by Lara Adrian
She looked different from when he’d last seen her. Slimmer, her golden skin more pale than luminescent. Her eyes, despite being filled with battle rage, seemed even more haunted than before. Most of her white-blonde hair had come loose from a long braid at her back. It hung in a wild tangle around her, its distinctive single streak of iridescent gold along the left side of her face hanging limp and dulled.
Not that any of these changes diminished Tamisia’s otherworldly beauty.
Trygg hadn’t cared enough to ask for details about her at the time she’d arrived in Rome, but rumor had it that she’d betrayed her own kind, causing the death of a fellow Atlantean council member. A month and a half ago, he’d helped Lazaro Archer bring Tamisia to the command center as some kind of diplomatic gesture between the Order and her people, but that was as far as Trygg’s interest in her had gone.
Or so he’d told himself for the two weeks the female had been underfoot at headquarters.
She’d been a distraction to him from the moment he first set eyes on her. A nuisance he’d been eager to lose when she abruptly left the Order’s safekeeping a month ago to make her own way in the city. Trygg hadn’t asked where she had gone. He hadn’t wanted to know.
He sure as fuck didn’t want to be standing in front of the female now, in the middle of a surveillance mission gone all to hell.
Thanks mostly to her.
She seemed anything but concerned with the fact that he was even in the room. Hurrying over to the crib, she collected the squalling baby into her arms. Holding her like precious, fragile glass, she quieted the worst of the infant’s cries with soft murmurs and gentle strokes along the child’s trembling back.
Trygg ran a hand over the stubble on his shaved head, then exhaled a gruff curse as he assessed the damage to his night’s objective. Franco was as dead as he could be. Trygg should have forgone the tail tonight and simply squeezed the Breed male for information. Now Franco was useless to anyone. The Order would have to start all over with a new mark inside Santino’s operation. It could take weeks, even months.
“Do you have any idea what you just did, female?”
“Yes.” When he glanced at Tamisia, her chin hiked up a notch. “I dispensed justice. Unfortunately, not quickly enough to save Rosa.”
Trygg followed her sober gaze to the strangled female near the bed. Rosa looked to be barely out of her teens and no threat to anyone, least of all the pair of assholes who’d broken into the house tonight. He could hear the grief in the Atlantean’s soft voice when she spoke about the young woman, but Tamisia didn’t shed a tear. In fact, she straightened her shoulders, looking even more determined as she gently stroked the baby’s back.
“Tell me what happened.”
“The human male was searching her belongings when I kicked in the door. The other one, the bloodsucker, had a hold of her by the throat. He’d already wrenched the life from her in front of her child by the time I got up here. Then he threw her down over there as if she were rubbish.”
Her voice shook a bit, not with fear or shock, but with loathing. Trygg only had to look at Franco’s big, broken body and snapped neck to understand that her fury tonight must have been off the charts. The Breed and the Atlanteans had been enemies for the longest time, and this brutal attack on a young woman only seemed to fortify Tamisia’s animosity toward Trygg and all of his kind.
But Tamisia’s feelings were none of his concern. He was more interested in what she’d just divulged about the attack. He glanced at the closet and the upturned drawers and emptied backpack.
“What were they looking for?”
“I don’t know.”
Trygg walked over and moved some of the scattered clothing and other personal effects with his boot. He didn’t see anything of interest. Whatever Franco and his companion were searching for, it didn’t appear that they’d found it.
And now Trygg had another wrinkle to smooth in his already fucked-up mission.
No. Make that two.
Sirens sounded in the streets outside, growing louder by the moment. The distinctive whine signaled the pending arrival of the Joint Urban Security Taskforce Initiative Squad, a police force comprised of humans and Breed officers.
“You called JUSTIS?”
She nodded, still cradling the baby in her arms. “My friend who runs the shelter called them. I told her to when we realized someone had broken into the house.”
“Fuck.” Bad enough his best chance of getting a firm lock on Santino was currently sprawled on the floor with his head nearly twisted off like a bottle cap. Lazaro Archer would be plenty pissed off to hear that newsflash. Hell, Trygg would probably have to answer to D.C. headquarters and the Order’s founder, Lucan Thorne, too. About the only thing that would make the night any worse was having to explain to JUSTIS what a member of the Order was doing standing in the middle of a multiple murder scene.
He and his fellow warriors already had a reputation as merciless vigilantes with a habit of enforcing law and order whenever and however they saw fit. Relations with mankind in the past twenty years since the Breed had been outed to them were strained enough without the situation here adding fuel to the fire.
And besides, rumor had it that Roberto Santino had a fair share of the city’s police force on his payroll.
He could trance the human officers as soon as they showed up and scrub their minds of all memory of what they found here, but that wouldn’t work on the Breed members of the squad. Nor could he erase the record of the emergency call for help that had come from this house. The wheels were already in motion here, and Trygg was going to have to deal with the fallout as best he could.
He looked at Tamisia, standing there with a self-healed gunshot wound and palms still pulsing like embers as she held the quieted infant in her arms. Her regal, ethereal beauty called attention under normal circumstances. After what she’d done tonight, there would be no mistaking her for anything as mundane as human.
Which meant he wasn’t the only one who’d have a lot of explaining to do once the law arrived on the scene.
“The cops will be here soon. You’d be wise to avoid them. I doubt this is the way you or any other Atlantean would want to go public to the humans for the first time.”
Her face blanched. She looked at the carnage she’d left—carnage no mere mortal was capable of—and true worry flickered in her brilliant blue eyes. “What shall I do?”
“For starters, lose those ruined clothes. There’s going to be a lot of questions about what went down in here. Aside from the fact you took out two intruders single-handedly without any trace of a weapon, it’d be damn hard to explain the blood and the lack of a bullet wound where you’ve obviously been shot tonight.”
“Then what are we going to tell the officers when they get here?”
“Not we, Tamisia.” Trygg bared his fangs in a smile he knew was far from friendly. “You’re going to stay out of my way and let me handle this. That’s not a request.”
The flat line of her lips said she didn’t appreciate him telling her what to do, but he gave her points for not arguing with him. In fact, despite his general distaste for females and all the trouble that followed them, the memory of Tamisia standing over Franco’s dead body like an unearthly, avenging angel made his cock buck hard behind his zipper.
Not gonna happen.
He ground his molars against the desire that stirred, unwelcome, inside him. “Go. Take the baby out of here and keep the other women away too. I’ll go down and wait for the police.”
Tamisia stared at him, her head tilted with growing suspicion. “Tell me what’s really going on. You knew those men, didn’t you?”
“Go, Tamisia. Far as you or anyone else is concerned, this is the Order’s business now.”
At first he thought she would ignore him. But as the sirens blared in the street outside the house and flashing red and blue strobes lit up the darkness, some of her resistance ebbed.
Finally her ice-blue eyes released
him. Tucking the baby against her, she strode out of the room, her spine as straight and stubborn as a queen’s.
Trygg made a focused effort not to watch the way her hips and curved backside swayed with each long stride. Ignoring the kick of his veins and the pulse that throbbed in both his emerging fangs and the stiffness at his groin was more struggle than he wanted to admit.
When Tamisia’s light footsteps retreated out of earshot, he exhaled the curse he’d been holding and rubbed his palm over his clenched jaw.
Time to get to work.
Chapter 3
Two hours later, Sia stood at the front door and watched the law enforcement vehicles quietly roll away from the house. The ambulances carrying Rosa’s body and those of her assailants had departed for the medical examiner a few minutes earlier.
The JUSTIS officers had stayed in Rosa’s room for a long time, talking with Trygg and processing the scene. It had taken all the patience Sia possessed to simply wait downstairs with Phaedra and the shelter’s residents while the officers did their work and carried out a bag of evidence from Rosa’s room.
Sia and Phaedra had been questioned only briefly by one of the human officers, both of them asserting to him that they had called for help as soon as they heard the ruckus upstairs and had been too afraid to do anything more—just as Trygg had privately instructed them to do in the moments before he went outside to meet the arriving squad cars.
Then Sia had dutifully kept her distance from the police and their investigation. Not out of any obedience to the Breed warrior or the Order he served, but out of loyalty to Phaedra and the rest of their people.
Trygg had been right about one thing. She didn’t want to be the one who shattered the secrecy that had kept the Atlantean realm hidden as pure myth for centuries upon centuries. She’d already failed the council and her friends in the colony once. She wasn’t about to do it again.
As distant a dream as it was that she might one day win back her place among her people, she clung to that small hope. She would never risk even deeper disgrace by giving the humans a reason to suspect she was anything other than human.
Or that there were others like her, both the ones living quietly among man and Breed, as Phaedra was doing, and the hidden populations who lived behind the veil of the colony and in the greater realm ruled by the Atlantean queen, Selene.
Mankind was quick to alarm and slow to trust. After twenty years of coexisting in the open with the Breed, war between the two races remained a constant threat. There might never come a time when the humans were ready to learn they shared their small planet with yet another immortal, otherworldly faction.
“Everyone’s exhausted and gone back to their rooms for the night,” Phaedra said as she came up beside her. Her ageless face was troubled, sober with grief. “I’ve moved the baby into my quarters for now. Poor little Angelina. Can you imagine being left without a mother at such a tender age?”
Sia blinked slowly and shook her head, regret tight in her breast. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to save Rosa,” she whispered for her friend’s ears alone. “I got there too late.”
Phaedra’s hand came to rest lightly on her back. “It’s not your fault, Tamisia. For pity’s sake, you weren’t the one who killed her. Those awful men did.”
Sia nodded, but her thoughts were grim, her mind troubled—not only by the death of an innocent woman, but by the fact that one of the Order’s warriors had been tracking Rosa’s attackers for some reason. She could imagine no other reason for Trygg to have been close enough to the shelter when the men broke in.
What did he know about them?
Or was it someone else that had piqued the warrior’s interest?
She watched Trygg’s immense shape moving through the darkness and across the street. Sia had kept her word to stay out of the way while the police were there, but she had questions that needed answers.
“I’ll be right back,” she murmured to Phaedra, already opening the door and stepping out after him. “Trygg, I need to talk to you.”
He glanced behind him but didn’t acknowledge her. Moonlight gleamed on the top of his head as he kept walking, his broad shoulders determined and his long, muscular legs practically chewing up the pavement with each hard stride.
When it became clear that he meant to ignore her, Sia picked up her pace, using Atlantean speed to place herself in front of him before he could take another step.
He stopped abruptly, less than an inch to spare between her breasts and the center of his sternum. She was tall, but he was enormous. She hadn’t really stopped to recognize that until now. She’d never been this close to the surly Breed male before. Close enough to feel the heat and power of his body, and to inhale the spicy, dark scent of his skin.
During her brief stay at the Order’s command center, she had been too put off by Trygg’s menacing demeanor to allow herself to truly look at him for any length of time. Now she couldn’t help but study him, realizing beneath the scowl and the severity of the shaved head and jagged facial scar, he was actually handsome. Long black lashes fringed eyes of the deepest shade of sapphire she’d ever seen. His nose was straight and regal, his mouth generously cut, even sensual.
He caught her staring, and the furrow between his dark brows deepened.
She awkwardly cleared her throat. “What did you tell the police?”
“The truth, more or less. I was on patrol, tailing a couple of petty drug pushers to this address. I saw them break into the house. When I heard a woman scream, I decided to take matters into my own hands. Not the first time I’ve had to explain a couple of dead bad guys to JUSTIS. They seemed to buy it.”
“Those men. Is that what they were—drug dealers?”
He stared at her. “You don’t need to know anything more than what I told the cops, Sia. Do us both a favor and leave it at that.”
“They were searching for something, Trygg.”
“So you mentioned.”
“Do the police have any idea what it might be?”
“I didn’t tell them that part.”
Sia gaped. “Why not? Rosa was killed for whatever it was they thought she had. If telling the police about it will help them understand what kind of trouble she was in—”
“The police can’t help.” Trygg blew out an impatient curse. “And whatever those men wanted from the woman doesn’t matter now.”
“It matters to me,” she insisted.
His dark eyes narrowed and he gave a stiff shake of his head. “This conversation is over. I told you, what happened here is the Order’s business. Go back inside and get some rest. Forget about tonight.”
She scoffed. “Forget it?”
When he started to move around her, Sia grabbed his arm. Warm, hard muscle clenched beneath her fingertips, sending a shocking heat through her body. She drew her hand away at once, trying to ignore the distressing awareness she felt for a man who infuriated her more and more the longer she knew him.
“You think I will ever forget what I saw tonight? A young woman was murdered, Trygg. A woman I liked. A woman I was responsible for keeping safe. And now an innocent little baby is without her mother. Maybe that’s something your cold-hearted kind can simply dismiss, but don’t expect me to do the same.”
“Yes, Tamisia. That’s exactly what I expect.” He scowled now, his scarred, sinister face taut with growing irritation and something more difficult to define. “In fact, I’m fucking demanding it. You do not want to be involved in this. So stow your questions and march your fine ass back into that house and stay there.”
Her jaw dropped open. No one had ever spoken to her like that in all of her immortal existence. She was an Atlantean elder, one of the highest regarded council members in the colony. At one time, she had even been a confidante to the queen herself.
Was. Past tense, all of it.
Now she was merely a foreigner dropped into the middle of a strange, violent land.
And Trygg had no reason to treat her as anything m
ore.
Still, his heavy-handed, gruff demeanor rankled her. It pissed her off.
Even while she couldn’t help noting his unexpected comment about her ass.
She stood her ground, refusing to let him think he could cower her. Agreeing to cooperate with him for the protection of her people was one thing. Turning a blind eye to a cold-blooded murder was quite another.
“I want the answers about Rosa’s death even if you don’t, warrior.”
But Trygg did want answers. She had seen that truth in him earlier tonight and she saw it now too. No matter how hard he was trying to convince her otherwise.
He growled a low curse and took a step away from her. Sia followed him with her gaze.
“Who’s Santino?”
Trygg stopped dead in his tracks. When his head swiveled in her direction, his expression was as dark as a thundercloud.
“I heard the Breed male who killed Rosa say the name Santino. He told the other man to keep looking for whatever it was they were after. He said Santino didn’t want any loose ends.”
“Jesus Christ.” Trygg came back, seizing her upper arms in his strong grasp. “You’re just telling me this now?”
“I would’ve told you sooner, but you didn’t give me a chance before you all but shoved me out the door of Rosa’s bedroom.”
He swore again, more vividly this time. He didn’t let go of her, and despite the anger in his face, the feel of his hands on her was the thing giving her the deepest unease. She couldn’t keep from noticing how immense he was, how powerfully male. Atlantean males were strong and masculine, too, but there was a ruggedness about this Breed male that sent Sia’s pulse racing more heatedly than she cared to admit.
“Did you say anything about this to your friend Phaedra?”
“No.”
“Good. Don’t.” He released her, but his grim eyes stayed locked on hers.
“Who is he, Trygg?”
“Someone you don’t want to cross.” She didn’t expect him to offer anything more, but then he exhaled a resigned sigh. “Roberto Santino is the biggest narcotics kingpin in Europe. More recently, he’s been dealing in a drug called Red Dragon, a substance that’s only effective on my kind. It turns even the most mild-mannered Breed into a bloodthirsty animal.”
