by Adrian, Lara
She did. He saw the knowledge register in her widened eyes as she lifted her head from his chest. A small crease burrowed between her brows.
But instead of pushing him away or making a break for the nearest door, beautiful, tipsy Brynne did something else he wasn’t expecting.
Reaching up to lace her fingers behind his neck, she pulled him into a shocking, mind-blowingly deep kiss.
CHAPTER 3
She didn’t know what had gotten into her.
With her mouth locked on Zael’s in a kiss that seemed to stagger them both, Brynne wanted to blame her rash—not to mention mortifying—impulse on the whisky.
It was because of the whisky.
Had to be.
How else could she explain the fact that this unwelcome reunion with the Atlantean had been the highlight of her entire day?
What other excuse could she possibly find for the fact that she was currently wrapped within the arms of a man who had done nothing but unsettle and annoy her from the instant they met, and she liked it?
God help her, she more than liked it.
Moaning, she speared her fingers deeper into his thick golden hair as she pulled him closer and her tongue dove deeper into his mouth. Her fangs surged, elongating as her desire intensified. Behind her closed eyelids her vision burned blood-red, and beneath her silk blouse and tailored pants, her skin tingled with the awakening of her dermaglyphs.
She was overcome with need, no doubt because it had been so long since she’d given in to her body’s demands—carnal and otherwise. Surely, that had to be the reason.
Every cell in her body lit up with a sudden and startling current of electricity as she sparred and tangled her tongue with Zael’s. Heat licked through her senses, into her veins, with each brush of his lips over hers.
It wasn’t as if she’d never kissed a man before. She had—although admittedly, infrequently at most. To her chagrin, kissing Zael made the memory of those other encounters dissolve into oblivion now.
And regardless of the fact that an audience of other clubgoers surrounded Zael and her from all sides, Brynne couldn’t get enough of him.
Just how many shots had she drunk tonight?
She couldn’t remember, nor did she care. With Zael’s mouth moving so hotly over hers, the only thing she could answer to now was her desire.
Wasn’t that what she’d wanted? Distraction from her problems. From her failures.
And yes, from her loneliness too. Zael had been right about that. She’d wanted a release from the emptiness of her life.
Just for a little while.
For a night.
With someone who wouldn’t judge her, or be inclined to stick around long enough to see just how fucked up she truly was. With her train wreck of an upbringing, she had no experience with emotional bonds, aside from the half-sister she’d met just several years ago.
And if having spent the first twenty-odd years of her life simply trying to survive wasn’t bad enough, she also had the added bonus of a cellular metabolism flaw that was slowly tearing her apart. She wasn’t wired for relationships. Long-term romantic commitments were not in her DNA—literally.
Which kind of made a player like Zael the perfect sexual outlet she was looking for tonight.
Hell, she was almost halfway there with him already.
Her veins felt like rivers of fire under her skin. The low hum of her need was rising swiftly in her temples, building with each heavy pound of her heart.
Panting as she tore her mouth away from his, Brynne stared up into his heavy-lidded, darkened blue eyes. “Let’s get out of here. My flat is just across the river.” She licked her lips, no easy feat when her fangs were fully extended and filling her mouth. “I want to go. Right now. With you.”
It was intended as a command, which should have been clear enough to him. But he stood unmoving. His handsome face was taut with desire, his mouth wet and slack from their kissing. Sexual interest radiated off every hard, golden inch of him. Most obviously in the rigid length of the erection that pressed against her hip.
Yet he slowly shook his head in denial.
“What are you trying to do here, Brynne? You’ve had too much to drink. I doubt you even know what you’re saying.”
She reached up, grabbing a fist full of the front of his shirt. “I’m saying I want to have sex with you, Zael. No strings attached, no need to call me in the morning. We don’t ever have to see each other again. In fact, I’d prefer that we don’t.”
She fully expected him to jump on the offer. At the very least, she expected she’d have to endure the Atlantean’s self-satisfied grin as he tossed off one of his snappy, arrogant comebacks before dragging her out of the club like the caveman she was certain he was.
Instead, he held her slightly unsteady gaze. His square jaw remained firm, unyielding.
When he spoke, his voice was low, utterly serious. “I should take you to bed, if only because you strike me as a woman who’s never been properly fucked in your life. But I won’t. Not like this.”
He pried her fingers from his shirt and took a step back from her.
Good lord, was he . . . offended?
Brynne scowled, weaving slightly on her feet. Her body vibrated with stalled need. “Aren’t you the one who’s been putting the full court press on me every time I’ve seen you? I thought you wanted me. It sure as hell felt like you did just now.”
His answering grunt was sharp, caustic. “I can have any woman under the terms you just described. And I have.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
He didn’t answer, just started walking away from her. Brynne fell in behind him, hurrying to catch up as he sliced through the crowd. She didn’t reach him until they were through the bar and heading for the exit.
“Zael, wait. Please.”
He paused just inside the club’s vestibule.
“I shouldn’t have come.” He stared at her as if he was going to say something more, then changed his mind. He shook his head. “You want to go home, I’ll take you home. I’ll even put you to bed, Brynne. But I won’t fuck you. Not like this. No matter how much I want to.”
His toneless reply took her so aback, he might as well have slapped her.
She swallowed back her humiliation, but it sat at the back of her throat, bitter as acid.
“Come on,” he said tightly. “I’ll hail us a taxi.”
As they stepped outside the building, Brynne’s apology sat on the very tip of her tongue. All of the alcohol in her bloodstream seemed to dissolve under the weight of her embarrassment, leaving her feeling cold and foolish.
And never more alone.
“Zael, I—”
She didn’t know what she could say to fix things. She wasn’t even sure she knew how.
But then something bright in the starlit distance caught her eye—something disturbing, setting the skyline across the Thames aglow.
A fire.
No, it was more than a fire. It was a churning, massive plume of flames and roiling, thick gray smoke. Outside the club, a crowd was gathering to look at the spectacle.
As they all watched in silent horror, a low rumble sounded across the water…followed by the unspeakable crash and roar of crumbling metal, glass, and mortar.
“Oh, my God,” Brynne murmured. She glanced over at Zael, feeling all of the blood drain from her face. “That’s the government block at Vauxhall Cross. That building that just went down? Zael…It was JUSTIS headquarters.”
CHAPTER 4
Order Headquarters
Washington, D.C.
Lucan Thorne had been a warrior far too long and seen too damned much for anything to take him by surprise anymore. Yet as he stood in front of a wall of video monitors in the Order’s war room at headquarters, watching with most of his lieutenants and their mates as the heart of London’s government district burned, he couldn’t deny the cold sense of disbelief that gripped him.
The iconic white building that once ho
used the famed British MI6, and, for the past twenty years, the global operations headquarters for JUSTIS…gone.
Nothing but rubble. The highly secured, impenetrable modern fortress and all who’d been inside it tonight, consumed by the massive cloud of dark ash and searing fire that lit up the London skyline like a volcano.
“Opus Nostrum wasted no time claiming responsibility,” Gideon said grimly from beside Lucan. “It’s all over the Internet now.”
The Order’s technology expert had a tablet in hand, scanning underground sites where hackers and other society misfits liked to boast and preen for one another. Gideon was as much a warrior as any of his comrades, but he also had skills that would leave any black hat computer genius in his wake.
Lucan ground out a tight curse. “We should’ve seen this coming.”
“No one saw this coming,” Gideon said. “There was no chatter, no posturing. No threats. Nothing but silence leading up to this attack.”
“Even so, we should have known they wouldn’t let us take out two of their key players without some kind of response.”
Sterling Chase, head of the Boston command center, shook his head as he considered. “This kind of assault takes time. It takes planning and coordination. You don’t just roll up to a high-security government facility with enough firepower to raze the place.”
Dante, another of the longtime Order members, grunted in agreement. “Not without getting your own ass blown to pieces as soon as your toe crosses the property line.”
“There were no reports of unusual activity anywhere in the area,” added Tegan.
The massive male was first generation Breed, like Lucan—both of them powerful Gen Ones, both of them centuries-old founding members of the Order. They had gone from friends to enemies and back again in the long time they’d known each other. Now, both mated to extraordinary women who’d given them each brave sons who shared their fathers’ commitment to the Order, Lucan and Tegan had become as close as kin.
“No one saw this coming,” Tegan said, “let alone had time to prevent it.”
As much as Lucan wanted to believe that was true, the leader in him didn’t feel the weight of the blame on his shoulders any less.
“Is that what we’ll tell the public when they ask how this was allowed to happen? That we were all caught unaware and now we’re standing around with our dicks in our hands?”
“JUSTIS never wanted our help, Father.” Lucan’s son, Darion, stared at him from the other side of the room. The adult Breed male stood with a few of the other warriors’ grown sons who had gathered in the war room as the first reports were coming in from London.
As he spoke, several heads of the younger recruits nodded.
“Ask anyone in JUSTIS or the Global Nations Council,” Dare went on. “They don’t trust us and they don’t approve of our methods. They haven’t from day one.”
“Neither did the old guard of the Breed’s famously ineffective Enforcement Agency,” Rio pointed out. “But we outlasted them too.”
The Spanish warrior’s statement drew assenting comments from his fellow comrades Brock and Kade. Even Hunter, the formidable former assassin, voiced agreement.
Lucan glanced back to the fiery destruction still filling the video monitors. “I don’t give a damn about JUSTIS’s approval, or the GNC’s, or any other organization that talks a good game right up until a real threat comes around and blows them all to shit. I care about peace. I care about protecting the lives of the innocents who can’t do it for themselves.”
“We all do, Lucan.” His Breedmate, Gabrielle, moved in closer and nestled against him, her voice calm and rational, even in the face of terror like the kind that was dealt tonight. That steadiness was one of the things he’d always admired about her.
But she clung tightly to him as she spoke. Whether she intended the physical contact as a reassurance to herself or to him, Lucan wasn’t sure.
Gabrielle looked at Mathias Rowan, who led the Order’s command center in London. “Do we know how many people were in the building tonight?”
Mathias might have been home in England tonight himself, but he’d recently come to the States with his newly expecting Breedmate, Nova, to visit his friend Sterling Chase in Boston.
Mathias gave a vague shake of his head, his arm around Nova’s shoulder as the pair watched the horror unfold on the monitors. “They’re still working to get an accurate count. Given the late hour of the attack, there were few human members of JUSTIS on site.” His gaze was as sober as his voice. “My men over there are on the ground as we speak. Thane, the team’s captain, says there were no survivors. From the looks of it, he thinks we should expect Breed casualties to be in the high double-digits, possibly a hundred.”
A ripple of outrage traveled the gathered warriors. The women’s reaction was quieter, a couple of the Breedmates sniffling as they struggled to hold back tears. Most affected of them all was Sterling Chase’s mate, Tavia.
Her half-sister, Brynne Kirkland, worked in London as a JUSTIS investigator. Tavia had been frantically trying to reach her ever since the first news of the attack surfaced.
“Has there still been no word?” Gabrielle asked the other female.
“Nothing yet.” Tavia’s worry drew her mouth into a flat line. “Brynne emailed me before heading in to JUSTIS headquarters this morning. She said she expected to be in debriefing meetings at least all day about Fielding’s death. She said she’d call me after she was out. I’ve called her several times and emailed, but…” She drew in a shaky breath. “Brynne’s flat is in that same neighborhood. If she wasn’t still at the JUSTIS building tonight, then she was probably home when…”
Her words trailed off again, her voice constricted. Chase drew her against him and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. He offered no words or false hope, just held his mate as his grim gaze met Lucan’s.
“We have to stop Opus before they grow any bolder,” the Boston commander said.
Lucan nodded. “Yes, we do. And we will.”
He was well aware that this assault would not be the last. Nor would it be the worst still to come, based on their dealings with the cabal whose main goal seemed to be global chaos and terror. The type of kindling that never failed to spark war.
And every man and woman in the room with Lucan now also knew that Opus Nostrum was only one enemy they had to contend with.
The other force that had declared itself the Order’s enemy was even worse for the fact that it was unseen—unknown thus far, except for her name.
Selene.
The exiled queen of the hidden race of immortals whom legend and myth had called Atlanteans.
If the Order’s information was to be trusted, Selene was preparing for a strike of her own. According to what they knew, she had been plotting, waiting to make her move. What they didn’t know was how or when. Perhaps if they did, they would know how best to stop her. Failing that, Lucan and his warriors would have no choice but to destroy her.
Before she had the chance to destroy them.
And to accomplish that, the Order was prepared to utilize every advantage they had over the Atlanteans and their mad queen.
As Lucan contemplated all of the grave work ahead of him and his warriors, his comm unit vibrated with an incoming call on his private, encrypted line.
He could count on one hand the number of people who had direct access to him—most of them gathered in the war room with him now.
Except for one recent addition.
He put the phone to his ear and heard a deep voice of an individual he’d only come to know a few days ago. A man the Order had little choice but to trust as a much-needed ally.
“Lucan, it’s Zael.” Sirens screamed in the background, punctuated by the low, distant percussions of explosive aftershocks. “I’m in London with Brynne. We need help.”
CHAPTER 5
Brynne wanted to pretend the humiliation of having propositioned Zael—and been rejected—hadn’t actually happened.
She wanted to pretend a lot of things hadn’t truly happened tonight, chief among them the heinous attack on her colleagues at JUSTIS.
But it was impossible to ignore anything that had occurred these past several hours as she sat alone with Zael inside the luxury cabin of the Order’s private jet en route to Washington, D.C.
Opus Nostrum had destroyed the entire London headquarters in one fell swoop.
No survivors. Nearly a hundred JUSTIS officers and officials incinerated in the blast, all but a dozen or so of the victims Breed. Men and women Brynne had worked with for the bulk of her career with the organization. People she liked, simply gone in an instant.
The rubble from the explosion was burning as the jet had taken off from outside the city. It would likely take days before the two-block diameter pyre finally cooled.
Her city would never be the same.
Around the whole world, nothing would ever be the same now.
Opus had made that point clear tonight.
Brynne jiggled the ice in her glass then took a long drink of the cold liquid. Water this time, even though her grief and fury called for something stronger. Witnessing the inferno that had devoured her longtime workplace—former workplace, she reminded herself grimly—had been enough to sober her on the spot. The way she felt after tonight, she might never touch another drop.
Zael was watching her from his seat across the cabin. He’d been uncharacteristically reserved since they boarded the jet. Even now, he kept his tongue and his distance, allowing her much needed space to process and reflect.
She set her empty glass on the console next to her. “I keep picturing myself walking those networks of corridors,” she murmured softly. “I keep seeing their faces—the other officers and investigators I worked with on a daily basis at that building. I can’t stop running through their names in my mind, doing a mental body count.”
Zael nodded gravely, but didn’t say anything. He got up and slowly walked over to take the leather seat facing her. His copper-threaded blond hair had gotten tousled from their race across London to view the destruction firsthand.