew. So she spent a few minutes talking to the waiter, listening to the day’s specials and then asking himself a few questions about himself, his family. Trying to get a good idea of how the regular dragons in the clan were doing.

  As the waiter was leaving with their orders, she instructed him to take the wine and throw it away. Gage didn’t argue, and her heart cracked wide open. This was the man she had planned to ask to marry her? The man she’d wanted to make king? The hero worship she’d had for him since she was ten years old died a painful death.

  “It was just a few sleeping pills. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “Just get me out of the way for a while. Why?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think it matters now.”

  “Says the man who didn’t almost end up passed out in his fettuccine.” He didn’t answer for the longest time, and when he finally did say something, it had nothing to do with the fact that one of her oldest, dearest friends had just tried to drug her insensate.

  “Don’t go near the lab, Cecily. It’s not a good place for you.”

  “Why not?” She leaned forward and whispered fiercely, “What’s in there that has you so afraid? What has my father done, Gage? What have you done?”

  “I haven’t done anything.” He slid back from the table so fast his chair hit the ground hard. “There’s no way I’m taking the blame. Not for this. I did your father’s dirty work for nearly five hundred years, but this . . . this is pure evil. I never had anything to do with what went on in that lab. You remember that.”

  He stormed out of the restaurant and she was left staring after him, completely bewildered. And more than a little frightened.

  Pure evil? What the hell had her father been up to?

  And why had Gage tried to drug her?

  Logan had just knocked out one of the guards and slipped into the lab when a wave of ps
ychic energy hit him hard enough to scramble his brain. At first, he’d figured it was a booby trap, meant to attack any outsiders who actually found a way into the lab. But a quick glance around told him no such alarm had been triggered. He was safe, undetected—at least for now. Which was a good thing, as it was two in the morning and his shields were down, all of them, his brain completely exposed as he tried to figure out exactly what the hell was going on in the lab.

  He’d spent most of the day outside the large, unimaginative-looking building, observing the comings and goings and anything else he could see. As he’d waited, he’d reached a few conclusions. The first one was that for a lab that was manufacturing a deadly virus of biblical proportions, there were an awful lot of people walking in and out of the place. The second one was that the security had more than doubled since he’d been there the night before, especially around the south side (which was why he’d come in on the north side). He wondered if it was attributable to his attack on Remy. Had they traced it back to him? And if so, why hadn’t they come after him?

  The third thing he’d figured out was more an educated guess based on observation. Something big was going on in there, and whatever it was was big enough that more than half of the factionnaires had been by to check up on it. He’d watched nine of them stroll through the large doors at the front of the lab, and none of them had come back out. At least not while he’d been lying out here in the middle of the bushes.

  Of course, he had been gone for an hour when he had picked up on an incredible amount of distress from Cecily. He’d tried to ignore it, as he had her psychic calls earlier in the day, but when he’d realized she was both devastated and confused, he hadn’t been able to stay away.

  After his disappearing act that morning, she hadn’t exactly been overjoyed to see him, which he should have been happy about. But the whole mating thing was a tricky one, and no matter what he had told himself the night before, it drove him—and his beast—nuts to know that he’d hurt her.