by Lara Adrian
But not this time.
The floor-to-ceiling bookcases wobbled in her mind’s eye as the walls of the library seemed to squeeze in, collapsing inward from all sides. On the wall across from her, a large tapestry, stitched to depict a glowering dark knight on a black charger, now seemed to twist and distort, the man’s handsome features and his beautiful horse both mutating into something demonic and mocking.
She closed her eyes, but darkness didn’t make things any better. Suddenly she was back in Dragos’s prison cells. Back in the lightless pit, naked and shivering. Alone in a dank void, waiting for death. Praying for it, as her only means of escape from the horror.
Corinne sucked in a mouthful of air but felt only the smallest gasp of oxygen feed her lungs as the space around her condensed toward nothingness.
“Corinne?” Gabrielle and Elise both said her name at the same time. Both women reached out to hold her up, keep her steady.
Corinne heard herself gasp for breath. “Need out … have to get out of this cell—”
“Can you walk?” Elise asked her, her voice urgent but in control. “Hold on to us, Corinne. You’re going to be okay.”
She managed a nod as they helped her out to the corridor. Cool white marble spread out in both directions. The passageway was wide and endless, instantly soothing. She let the gleam of pale, pristine walls fill her vision as she took a deep breath and felt some of the constriction in her lungs begin to ease.
Yes, thank God.
Already it was better.
Gabrielle reached out to smooth some of Corinne’s dark hair from her eyes. “Are you all right now?”
Corinne nodded, still breathing hard but feeling the worst of her anxiety fade away. “Sometimes I just … sometimes I feel like I’m still in there. Still locked in that awful place,” she whispered. “I’m sorry. I’m so embarrassed.”
“Don’t be.” Gabrielle’s smile was sympathetic without being pitying. “You don’t have to be sorry or embarrassed. Not among friends.”
“Come on,” Elise said. “We’ll take you up to the mansion. We can have a little stroll around the grounds outside until you feel better.”
As the compound’s garage elevator came to a cushioned stop belowground, Hunter glanced at his wounded patrol partner in silent assessment.
Head hung low on his shoulders, matted golden-brown hair drooping over his brow, Sterling Chase leaned against the opposite wall of the car, his breath sawing through his teeth. His black fatigues were torn and blood-soaked, lacerations and swelling contusions making a battered mess of his face. His nose was surely broken, his upper lip split open and bleeding onto his chin. More than likely, his jaw had been fractured as well.
The warrior’s injuries from the brawl in the city were numerous, but nothing that wouldn’t heal with time and a few decent feedings.
Not that Chase seemed at all concerned about his condition.
The elevator doors whispered open and he swaggered out to the corridor ahead of Hunter, arrogance in every stride.
Lucan blocked his path just a few steps out. Put his palm in the center of Chase’s chest to stop him physically when the other male appeared disinclined to pause. “Have a good time in Chinatown tonight?”
Chase grunted, his split lip tearing wider as he gave Lucan a dark smirk. “I gather Mathias Rowan has been in contact with you.”
“That’s right. More than I can say for either one of you,” Lucan replied tersely, his furious gaze traveling briefly from Chase’s battle-worn appearance to Hunter, whose fatigues were stained with their own share of spilled Enforcement Agent blood. “Rowan told me all about the shit that went down. He says he’s got multiple dead and wounded and every Agent he’s spoken to has put the blame for the unprovoked assault squarely on you, Chase.”
He scoffed in response. “Unprovoked, my ass. Every one of the Agents in that place was looking for a reason to piss me off.”
“And you couldn’t wait to oblige them, that it?” At Chase’s answering glower, Lucan shook his head. “What you are is reckless, my man. This shit tonight is just one more mess you’ve left for someone else to deal with. It’s getting to be a pattern with you lately, and I don’t like it. Not one fucking bit.”
“You sent me out to do a job,” Chase shot back darkly. “Sometimes things get messy.”
Lucan’s eyes narrowed, anger radiating off his body now, a palpable heat that Hunter could feel from where he stood just a few steps away with Gideon. “I’m not sure you know what your job is anymore, Chase. If you did, you wouldn’t be coming back here empty-handed, reeking of spilled blood and attitude. Far as I’m concerned, you failed out there tonight. How much intel did you gather on Freyne? Are we even one fucking scintilla closer to getting a lock on Dragos or any of his possible other associates?”
“Perhaps we are,” Hunter interjected.
Now Lucan swung his scowl on him. “Explain.”
“An Agent named Murdock,” Hunter replied. “He approached Chase and me when we arrived at the club. We had words, but he wasn’t forthcoming with any useful information. Once the fight broke out, he appeared notably anxious. I saw him make a phone call to someone before he escaped amid the chaos.”
“This is a lead?” Chase muttered dismissively. “Of course Murdock would run. I know this guy. He’s a coward who’d rather put a knife in your back than face a fight head-on.”
Hunter ignored his patrol partner’s commentary as he held the keen stare of the Order’s leader. “Murdock took off for the alley out back of the place. A car was already coming around to pick him up. The driver was a Gen One assassin.”
“Good Christ,” Gideon remarked from beside Hunter, shoving his hand through the short blond spikes of his hair.
Lucan’s face hardened, while Chase had gone utterly silent where he stood, listening as intently as the others now.
“I pursued the vehicle on foot,” Hunter continued. “The assassin was neutralized.”
He reached around to the back waistband of his fatigues and pulled out the detonated collar he’d removed from his kill. Gideon took the ring of charred black polymer out of his hand. “One more to add to your collection, eh? You’re racking up quite a score lately. Good work.”
Hunter merely blinked at the unnecessary praise.
“What about Murdock?” Lucan asked.
“Gone,” Hunter replied. “He fled the scene while I was disabling the driver. By then it was a choice of either tracking him down or going back inside the club to retrieve my patrol partner.”
The decision to aid his fellow warrior had given him more than a moment’s pause at the time. Logic and training as one of Dragos’s soldiers demanded he carry out his missions as a single entity: efficient, impersonal, and utterly independent. Murdock was a quantified target. Interrogating him would surely provide valuable intel; his capture was imperative to the success of the night’s patrol. To Hunter, apprehending the escaped Agent had seemed a logical enough objective.
But the Order operated under a different tenet, one he had pledged to follow when he’d joined them, no matter how it contrasted to the world he had once known. The warriors had a code among themselves for every mission, an understanding that if a team went out together, they came back together, and no man was ever left behind.
Not even if it meant forfeiting an enemy asset.
“I know Murdock,” Chase said, lifting the back of his hand to his chin to wipe away some of the blood that slicked his skin. “I know where he lives, I know the places he’s likely to hang out. It won’t take me long to find him—”
“You’re not doing shit,” Lucan interrupted. “I’m pulling you off this mission. Until I say otherwise, any and all Agency contact goes through me. Gideon can dig up everything we need on Murdock’s properties and personal habits. If you feel you’ve got anything more useful to add, turn it over to Gideon. I’ll decide how and when—and I’ll decide who—is best to go after this asshole Murdock.”
�
�Whatever.” Chase’s blue eyes glittered darkly under his lowered brows. He started to walk away.
Lucan’s head pivoted only slightly, his voice as low as distant thunder. “I didn’t say we were finished.”
Chase scoffed. “Sounds to me like you’ve got it all under control, so what do you need me for?”
“That’s something I’ve been asking myself all night,” Lucan replied evenly. “What the fuck do I need you for?”
Chase muttered something low and surly under his breath in response. He took another step and suddenly Lucan was right in front of him, having moved so quickly it had been hard for even Hunter to track him. He shoved Chase with a hard dose of Gen One strength, a frontal blow that sent the other warrior flying into the corridor wall.
Chase righted himself with a hissed curse. Eyes flashing like bright coals, he charged forward with a fang-bearing snarl.
This time it was Hunter who moved the fastest.
Intercepting the threat to the Order’s leader—his leader—he placed himself between the two vampires, his hand clamped around Chase’s throat.
“Stand down, warrior,” he advised his brother-in-arms.
It was the only warning Hunter would allow. If Chase so much as flinched with further aggression, Hunter would have little choice but to crush the fight out of him.
Teeth and fangs clamped together, lips peeled back from his gums, Chase held his stare in a thick, answering silence. Hunter felt a shift of movement in the space of the corridor behind him. He heard a feminine gasp—just the softest pull of air through parted lips.
Chase’s gaze drifted in that direction and some of the taut fury left him at once. As he relaxed, Hunter let go of him and stepped back from the confrontation.
“What’s going on out here, Lucan?”
Hunter turned along with the other males in the corridor and found himself facing Lucan’s mate, Gabrielle, standing behind them with two other females. Hunter knew the fine-boned blonde with the pale lavender eyes. It was she—Tegan’s mate, Elise—who’d gasped, her hand still lifted toward her mouth.
“I’m out of here,” Chase muttered, notably subdued as he brushed past Hunter and the others and stalked off down the corridor toward his quarters.
Hunter hardly noticed the warrior’s departure.
His attention was riveted on the third female who stood in the passageway now. Petite and fair-skinned behind the curtain of long ebony hair that partially hid her face from his view, she held him utterly transfixed in that moment. He couldn’t look away from the large greenish blue eyes that tapered delicately at their outer corners. At a loss to categorize their specific color, he didn’t try, instead attempting to determine why he found her presence so arresting.
“Is everything all right?” Gabrielle asked, moving over to Lucan in obvious concern.
“Yeah,” he replied. “It’s all good now.”
Hunter drifted closer to the unidentified woman, hardly aware his feet were moving until he was standing directly before her. She looked up at him then, lifting the perfect oval of her face until her gaze had traveled past the blood-spattered length of him and their eyes were locked on each other.
She was a stranger to him, yet, somehow, strangely familiar too.
He cocked his head, trying to puzzle out the peculiar sense that he’d seen her somewhere before. He blurted the thought that was banging around in his brain. “Do I know you …?”
Gabrielle cleared her throat and walked over as if she meant to protect the female from him. “Corinne, this is Hunter. He’s a member of the Order. Say hello, Hunter.”
He grunted the greeting, still staring at her.
“I saw you the night of the rescue,” she said quietly. “You were one of the warriors who brought me and the others to Claire and Andreas’s Darkhaven.”
So, she’d been among the captives Dragos had been holding. He supposed that made sense. He gave a vague nod, his curiosity somewhat satisfied by her reminder. But he hadn’t seen her in Rhode Island, he was almost certain of it. He felt sure he’d remember that face, those luminescent eyes.
“I’m afraid we still don’t have an ETA on Brock and Jenna,” Gideon told the dark-haired beauty. “The weather report out of Alaska doesn’t look good for another three days, minimum.”
“Three more days?” Corinne’s smooth forehead creased with a small frown. “I really need to get home. I need my family now.”
Lucan blew out a sigh. “Understood. Since Brock is a few thousand miles and a couple of blizzards away from Boston at the moment, someone else will have to—”
“I will take her.” Hunter felt Lucan’s stare land on him the instant the words left his mouth. He met the other Gen One’s gaze and gave a decisive nod. “I will see that she gets home safely to her family.”
It seemed a simple enough task to manage, yet everyone in the immediate vicinity had fallen into a sudden, lengthy silence. The most stricken of all seemed to be Corinne herself. She stared up at him mutely, and for a second he wondered if she was going to refuse his offer.
“It will take about fourteen hours by car,” Gideon said. “That’s a couple of days total, since we’re talking about night travel only. If you left right now, you could put in about a hundred miles before the sun starts to rise. Or I could have one of our corporate planes fueled up and ready to go at sundown. A couple hours of flight time and you’re there.”
Lucan stared hard at him, then gave a nod. “The quicker, the better. I’m gonna need you back on patrol tomorrow night.”
“Consider it done,” Hunter replied.
Chase sat in the dark alone, hunkered down on his haunches in a shadow-filled corner of the compound’s small chapel.
He didn’t know why his boots had carried him in here, to the quiet, candlelit sanctuary instead of his personal quarters farther down the corridor. He’d never been one to seek counsel or forgiveness from a higher power, and God knew he was likely too far gone for prayer anyway.
He sure as hell wasn’t holding out any hope of absolution. Not from above, and not from Lucan or his other brethren of the Order either. Not even from himself.
Instead he nursed his fury. He welcomed the agony of his wounds, the fiery kiss of deep pain that made him feel alive. Just about the only thing that gave him any feeling at all. And, like a junkie, he pursued that feeling with reckless, desperate abandon.
Better than the alternative.
Pain was the dark, wicked high that kept him from craving another, more dangerous mistress.
Without pain, all he would have was hunger.
He knew where that would end, of course.
His intellect wasn’t as lost as his body or his soul; reason told him that one day this ugly itch of his would kill him. There were some nights—more and more, lately—that he simply no longer cared.
“Sterling, are you in here?”
The feminine voice made his head jerk up, commanding his full attention just as it had in the corridor outside the elevator a few minutes ago. He cocked his head and listened for her movements, even as the addict in him craved the isolation of the shadows that concealed him from her sight.
He drew upon those shadows, reaching deep into the well of his personal Breed talent to gather the gloom around him. It was a struggle to summon his gift; harder still to hold it in place. He let go not even a moment later, hissing a rough curse as even the shadows abandoned him.
“Sterling?” Elise called softly into chapel.
Her footsteps were careful as she entered, as though she didn’t feel entirely safe with him. Smart woman. But still, she didn’t pause to back away and leave as he would have liked.
“I’ve just been to your quarters, so I know you didn’t go there.” She exhaled, her sigh sounding confused and not a little sad. “You can hide from my sight, but I feel your presence in here. Why won’t you answer?”
“Because I have nothing to say to you.”
Harsh words. And wholly undeserved, particul
arly by the female who was Tegan’s Breedmate of the past year, and, long before that, the mourning widow of Chase’s own brother. Quentin Chase had been blessed immeasurably when Elise chose him for her mate—and he’d had no idea that his younger brother had harbored a secret, shameful lust for the happiness Quent and Elise had known.
At least he no longer had to contend with that unwanted desire.
He’d weaned himself of his fixation. There was a tarnished nobility in him that wanted to believe he’d been able to let his want of Elise go because she had given her heart to another of his brothers—a brother-in-arms who would kill for her, die for her, just as she would for him.
Tegan and Elise’s love was unbreakable, and although Chase had never lowered himself to test it, the simpler truth was, his thirst for pain had since replaced Elise as the primary object of his obsession.
Yet he still found himself holding his breath as she drifted farther into the chapel and found him hunched in its back corner, his spine wedged into the angle of the stone walls.
Silent, she walked the short distance between the two columns of wooden pews. At the one closest to where he crouched on the floor, she seated herself on the edge and merely stared at him. He didn’t have to look over at her to know that her pretty face would be etched with disappointment. Probably pity as well.
“Maybe you didn’t understand me,” he said, little better than a snarl. “I don’t want to talk to you, Elise. You should leave now.”
“Why?” she asked, staying right where she sat. “So you can sulk in private? Quentin would be appalled to see you like this. He would be ashamed.”
Chase grunted. “My brother is dead.”
“Yes, Sterling. Killed in the line of duty for the Enforcement Agency. He died nobly, doing his best to make this world a safer place. Can you honestly say that’s what you’re doing?”
“I am not Quent.”
“No,” she said. “You’re not. He was an extraordinary man, a courageous man. You could have been even better than him, Sterling. You could have been so much more than what I see before me right now. You know, I’ve heard how you are on missions lately. I’ve seen you come in like this too many times, torn up and volatile. So full of rage.”
