by Lara Adrian
Niko’s questioning gaze met his pained stare in the rearview mirror.
“Stop the car!” Chase rasped, hardly able to speak for the shredding intensity of his realization now. “We gotta turn around. I feel her. She’s here. She’s somewhere in this city.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
SHE COULD HARDLY stand the pain.
It swam through her veins, through her mind, draining her of all strength. Chewed away at her sanity with tiny, shredding teeth.
This was death.
This was true agony, a swift and thorough addiction that left her writhing on the floor. Gasping as though she was dying for air.
This was hell unlike any she could have imagined, to feel her body lost to a hunger—a savage, consuming thirst—that no amount of drink could quench.
Through bleary eyes, her face resting heavily on the floor where she writhed in helpless despair, she watched as Dragos’s newest Minion made the call to the man he once served as his loyal second. The vice president’s neck still bled from the twin punctures Dragos had made there, but he no longer felt pain. He knew only to please his Master.
“The president is on the way,” the Minion said, handing the cell phone back to Dragos with a dead man’s smile. “He was suspicious of the request. He will come with heavy military guard, Master. They will be on shoot-to-kill orders if he senses anything amiss.”
Dragos nodded. “We are prepared for that. All I needed was to get him close. Soon I’ll own him too. And with his allegiance will come the rest of the world’s leaders, one by one. You’ve just helped put the last nail in the coffin of the humans’ control over the Breed.”
The Minion inclined his head in a servile bow.
Tavia tried to get up, desperate with the hope that something—anything—would thwart the evil Dragos still intended. She no sooner lifted her head than a heavy boot came down on the back of her neck, pinning her there.
The Hunter’s boot heel promised to crush her throat if she even thought of rising up against his commander.
She sagged back down and felt a new agony bloom to life inside her. It was Chase. Her blood surged with the power of his fury—his fear for her. It shook her to her core, how deeply he longed to be near her now.
And he was coming. She could feel that too. She felt every mile that shrank between them—could almost feel him urging her to hold on, to stay alive, until he could reach her.
It was only then that her tears started to fall.
Chase was coming for her, and Dragos and his army of killers would be waiting for him.
“YOU’RE SURE THIS IS IT?” Nikolai asked from behind the wheel as they sped toward the sprawling United States Naval Observatory compound.
Chase’s blood thrummed hard with the answer. “I’m sure. She’s in there somewhere.”
“The vice president’s house is on these grounds,” Dante said from next to him in the Rover’s backseat. “This place should be swarming with military.”
“Not if Dragos is here too.” Lucan’s reply was an ominous mix of foreboding and thinly leashed menace. “Good God. Tavia’s brought us right to the son of a bitch.”
Lucan’s cell phone hummed with an incoming call and he pressed the button to put it on speaker. It was Gideon again. He’d been keeping a pulse on the situation since they’d set out a few minutes ago. Now his voice was tight with an eager intensity.
“We got pay dirt on those collar signals at last,” he reported. “I’ve got a map online and I’m seeing a whole lot of signals coming out of the D.C. area right now.”
“Where at?” Lucan asked as Niko took a fast corner and gunned it onto the circle, Brock keeping close behind.
“I’ve got literally dozens of blips a couple miles northwest of the White House. The area’s lit up like a goddamn Christmas tree.”
Lucan glanced to Chase and the other warriors, dark brows low over his steely gray eyes. “We know exactly where that is. We’re rolling up to it now.”
“Holy shit, this can’t be good,” Gideon murmured, running his hand over his disheveled blond hair as he slumped back in his seat in the tech lab. “It could be a trap, guys. You could be walking right into Dragos’s hands.”
A muscle ticked in Lucan’s jaw as he met Chase’s determined gaze. “Guess we’re gonna find that out soon enough. Chase’s female is inside. We’re not leaving without her.”
A look to Niko dropped the warrior’s foot hard on the gas.
With a screeching wail of rubber on asphalt, both of the Order’s Rovers surged up onto the parklike lawn of the vice president’s compound.
Chase leapt out halfway up the yard and raced toward the mansion with all the preternatural speed he possessed.
DRAGOS HEARD the sudden shriek of tires on the grounds outside the house. He wheeled toward the noise, knowing that the president and his security detail would not come barreling into the place hell-bent for leather.
It was the Order.
He threw a glance at Tavia, recalling her admission that she’d taken blood from Sterling Chase. He might have guessed the half-Rogue former Agent might’ve also sampled her blood. They were bonded, and when Dragos saw the tears streaking the female’s contorted face, he understood that Chase and she were bonded by more than blood. She loved him.
And Dragos was betting by the cacophony of gunfire and combat rising up in the yard outside that Sterling Chase loved her too.
“You led them here.” He let his laughter boom out of him as he clapped his hands in mock applause. “Congratulations, Tavia. You’ve done what I’ve been unable to accomplish all this time. You brought the Order to me, right to their certain deaths.”
He swung a hard look on one of the Hunters who stood nearby in the living room. “No survivors. Understand me? Tell the others to do whatever they must to see it done. I want Lucan and his warriors dead right now, goddamn it!”
As the assassin pivoted to carry out the command, a window at the front of the residence shattered. Rapid gunfire and a massive bulk of roaring fury crashed inside, taking the Gen One down to the floor in a blurred confusion of motion and savagery.
Dragos gaped at the unexpected invasion. He dived for a weapon as his Hunter took the brunt of a punishing assault by Sterling Chase. The warrior was crazed with violence, purely animal. Almost magnificent in his lethality.
Another warrior vaulted in behind Chase, then another, the mad exchange of incoming gunfire and deadly force taking on two more assassins by what seemed to be sheer bloody-mindedness alone. The battle was brutal, and Dragos knew a pang of uncertainty when he saw his highly trained killing machines taking a beating from Chase, Dante, and Rio of the Order.
Behind him, Dragos saw Tavia using the moment of inattention to push herself up from the floor. The bitch was in bad shape, but she wasn’t about to go down without a fight. Her amber eyes skewered him from across the room. Her fangs were sharp white daggers, dripping with the red foam of Crimson that would eventually consume her sanity and her life.
But not soon enough.
She came out of her crouch and sprang off her toes toward him. Dragos went down beneath her, his pistol skittering out of his grasp as the seething female vampire perched on his chest like a she-dragon about to eviscerate him.
She didn’t get the chance.
Before she could do her worst, his last remaining Hunter in the house plucked her off him and threw her against the wall. She crashed to the floor in a broken, moaning heap. Dragos was right there as she tried to lift herself for another round.
“Not so fast,” he warned her, the butt of a semiauto 9 mm pushed up hard against her temple. A nod to his Hunter saw her yanked to her feet. Dragos kept his pistol leveled on her, ready to blast her brains all over the wall if she so much as blinked in a way that displeased him.
Across the room, Chase and the others had finished his two assassins. In the yard beyond, the combat raged on, gunfire blasting, sirens wailing in the distance as the rest of the city remained
under siege at Dragos’s command.
Dragos grinned as Chase realized he’d taken his battle as far as he could.
The warrior’s eyes flashed hot amber as he glared at the pistol that could end his female’s life at any second. “You have lost,” Dragos told him. “You and the Order were never going to win this.”
“Let her go.” Chase lifted his own weapon now, training it on Dragos’s head.
“Let her go?” Dragos scoffed at the tight command and the threat of the bullet he knew the male would never risk. Not when his woman’s temple could so easily eat a bullet at the same time. Not that it would take a bullet to kill Tavia Fairchild now. “She’s already gone, warrior. Look at her. Foaming and panting like a rabid dog. Put down your weapon.”
“Tavia,” Chase said now, his gaze pitiful with love and concern. “Tell me you’re okay. Ah, Christ … tell me I haven’t lost you.”
Dragos chuckled, enjoying the wasted sentiment like the villain he truly was. “I said put down your—”
The words clogged in his throat, then leaked out of him on a wheezing cry as a jolt of pain stabbed his skull. It was debilitating. A fiery-hot stake that skewered his brain made every muscle in his body convulse in agony. The pistol fell out of his hand. His legs disappeared from beneath him. His head felt squeezed in a vise, about to pop under the extreme pressure and pain.
As Dragos crumpled to the ground, he saw the slender outline of a female in black leather. A Breedmate with chin-length black hair and piercing jade green eyes that held him in a mind-blasting web of extrasensory power.
AS SOON AS Renata’s talent dropped Dragos, Chase flew at him in a furious leap.
He couldn’t curb his savagery.
His roar was purely animal as he clamped his jaws down on the vampire’s throat and tore out his larynx with his teeth and bared fangs. Dragos’s scream died along with him. The orchestrator of so much violence and misery, dead in a bleeding mash of frayed tendons, spurting arteries, and wide-eyed, slack-jawed fear.
Chase had wanted to make the suffering last. He’d craved a brutal, punishing demise for Dragos, but not with Tavia’s life on the line. Chase let Dragos’s body fall, rubbish discarded without a single backward glance.
As the life left his body, all his Minions would perish too. Behind Chase, the human who’d been the vice president slumped lifeless to the floor. Elsewhere in the world, wherever Dragos had sown his seeds of revolt, the humans he owned would all die in a similar manner: abruptly, quietly, inexplicably.
Not so his homegrown army of assassins. Between Dante, Rio, and Renata, the last Hunter remaining in the house was no longer a threat, but those still battling the Order on the grounds outside would not relent until they carried out their commander’s wishes.
Chase knew his brethren needed him out there.
He knew it, yet all he could do was race to Tavia’s side and pull her Crimson-ravaged body into his arms.
“Stay with her,” Dante said, no judgment in his whiskey-colored eyes. Only friendship, and the understanding of a mated male who would do the same thing if it were Tess lying there now. “Keep her safe. We’ll handle the rest.”
Chase hugged Tavia close as Dante and the others pivoted to head out into the fray.
In the next instant, the night outside was illuminated with the sudden flash of intense, retina-searing light.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
LUCAN HIT THE GROUND and shielded his eyes along with the rest of the Order as soon as they heard the sudden, tandem hum of the UV collars on the army of attacking Gen One assassins.
Still, the impact of their detonation came as a shock.
The emitted light was so bright—like a bolt of lightning taking out the entire offensive assault in one fell swoop.
When it was gone a moment later, the remains of dozens of Hunters lay where they’d fallen, their heads cleanly separated from their bodies by the shearing power of the collars that ensured their loyalty—and their indenture—to Dragos.
“He’s dead.” Dante jogged out alongside Rio and Renata, the latter being swept into a fierce embrace by Nikolai as soon as he saw her. “Dragos is dead.”
“Chase and Tavia?” Lucan asked, glancing back toward the house when neither of them came out.
“She’s in bad shape, Lucan.” Dante’s tone didn’t hold a lot of promise. “By the look of her—the way she’s acting, the pink spittle around her mouth … I’ve only seen that kind of reaction one time before.”
“When the Order was asked to stop the Crimson dealer who was ruining all those civilian kids’ lives,” Lucan finished, recalling that night—and the uptight Enforcement Agent who came to them reluctantly a year ago and had somehow become an integral member of the Order. A member of the extended family that Lucan would protect with his life. Seeing how deeply Chase cared for Tavia Fairchild, recognizing their bond, that made her a member of that family now too. “We need to take her back to the compound, find a way to help her.”
Dante nodded, but there was worry in his gaze, not only for Tavia but for Chase as well. “If she doesn’t make it …”
“Then we’ll have to make sure she does.”
Lucan’s cell started ringing. Gideon, phoning in from headquarters. “Since you’re taking my call, I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess that my hack of the detonation codes worked.”
“It worked,” Lucan confirmed, nodding to Tegan and the others who’d just witnessed the same miracle of Gideon’s genius and were coming to join the rest of the group. “The worst of this war with Dragos is finally over. Now we have to deal with the fallout.”
As he spoke, a large black SUV with flashing headlights and a military vanguard escorting it came roaring up the drive toward the house. Lucan felt his brethren tense around him, readying themselves for a continuation of the battle.
“Stand down,” Lucan advised them coolly. “We must show the humans we are their allies, not the enemy. Hopefully they’ll afford us that chance despite everything Dragos has done to undermine it.”
Dozens of soldiers ready for combat surrounded the Order as the SUV came to a halt a few yards away from the gathered Breed warriors. A gruff-looking man in military uniform came out of the back and walked crisply toward them. Four embroidered stars rode down the front insignia pad of his camouflage army fatigues, another set of stars ran across the visored camo cap that covered his high-and-tight, graying hair. As the officer made his approach, shrewd eyes scanned the unexplainable destruction and body count that littered the grounds.
“General,” Lucan said, giving him a slight nod of greeting.
The human remained silent, gauging the situation. “Where is the vice president?”
“He’s dead. You’ll find his body inside, along with that of the one responsible for everything that’s happened here tonight.” Lucan held the high-ranking officer’s appraising stare. “The one who orchestrated all the carnage in this city and others around the world will do no more harm. My brethren and I destroyed him. But evil is still running loose in your streets and there is more work to be done to stop it. Work that needs to be done by all of us together, mankind and ours.”
The general’s eyes narrowed. “Your kind. Just what is your kind? Savages. Vampires, slaughtering our citizens. Spilling blood all over the world, feeding on us like parasites, for God’s sake.”
“My kind is called the Breed,” Lucan replied evenly. “We have lived among you for many hundreds of years. We are not monsters. In fact, part of us is human, not so different from you.”
“I’ve seen no humanity in the killings taking place over the past couple nights.”
Lucan nodded, unable to deny it. “There were some among us who felt mankind should serve us, instead of sharing this world together in peace. Their leader is now dead.”
The general stared, hardly convinced. “After what we’ve seen, how can we ever trust any of you?”
Lucan let the contempt and suspicion wash over him without reaction. He
wasn’t blameless, after all. The fear that had been stricken into the humans’ hearts the past couple of days could take years to assuage. It could take centuries to rebuild some sense of order now. It could take longer still to achieve any kind of peaceful coexistence between their races.
But they had to try.
For the future of everyone.
For the future of all the unborn children of the Breed and humankind alike.
“I know that trust will not be an easy thing,” Lucan said. “But for the good of all, we need to try.”
The general started to say something—a protest, judging by the hard look that entered the old soldier’s eyes. But at that same moment, he paused to listen to the communication device tucked into his right ear. “Yes, sir,” he murmured quietly. “Of course, Mr. President.”
He stepped to the side as the back door of the SUV opened and another man climbed out. Lucan drew in a breath, watching cautiously as the military detail parted to clear a path for the most powerful man in the United States.
The president stood before Lucan, dressed casually in street clothes and a fleece-collared, dark olive bomber jacket. He looked haggard, as if the weight of the world rested on his shoulders. Lucan offered a faint, knowing smile as he inclined his head in greeting.
“You say the one who caused all of this is dead?”
“Yes, sir,” Lucan said with a nod, realizing the president must have been monitoring the conversation with the general from inside his SUV.
“And you and these men—this woman too,” the human leader added, glancing at Renata, who looked every bit as fierce as the rest of the warriors. “You say you had a hand in taking him down?”
“We did,” Lucan replied.
The United States’ commander in chief fell silent, considering. “I’ve seen scattered reports of a group of soldiers—a group of vampires—who’ve been saving human lives since the carnage began here two nights ago. I’ve seen photographs, video clips. Do you know anything about this group?”
