by Lara Adrian
But no … it wasn’t distress that made her see it. This was real. As real as the unrelenting heat of his hands on her, fingers searing her nape and pressing hotly against her mouth.
As real as the sharp, elongated white tips of his teeth, which glinted as he parted his lips to speak once more. “I’m not going to hurt you, Tavia.”
Oh, God.
Here was her nightmare, standing before her in real life.
He wasn’t human; he couldn’t be. Her mind rejected the word that leapt at her from out of the horror stories and dark fiction Aunt Sarah had chided her for reading when she was a child.
Tavia wasn’t sure what he was, but she didn’t believe even for a second that he wasn’t going to kill her in that next instant like he had the senator and the men in the other room. She struggled against him with all she had now, attempting to twist and fight her way free. But she couldn’t budge him off her.
He was strong—as strong as any monster should be.
And with the sudden surge of adrenaline into her bloodstream, Tavia felt her body begin to rebel beneath the forced calm that her medicines provided. Her heart rate jackhammered, sending her pulse throbbing in her temples. She groaned against the fingers that held her mouth closed, all the while trying to will herself out of an anxiety tailspin.
He maneuvered her around and pushed her down onto the bed.
“No!” her mind screamed, the physical cry snuffed in her throat.
She was on her back and struggling uselessly, his hand still flat on her lips. The other had come around swiftly from behind her neck, only to rest across her brow. Here he touched her lightly, the warmth of his broad palm barely skimming the surface of her skin.
“Relax, Tavia,” he said, that low, graveled growl not so much menacing now as coaxing. “Close your eyes.”
She bucked, thrashing her head beneath the odd comfort of his words. He seemed confused that she wouldn’t comply. Those inhuman eyes narrowed, pinning her in a scathing amber glow.
“Sleep.” It was a command this time, his hand still held to her forehead.
She glared up at him in defiance, letting him read her fury in her own seething gaze. Fighting with her legs, slamming her fists futilely against the rock-solid muscles of his back and shoulders, she made another desperate attempt to break free.
As she shifted and fought, she felt cool air hit the naked skin of her chest. Her hotel robe gaped open in a wide downward V, baring her to his gaze from throat to navel. Baring the worst of her skin’s flaws.
He stared.
Then he swore. “Holy hell …”
Tavia moaned, humiliation making her fright compound into something even more terrible. It was awful enough to be assaulted and in fear of her life. Now this astonishingly inhuman being gaped at her as though she were the freak.
The press of his palm against her mouth fell away on another, more vivid curse. Head cocked in an animalistic angle, his wild amber eyes came back up to her face in obvious disbelief. “What the fuck is this?”
CHAPTER TEN
HE WAS HALLUCINATING.
Had to be.
Chase knew what Bloodlust could do to one of his kind. He understood how the disease could corrode logic, rob the senses and reason until nothing remained of even the soundest mind. He’d sure as hell felt it nipping at his own sanity in recent days.
Bloodlust had been raking him hard after he left the detective back at the police station parking lot. The hand-to-hand combat with the two unconscious feds and the dead Minion lying in the other room had made it even worse. He was in a bad way, he knew, but never had his affliction manifested in such a crazed mental trick as it did now.
Because what he thought he was seeing on Tavia Fairchild’s bared skin was impossible.
A pattern of dense but delicate markings tracked her body from neck to torso. They were light-colored, a faint mauve barely darker than her fair skin tone. To his impaired vision, swamped in the amber light of his hunger, the webwork of interconnecting flourishes and twining swirls looked like something he was intimately familiar with.
The markings looked very much like Breed dermaglyphs.
“Impossible,” he said, hearing his own confusion in the feral growl of his voice.
Skin designs like these occurred only on his kind. And courtesy of a genetic anomaly of the race, beginning when the Ancients sired their young on Breedmates and created the Breed, all of Chase’s kind—for all the thousands of years they’d existed on this planet—were born male.
Through the fog of his questionable reason, he was reminded of Jenna Darrow, the woman who’d recently come to the Order from Alaska following an assault by the last of the Ancients. Brock’s human mate had marks like these now, but they were minor in comparison and caused by the alien DNA contained in the rice-size bit of biotechnology the Ancient had implanted in her during her ordeal.
This was something altogether different.
Where the thick terry robe was still loosely fastened at Tavia’s waist, the intricate skin pattern disappeared beneath the folds of the fabric. He caught a glimpse of more on her hip as she tried to scramble away from him on the bed.
Jesus, how far did they extend?
He reached for the belted tie, about to yank it open.
“No!” she cried, eyes fixed on him in abject horror as she drew the edges closed in trembling fists. “Get away! Don’t touch me!”
Her fear jolted him from the insane tack his mind was taking. He hadn’t come there to terrify her. His objective had been to see her safe, to make certain the Minion cop accompanying her didn’t harm her. At the same time, he’d been damned curious why Dragos would enlist one of his mind slaves to act as her guard.
That question burned more fiercely as he stared down at her white-knuckled hands that gripped the robe closed over her body like her life depended on it.
Chase laid his palm to her forehead once more, another attempt to trance her, but she had a strong mind that didn’t want to go down easy. She fought the lull that should have put her under in just a few moments and would have made it easier for him to decide what to do with her next. She pushed and fought, refusing to surrender despite the fear that he could feel rolling off her tall, deceptively athletic body in waves.
And he had other problems stirring now.
In the room outside, one of the federal agents Chase’d knocked unconscious was starting to rouse. If either of them woke and saw him there, eyes throwing off amber sparks and fangs extended to razor-sharp points, his mind scrub on them a few minutes ago would have been for nothing. And he didn’t have time for a do-over.
“Stand up,” he growled at Tavia Fairchild. He took off his stolen coat and covered her with it, robe and all. Then he fisted his hand in the woolen lapels and hauled her up off the bed. “Come with me.”
He gave her little choice. Pulling her along the short hallway to the living room of the hotel suite, he ignored her choked gasp as she saw the signs of the struggle and the three large law enforcement personnel lying in crumpled heaps on the floor. Her breath was coming fast and hard now, on the verge of hyperventilation.
“You killed them,” she cried. “Oh, God … let me go!”
“I only killed the one who needed killing,” he said as he dragged her through the room, past the dead Minion. One of the feds moaned, started to move where he lay on the floor nearby. It would only be seconds before he came to, and Chase needed to be gone before that happened.
“Please,” Tavia choked. “Please, don’t do this. Tell me what you want from me!”
God help him, he wasn’t sure how to answer that now. All he knew was he had to get out of there and he couldn’t leave her behind. So she was coming with him.
When she sucked in a breath and he felt her prepare to let it loose in a scream, he brought the Minion cop’s gun around from the back waistband of his pants where he’d stashed it after the scuffle. All it took was one look at the weapon and she got quiet. He never would hav
e used it on her; he was Breed, and that gave him about a dozen other ways he could have threatened her into silence. But the pistol spoke the most convincingly to her mortal sensibilities.
“This way,” he ordered her. “Quickly.”
Shocked and confused, she didn’t resist. Chase pushed her into the empty hotel corridor outside the suite, then hustled her toward the back stairwell.
FRESH FROM A SHOWER, Lucan stepped out the French doors of his and Gabrielle’s private bedroom at the Maine compound and stood alone on the timber deck. He was naked, beads of water still clinging to his skin, which steamed in tendrils all around him as he walked into the brittle night air. It was cold this far north and this deep into winter, punishingly so. He breathed it in, let it clear his mind and crystallize his thoughts around mission goals and duty. The things he knew best—the burdens he had elected to carry on his shoulders alone when he founded the Order all those centuries ago.
He’d never resented that choice, and he’d be damned if he let himself start doing so now.
On a muttered curse, he inhaled another lungful of bracing cold and pushed it deep down, determined to smother the strange ache that had been troubling him all day. It had plagued him longer than that, he had to admit, although it had taken seeing Gabrielle with Dante and Tess’s baby before the disturbing ache—the unwanted void—had given itself a name.
It was longing.
Bone-deep, and undeniable.
Christ, he was sick with it.
He saw his beloved mate near the small Breed infant and knew an instant, intense yearning to see her swell with his own sons. Everything male in him had roared with the need to claim her in that most primal, basic way. In that moment earlier today, he had wanted it more than anything he’d ever known.
And that was something he could not afford to feel right now.
Not when their world was in the midst of war with Dragos and everyone was looking to Lucan to lead. Bad enough he worried for Gabrielle every time he left her behind to walk into combat. He couldn’t bear to think of possibly leaving her to raise his child alone.
That was why he’d always frowned on warriors taking a mate, had all but forbidden any of them from starting a family while serving the Order. It was just two summers ago when his point had proven out tragically in the Boston compound when Conlan, a member of the Order for more than a hundred years, took a fatal blast of bomb shrapnel and C-4 explosives while on patrol pursuing a Minion. Conlan’s grieving widow, Danika, had been forced to release her dead mate to the sun while pregnant with their firstborn. She’d decided to leave Boston soon afterward, devastated and bereft.
Not that the painful lesson had been warning enough to any of the other warriors to avoid emotional entanglements. Somehow, within the space of less than two years, they’d nearly all taken Breedmates—Lucan himself included. Things had only gotten more complicated when Niko and Renata brought eight-year-old Mira in with them as their own child when they’d paired up some six months ago, and now Dante and Tess had newborn Xander Raphael.
Lucan tilted his face up to glower at the pale gray wedge of a waning crescent moon peeking through the canopy of soaring pines overhead. He’d have to be a fool to think about adding another innocent life to the potential casualty list, should this situation with Dragos escalate into the catastrophe Lucan dreaded was coming.
He raked a hand through his damp hair and exhaled a curse into the frigid, dark night.
“I didn’t realize you’d come back already.”
Gabrielle’s warm voice jolted him to attention. He turned to face her and was struck, as always, by how beautiful she was. Tonight her long auburn hair was swept up off her delicate nape in a loose twist, curling tendrils framing her pretty face and soothing brown eyes. She was dressed all in black—not the soft colors and easy lines she normally wore, but a low-cut silk blouse unbuttoned to just between her breasts. The fabric was filmy, skating over her alabaster skin and lacy black bra. Her skirt was fitted and clinging to her every curve, hinting at the flare of her hips and her long, lean legs. Sharp-toed, glossy leather boots lifted her a good five inches on thin stiletto heels.
Damn, she was hot.
No wonder he’d been doomed from the moment he first laid eyes on her.
Lucan cleared his throat. “I got back about an hour ago. You look amazing.”
She smiled and walked out to meet him, crossing her arms around herself to rub at the cold. Her breath puffed in a light cloud as she spoke. “You’ve been home for an hour? What are you doing out here?”
Lucan shrugged and brought her under the warmth of his sheltering arm. “Just getting some air.”
“It’s freezing,” she pointed out. “And you’re naked.”
He put his mouth to her temple. “Suddenly I wish you were too.”
Her quiet laugh didn’t seem as light as it sounded. “How did it go with Kellan tonight?”
“He hunted,” Lucan replied. “He fed.”
“That’s good news.”
Lucan grunted. “It’ll be good news when he doesn’t need to be told to do it or require an escort to make sure it happens.”
“He’s been through a lot,” Gabrielle reminded him. “And he’s just a boy. Give him time.”
Lucan nodded, guessing she had a point. Kellan had been none too pleased to discover Lucan had been serious about taking him out personally to find a blood Host that night if Lazaro hadn’t already made firm plans to see the task done. At nightfall, Lucan had found the youth in the Order’s makeshift weapons room, engaged in solo mock combat, wielding a pair of long daggers. He wasn’t very good—all gangly arms and lanky, uncooperative legs—but he wouldn’t have had much practice at battle while living in the Darkhavens. He’d almost cut off his foot with a fumbled blade when Lucan announced they were going hunting right then, just the two of them, together.
Lazaro Archer would have been perfectly capable and ready to take the boy himself, but Lucan had been curious. He’d taken Kellan to Bangor, the nearest city with a decent population and enough public gathering places to select from without being noticed as anything more than tourists from “away.”
Kellan had chosen an old drunk sleeping off a bender in the downtown park—easy prey, but the exercise tonight hadn’t been about challenge or technique. Lucan had stood back while the boy quickly fed, then left his blood Host in a peaceful, trance-induced drowse. Kellan didn’t say two words to him on the drive back to headquarters, but his eyes had lost their dark circles and his skin color was flushed a ruddy, healthy pink from the feeding.
Gabrielle turned a questioning look on him. “You’ve been back all this time, but you didn’t come to find me and let me know? That’s not like you.”
He kissed her furrowed brow. “You were with Tess. I didn’t want to disturb, in case they were resting. Besides, I’d asked Gideon for a systems check earlier today and he’d been waiting for me to return.”
Gabrielle’s inquisitiveness took on a suspicious edge. “If I didn’t know better, I might think you were trying to avoid me.”
He scoffed at the idea, but part of him wondered if she could be right. He cast a dark glance up at the night sky and that damned sliver of a moon suspended within it. This was the fertile time for Gabrielle, and for every Breedmate who shared a blood bond with one of Lucan’s kind.
It took blood and seed given together, a mutual feeding at the moment of release—during the cycle of a crescent moon—to create the spark of new Breed life.
The act was sacred, not to be entered into with any trace of doubt.
Gabrielle stared at him in his silence. She took a small step forward, moving out from under his arm to gaze up at the black velvet sky herself. She released a small sigh, wordless but rife with understanding. She gave her back to the moon and faced him, leaning against the waist-high railing of the deck. “I hear there’s been word from Hunter tonight. He and Corinne are on their way north?”
Lucan nodded, more than willing to
take her offered detour in the conversation. “Had to wait out the daylight in Pennsylvania, but they’re on the road again tonight. They expect to make New England before daybreak, arriving here tomorrow night.”
It still seemed strange sometimes to think of Hunter as part of the Order, but the lethal Gen One who’d once served as assassin for Dragos had proven himself to be a vital asset in the short time he’d been with the warriors. Now he was returning from a mission in New Orleans—one that had netted the Order valuable intel from a key area of Dragos’s operation. Hunter was bringing that intel with him.
He was bringing something else too: Corinne, his new mate, and the boy she’d given birth to some thirteen years ago, while she’d been held captive in one of Dragos’s genetics labs.
“I can’t say I’m surprised that Hunter and Corinne are together,” Gabrielle remarked, as if she were tuned into Lucan’s thoughts as much as her blood bond to him had connected them emotionally. “They’re both survivors of Dragos’s evil. Now they have a fresh start, together. Nathan too, that poor child.”
Lucan considered Corinne’s Breed son, one of many sired on scores of imprisoned Breedmates whom Dragos had used to create his own private army of first generation Breed assassins. Those Gen One offspring all shared the same paternal DNA—taken from the Ancient that Dragos had kept hidden and secret for centuries, enslaved to do his bidding until the otherworlder escaped to the wilds of Alaska. That Ancient was dead now, killed by the Order after cutting a bloody swath through a number of settlements up there before the attack on Jenna that had left her changed forever.
But his laboratory-bred progeny lived on, raised in solitude by Minions and schooled by Dragos in the art of killing. They were called Hunters, stripped of their identities and all humanity from the time they were born. Boys like Corinne’s son, Nathan. And the Order’s own Hunter, whose imprisoned Breedmate mother hadn’t lived long enough to see freedom from her captivity or been given the opportunity to search for her lost child the way Corinne recently had. Thanks to the dogged efforts of Gabrielle and the other women of the Order, Corinne and the few remaining Breedmate survivors had been located in their secret prison and set free to try to begin their lives again.
