by Lara Adrian
He’d had other men on armed watch tonight. Whoever was inside now had likely killed them all.
Breed.
The Minion’s veins jangled with the warning. He drew back quickly into the study and pivoted to shut the door before the danger could reach him.
But it was too late for that.
Death was already in the room with him, manifesting from out of the shadows behind him. The Minion blinked and saw that the illusionary gloom had cleared. Standing in its place was the enemy of his Master. The warrior who should have been dead at the hands of the police tonight.
He was barefoot, water dripping from his snow-dampened hair and the sodden blue hospital scrubs that stretched tight and wet around his body. Blood splattered the front of him, though whether from the gunshot wounds he’d sustained at the police station or the spent lives of the men he’d killed on his way inside here, the Minion couldn’t tell.
The Breed warrior took a step toward him, eyes throwing off vicious amber light. His fangs were huge, lethal daggers that could shred a body into pieces.
But the Minion wasn’t afraid.
He was resolved.
This vampire had come to wring information from him, information he would never get, not even under the worst torture.
He knew that’s what awaited him here tonight. Torture, and death.
“You will never defeat him,” the Minion stated, devout in his faith of his Master’s power. “You can’t win.”
But there was no uncertainty in the searing glower that leveled on him, only a wild fury that promised a hellish end.
His feet started moving beneath him, old instincts urging his body to flee this threat. He spun around and watched as a sudden stream of blood slashed in an arc across the wall and door in front of him.
His blood.
His hellish end, just beginning.
SHE WAS BURNING UP.
Tavia shifted in her bed, suspended in that thick veil separating sleep from wakefulness. The sheets and comforter were too heavy, her body too warm beneath them in her cotton camisole and panties. In the daze of her fitful slumber, she pushed the covers away, but the heat stayed with her.
It was inside her, not the rash of sudden fire that sometimes swept across her skin and nerve endings when she went too long without her medicines, but another kind of heat. Something slow building and fluid, a hot unfurling from deep within her.
Sensation tingled at her breasts, a sweet ache that traveled over each nipple and swell, then down toward her belly. Eyes closed, sleep still holding her in its web, she arched into the pleasure, wanting the feeling to linger in one place yet hungry to feel it all over her too. Deep inside, her senses were coming alive, reaching, the same way her body roused to its erotic demand.
The heat licked a trail that plunged lower now, playing at the flare of her hip bone. Then down onto the tender flesh of her naked thigh. Her blood rushed through her veins and arteries. She could feel it surging with each rising beat of her heart.
Anticipation simmered as the hot, wet heat stirred the small nest of curls between her legs.
Yes. The silent plea echoed in the heavy pound of her pulse. Yesss …
She knew it was only a dream. Her semiconscious mind understood that this phantom lover seducing her now couldn’t be real. She’d never been with a man. Had never felt a questing, hungered mouth on her body. Not even on her lips. She couldn’t. Her reality was too fragile, too constricted by fear and shame.
But not now.
Not like this, when she was dizzy with arousal from a dream she couldn’t bear to leave.
With sleep and pleasure enticing her to stay, she reached down to touch the part of her that was melting, alive with sensation. Her fingertips were his tongue, silky and relentless, kissing and stroking her in all the right places.
She pictured broad shoulders between her legs. Smooth skin and lean, hard muscle rubbing against her nakedness.
Surrender, let it all go. The low voice spoke inside her mind, the encouragements he murmured being so seductive she could feel his hot breath skating against her enlivened flesh. I want to see you, taste you, all of you. I want to make you scream my name.
But she didn’t know his name, logic that tangled in the gossamer threads of the dream. She pushed away the intrusion of her conscience and sank further into her fantasy. She had no choice but to surrender, because the pleasure was coiling tighter now, her skin tingling, every inch of her on fire … on the verge of disintegration. She writhed on the bed, unable to take much more.
And then his voice was beside her ear. His mouth was wet and warm against her neck, his voice a deep vibration she felt all the way to her bones. Let me taste you, Tavia …
“Yes,” she whispered into the darkness of her bedroom. “Oh, God. Yes.”
She felt his mouth open on her neck, his tongue and teeth pressing down onto the tender flesh, piercing it. She cried out at the pain of his sharp bite, shock and pleasure exploding at once and sending the flood within her crashing over its banks.
She was drowning in the dream now, helplessly adrift as her phantom lover rose up to look at her where she lay beneath him.
It was him.
The man from the police lineup. The shooter from the senator’s party. The steely-eyed, deadly menace whose face had haunted her from the moment she first laid eyes on him.
Poised above her now in her dream, his gaze was no less cruel, still unflinching, devoid of mercy. His lips were parted, and his broad, sensual mouth—the mouth that had given her such pleasure—was slick and dark with blood.
Her blood.
The realization raked through her as startling as a blade against her skin.
He smiled then, beautiful and terrifying, baring the pearly tips of razor-sharp fangs …
“No!” Tavia jolted to full wakefulness at the sight of them, her horrified scream raw in her throat. She sat up, panting and shaken, even while her body still thrummed from release.
A knock on her bedroom door had her scrambling to cover herself.
“Tavia, are you all right?” the older woman’s voice called through the closed door. “Is anything wrong?”
“I’m fine, Aunt Sarah. Nothing’s wrong.”
There was a hesitation, but only for a moment. “I heard you cry out in your sleep. Not another night terror, was it?”
No, something even worse, she thought. The night terrors had never started out so pleasantly, only to turn so hideous in the end. “It was nothing, really.” She somehow managed to keep the distress from her voice. “I’m okay. Please don’t worry. Go back to bed.”
“You’re sure? Can I get you anything?”
“No, thank you.” Tavia closed her eyes in the darkness of her room, trying to forget the disturbing dream that was still ripe in her mind, still alive on her skin and in the pounding rhythm of her pulse. “Good night, Aunt Sarah. See you in the morning.”
More silence as her worried aunt and caretaker waited outside her room. Then, finally, “All right. If you say so. Good night, sweetheart.”
Tavia sat there for a long moment, listening to the sound of retreating footsteps and the soft creak of her aunt’s bedroom door down the hall.
She swung her feet to the floor. Padded across the carpet to the cold tiles of her bathroom. Her face was pale and stricken in the medicine cabinet mirror. She slid the glass panel open and took out one of the monstrous pill bottles—the one Dr. Lewis prescribed to combat the anxiety attacks that had plagued her most of her life.
Tavia shook out one of the big white capsules and tossed it into her mouth, washing it down with a quick swig of water from the bathroom tap. Better make it a double. She’d never had a better reason to take the maximum dose. She swallowed the medicine and another mouthful of water, then headed back to bed.
Twenty minutes and she’d be under a heavy, medicated drowse. She climbed under the covers and waited for the powerful meds to obliterate all thought of the man who’d invaded her drea
ms like the dangerous criminal he’d proven himself to be.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE ENFORCEMENT AGENCY hangout in Chinatown looked like the aftermath of a war zone.
Mathias Rowan, current director of the region for the Agency, struggled to ignore the dull throb of his emerging fangs as he stepped farther inside the private club to survey the carnage. Blood covered everything, from the floors and walls, seats and tabletops, to the raised platform of the stage—even the damn ceiling was foul with the stuff.
“Hell of an hour to call you down here like this, Director Rowan, but I thought you needed to see for yourself,” said the Agent beside him.
It would be dawn soon, no time for any of their kind to be away from their Darkhavens with the sun about to rise. But a thing like this could not wait. A thing like this—such reckless, unspeakably savage anarchy—jeopardized all of their kind.
“I contacted you as soon as my team and I arrived to discover the situation, sir.” The Agent’s polished shoes crunched in broken glass and scattered debris as he came to a pause beside Rowan in the silent, corpse-littered establishment. “The humans were all dead and the place was already vacated when we got here. By the look and smell of the place, I’m guessing it’s been over for several hours now.”
Rowan’s glance traveled over the evidence of the violence and death that had gone on unchecked in the club earlier that night. That it was perpetrated by members of the Breed was obvious, but never in his hundred-plus years of life had he seen such brutal disregard for human life. The fact that the slayings had almost certainly been carried out by his fellow Enforcement Agents sickened him to his soul.
“And no one has come forward as a witness to what went on here?” he confirmed. “What about Taggart; isn’t he usually manning the door most nights? He had to have seen something. Or any one of the other dozen Agents who frequent this place like it’s going out of style?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
Furious over all of it, Rowan wheeled on the Agent. “You don’t know if they were here tonight, or you don’t know if they’re responsible for slaughtering these humans in the middle of goddamn Boston?”
“Um, neither, sir.” The Agent’s face blanched a bit under his superior’s glare. “I wasn’t sure where to begin with a situation like this. You were the first call I made.”
Rowan blew out a frustrated sigh. The Agent was young, new to his post. Freshly promoted from the general ranks, he was afraid to step out of line or make a mistake. And he was devoted to justice, a rarity within the Agency these days, Rowan had to admit. He wondered how long the kid would maintain his sheen.
“It’s okay, Ethan.” He clapped the youth lightly on the shoulder. “You did the right thing here. Let’s call in your team and start cleaning this mess up.”
The Agent gave a brisk nod. “Yes, sir.”
As he strode out to summon the others, Mathias Rowan took another long look at the bloodshed and death that surrounded him. It was heinous, what happened here. It was inexcusable. And he couldn’t help feeling that the carnage bore the stamp of a villain he was coming to know all too well.
Dragos.
During the several months that Rowan had been covertly allying himself with the Order, he’d learned firsthand what Dragos was capable of—from the abduction and abuse of scores of innocent Breedmate females, to the recent attack on a local Darkhaven that took the lives of nearly everyone in that prominent Breed family.
And then there was the breach of the Order’s secret headquarters by human law enforcement less than twenty-four hours ago.
More havoc instigated by Dragos.
Now this.
Rowan was certain Dragos was at the root of what went on here tonight. What better time for the devil to come out to play than when the Order had their hands full with a forced relocation of their compound and the surrender of one of their own to police custody? Rowan should have expected something like this. He should have been prepared to step in for Lucan and his warriors tonight, with half the Agency behind him.
Of course, that assumed half the Agency was still loyal to their oath of service. Rowan really wasn’t sure about that, definitely not anymore. The Agency had not been without its share of problems over the many long decades of its existence. Bureaucratic, slow to move, far too political at times, it was the bloated, impotent cousin to the Order’s lean, surgically precise efficacy as protectors of the Breed and humankind alike.
Corruption among the ranks was rampant, if festering below the surface. More and more, it was growing impossible to know who could be trusted. Good men did remain, but there were others—more than Rowan cared to admit—who hid their malfeasance behind a mask of Agency duty and authority. Dragos himself had been one of them, rising to one of the highest positions in the organization, and no doubt garnering a league of loyal followers, before the Order exposed him and sent him scurrying into deep hiding roughly a year ago.
No, Rowan thought grimly. There was no question that the mass slaughter tonight on Enforcement Agency turf was Dragos’s way of pissing on both the Order and the Agency at the same time.
“Son of a bitch,” he snarled into the tomblike silence of the club.
There was nothing to be done now, with morning about to break and the Order setting up temporary camp some five-plus hours north of Boston, but Lucan had to be informed of the situation.
Rowan pivoted away from the carnage and headed outside, passing the incoming team of Agents armed with body bags and cleanup equipment on his way to his vehicle. Once seated inside the sedan, he dialed a scrambled access line given to him by the Order. It rang through.
“Gideon, it’s Mathias Rowan,” he said when the line connected on the other end. “We have a situation down here. Lucan isn’t going to like it. Bad news, my friend, and it’s got Dragos’s name written all over it.”
“SHIT, SHIT, SHIT.” Tavia checked her watch again, impatiently waiting for the snarl of early morning commuters in front of her to step off the train at Boston’s Government Center Station.
It was almost 8:00 A.M., and she was late to work.
Definitely a first for her, although it wasn’t as if she didn’t have a good excuse. The stress of the past few days apparently was getting to her. She was still tense from the incident at the police station and Senator Clarence’s odd behavior afterward.
The troubling dream hadn’t done anything for her nerves either. While doubling down on her antianxiety meds had allowed her to sleep, it had also made her hit the snooze button on her alarm one too many times this morning.
She saw an opening in the slow-moving throng and dashed through it. Walking briskly, she crossed the snow-spattered bricks outside the terminal, rushing past a florist stand bursting with red and white poinsettias and evergreen wreaths. On the street, a brisk, cold wind blew, carrying the repetitive jingle of a Salvation Army bell from somewhere nearby and the smoky aroma of coffee beans and baked goods from the Starbucks on the corner. Tavia’s stomach growled in response, but she headed in the opposite direction.
She tried the senator’s cell phone, but it went straight to voice-mail, just as it had the two other times she’d called on her way into the city. He would be at the charity breakfast by now. Normally she would have double-checked with him first thing to make sure he had everything he needed for the event. Normally she would have been in the office for at least an hour already, getting a jump-start on the day’s tasks while he was out courting his public.
Normally …
Nothing about the past few days seemed normal.
Not even close.
Tavia walked along the City Hall plaza toward the senator’s offices, her head down, face dipped into the folds of her knit scarf as another wintry gust rolled up. She cut between the pair of towers and the squat government building next to them, hearing the cacophony of a gathered crowd even before she rounded the corner and saw the commotion.
News vans and camera crews from every local netwo
rk and a couple of national cable channels lined New Sudbury Street like vultures. Police vehicles, not an unusual sight at the government offices when a large precinct sat directly across the street, were blocking the entrance and exit, shadowed by black federal-issued SUVs parked in front of the building doors and all along the arched fire lane at the curb.
Dread squeezed her stomach, turning it into an icy fist in her gut.
“Excuse me.” Tavia approached a reporter from Channel Five who was fluffing her unmoving helmet of blond hair and performing a sound check. “What’s happening here?”
“Get in line, honey,” the woman replied. “That’s what we’re all waiting to find out. The police commissioner just called a press conference for eight o’clock.”
Tavia stepped through the groups of hovering reporters and the gawkers who’d been drawn from around the neighboring streets by all the noise and activity. She weaved between the sea of bodies, trying to make her way closer to the building entrance where most of the police and federal agents had clustered.
Someone took sharp hold of her arm. “Ms. Fairchild.”
“Detective Avery,” she said, the kick in her chest relaxing a bit as she met the older man’s sober gaze. “What’s all this about?”
“Come with me, please.” He walked her through the crowds and into the front entrance of the building. The lobby was busy with more uniformed officers and armed men in SWAT gear. The detective paused with her, his face fatigued, aging him even more. “When did you last speak to or see Senator Clarence, Tavia?”
The cold knot in her stomach got even harder. “Last night, when he dropped me off at home.”
“Do you remember what time that was?”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure. It was right after we left the police station. Has something happened to him? Is that what all this is about?”
