by Adrian, Lara
Lucan ground his molars together. The people had a right to be anxious. Hell, they had a right to be terrified. And they also had a right to the truth.
As the JUSTIS official withdrew a prepared statement from the breast pocket of his suit, Lucan stepped out of the building. He saw the startled faces, heard the gasps of shock as he strode into the afternoon light with his head and face deliberately uncovered, his UV helmet tucked under his arm.
His name traveled the crowd of reporters in a buzz of wariness and surprise, a few uttering it with outright disdain. He didn’t care if they liked him or the message he came to deliver. He’d never been interested in playing the role of diplomat, and he didn’t intend to start now.
His fangs had not yet receded. He stared at the gaping crowd with amber-tinged vision and knew that his irises were still narrowed in reaction to the extended time he and his team had spent around the spilled blood of the victims.
He looked unmistakably Breed now, and he wanted every human gathered—and every camera’s eye trained on him—to see that fact as he addressed them.
“You all have questions that need to be answered. You have fears—all of them justifiable—that you want someone to allay for you. You’re looking for reassurances that what happened here today and in London two nights ago is not the portent of worse things still to come.”
Murmurs of agreement rumbled through the crowd. Lucan looked at the uncertain faces and slowly shook his head.
“No one can make you those promises. Not me, not the Order. Not the allied heads of state represented by the Global Nations Council. And sure as hell not a bunch of JUSTIS stiffs reading off prepared remarks stamped and approved by some useless PR firm.”
The group of suits he’d just upstaged started grumbling at his back. Lucan ignored them, just as he ignored the faint sting of his exposed skin as he stood beneath the sun’s harsh rays and continued his message to the press and public who would see the day’s coverage.
“These recent attacks and the one the Order thwarted at the GNC peace summit a few weeks ago have a single purpose. To instill fear and seed mistrust. Opus would like nothing better than to see us at war against each other.”
One of the JUSTIS officials scoffed. “Our problems with Opus didn’t start escalating until the Order got involved. Maybe these are retaliative strikes against you, not us.”
Lucan turned to face the human male. “Yes, I have no doubt the attacks are meant to punish me and my warriors as well. Would you prefer the Order sat with our thumbs up our asses instead? Let Opus rip our world apart or watch all of us do it for them?”
The young man at least had the good sense to shrink back a bit under the withering blast of Lucan’s anger and his amber-lit glare. The rest of the warriors had since come out to join Lucan in front of the building, solidarity in their presence and their uncovered faces as they met the apprehensive crowd and the bristling JUSTIS representatives.
“Opus wants us at war with each other,” Lucan warned them all. “We’ve already been down that road once in our recent history. It’s taken twenty years to come out of those dark days. We can’t let anyone push us backward.”
“No, we can’t,” replied the suit in charge of the PR brigade. “That’s why JUSTIS will be replacing all security personnel in public and government facilities with our own officers, effective immediately.”
Lucan barked out a curse as he rounded on the man. “Not if I have anything to say about that.”
“I suppose you want to replace them with Order warriors instead?”
“You know, that’s a damned good idea.”
The official practically choked. “Try it and you’ll have a battle on your hands, Thorne.”
Lucan bared his teeth at the asshole, flashing more than a little fang. “I’ve got nothing but battles on my hands, so get in line. This press conference is over.”
A glance at his comrades put the group of immense Breed warriors into motion behind him.
Securing their UV helmets on their heads, Lucan and his men stalked down the stairs, through the gathered press corps. En masse, the reporters hurried along after them, shouting more questions and leaving the befuddled group of JUSTIS public relations officials standing outside the building, forgotten and ignored.
CHAPTER 14
Zael had imagined sex with Brynne would be amazing, but damn… He hadn’t been prepared. After a mind-blowing orgasm that practically turned him inside out, his appetite had only intensified rather than subsided.
Holding her against the front of his hard and ready body, he rocked his hips against the firm curves of her ass and moaned as his cock leaped with interest. There was no mistaking Brynne’s lean, powerful body for a human’s. There was a dangerously coiled strength about her that no Atlantean female could compete with either.
Brynne was utterly unique.
And a short time ago, when she was crying his name in the midst of her own shattering release, she had belonged only to him.
Zael didn’t want to consider how deeply that thought pleased him. At the moment, all he wanted was to be inside her again.
“You feel so good, I want to keep you here all night,” he murmured, nipping at the tender crook of her neck and shoulder.
Instead of sinking into his embrace the way he expected her to, Brynne tensed palpably. She moved out of his arms. Sliding to the edge of the bed, she swung her long legs off the mattress and sat up.
Zael frowned. “Where are you going?”
“I need a shower.”
Without looking at him, she spoke to the empty space on the other side of the room, her body language as distant as her voice. When she got up off the bed, Zael followed.
Before she could make a hasty retreat into the adjacent bathroom, he reached out to grasp her hand. “What’s going on?”
Given little choice, she slowly pivoted to face him. It was startling to see the crackle of fire still glowing in her eyes. Her fangs were arresting as well, larger than he’d ever seen them. The sharp white points glittered diamond-bright in the tense line of her mouth.
There was an odd, unspoken misery in her expression in the instant their gazes met, but she shuttered it from him with a slow blink and a downward glance.
“I need to clean up and get dressed. I’m sure I’ve missed Mathias and that flight back to London tonight, but I still intend to go home.”
“Back to London?” Zael took her reply as the slap to the face she intended it to be. When she seemed adamant to avoid looking at him, he lifted her chin on the edge of his fingers. “What the hell just happened between us in that bed over there?”
Her eyes flicked up to meet his, her dark brows drawn together. “What happened was a mistake, Zael. I don’t expect you to understand.”
“Then try me.”
She stared at him for a long moment. In her tormented eyes he saw a thousand different emotions, but the only thing she seemed willing to give him right now was indifference. “I’m not saying the sex wasn’t great. It was. But that’s all it was, right?”
He didn’t reply. If that’s really what she thought, he’d be damned if he admitted to feeling anything more.
And Brynne wasn’t finished. “I’ll be the first to say that I’m not built for relationships. I never have been. And I think we both know that you aren’t either.”
“That’s right,” he replied tightly, although hearing her say it like that—like an indictment, a condemnation—gave him more shame than he’d ever managed to heap on himself personally.
She stepped out of his reach, folding her arms over her like a shield. “The sex was…more than great, Zael. But now that we’ve gotten it out of our systems, I hope we can be adults about this whole thing. I hope we can be friends and move on.”
Damn. Was this how cold he came off to the women he seduced over the years?
No. He knew better than to give himself that much credit.
He never explained anything. His M.O. was to vanish when
things got too real.
“Can we do that, Zael? Will you try to understand how I feel and not make things any more awkward than they already are?”
“Awkward,” he muttered, then chuckled mirthlessly. “That’s not the word I’d use, Brynne. The only word I’d use for what you’re telling me right now is bullshit.”
Her look said it all. He’d hit the mark, but the mutinous set of her lips showed no sign of softening.
“I thought I did a fairly decent job demonstrating to you that you don’t have to run away from me,” he told her, more gently than he felt himself capable for the disbelief and outrage coursing through him. “I thought I made it clear to you that I’m not going to hurt you.”
Her soft laugh had a bitter edge to it. “I’m not afraid of you hurting me, Zael. Can’t you just try to respect my feelings and stay away from me now?”
“That’s really what you want?”
“Yes.” She swallowed hard, and he could see how she fought to hold his gaze as she worked the lie to her tongue. “You and I—everything that’s happened between us, Zael—it’s been a mistake. Let’s not make any more.”
He listened in stony silence, weighing her words against what the hauntedness in her face was telling him, and what her body communicated to his when they were making love.
“All right, Brynne.” He nodded slowly, then walked over to retrieve his clothing. He slipped his pants on, then pulled his linen tunic over his head. “You’re right, I do have to respect your feelings. Even if I don’t believe you for one damned second.”
CHAPTER 15
“Redhead, blonde, or brunette?”
Rafe glanced over at Aric, who was riding shotgun in the Order-issued SUV Mathias Rowan had arranged for them to pick up in Dublin after they arrived from London.
For most of the drive to Finglas on their fetch assignment for the Order, they had been shooting the shit, something the two friends fell into easily enough whenever they were together.
Now that they were closing in on the address Gideon had given them for Iona Lynch’s apartment, Aric had begun passing the time by speculating on the woman’s various attributes. He’d already given his unsolicited guesses to a host of other topics where Crowe’s potential mistress was concerned, so by comparison, hair color was about as innocuous a question as could be expected.
“Gotta go with blonde,” Rafe said. “Crowe’s definitely got a type, at least when it comes to his ex-wives.”
“Can’t argue that,” Aric replied. “Then again, there’s something to be said for variety, right? Miss Iona Lynch of Finglas, County Dublin, could be a saucy little redhead. Or maybe a smoking hot brunette with a fine ass and legs that go on forever.”
Chuckling, Rafe shook his head. “You describing Crowe’s taste in women, or your own?”
“I apply few conditions to my tastes in women.” Aric’s grin was shameless. “Why put limits on something you enjoy?”
“Spoken like a true manwhore.”
Aric shrugged, unfazed. “You should try it sometime.”
“You mean like the time you talked me into playing wingman for you with those twin strippers down in Southie? I spent half the night with their drunk friend’s tongue in my ear.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“She was hopped up on liquor and narcotics,” Rafe reminded him. “While you went off to have your fun with the twins, I was in a bathroom stall with Speedball Sally, sobering her up and healing her long-term drug addiction.”
Like all of the Breed, Rafe had been born with a unique ability passed down from his Breedmate mother. In his case, he’d inherited Tess’s healing touch. He could mend wounds, repair cellular disease or weakness, and, in one case recently—after a former warrior, Kellan Archer, had been mortally wounded by gunfire—Rafe and Tess together had even managed to reverse death.
“See? That’s your problem, man. That gift of yours is a curse. You’ve got no shortage of female interest wherever we go—hell, even more than I do, and that’s saying something.”
“Jealous?” Rafe quipped.
“Hell, yeah. Women practically drop their panties at your feet, and yet you’ve got a look-but-don’t-touch policy going on.” Aric blew out a short breath. “I swear, you think you’ve got to save everyone. Climb down off the cross once in a while and have some fun.”
Rafe couldn’t deny there was some truth in his best friend’s accusation. All right, a lot of truth. Maybe if he’d been gifted with Aric’s ability to bend shadows, or their team captain Nathan’s talent for sonokinesis, things would be different.
But Rafe felt an obligation with the ability he’d been given.
It wasn’t as if he never got laid. He was male and he also had a warrior’s blood in his Breed veins. He had all the female company he wanted; he just preferred to be selective—with his bed partners and his blood Hosts, both of which he drew exclusively from the human population.
He slanted a flat look at Aric. “You want to keep lecturing me for a while, or are you ready to get to work?”
He turned onto a quiet road leading away from the Finglas city center. Rows of small, nearly identical red-brick duplexes and townhomes lined one side of the lumpy asphalt. On the other side of the darkened residential road, an overgrown spread of grass that might have passed for a park at one time spanned several blocks.
“This is the street Gideon gave us?”
Rafe nodded. “This is it.”
Aric’s brows rose. “Not exactly the kind of posh address I’d expect for one of Crowe’s women. If she was sleeping with him, she should’ve demanded a raise.”
“Maybe it’s modest for a reason. If not for Gideon tracking her down, we probably never would’ve thought to look in a nondescript neighborhood like this for Crowe or anyone he associated with.”
“Hide in plain sight,” Aric said. “Crowe wouldn’t be the first Atlantean to pull that stunt.”
Rafe nodded, checking house numbers as the SUV rolled past one tiny cracker box after another on the narrow residential street. “Guess she’s not hiding in plain sight anymore. Here we are.”
Aric stared out the passenger side window at the tidy little apartment building that sat quiet and dark at the end of a short slab of cracked concrete. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s home.”
Rafe peered closer and shook his head. “She’s home. There’s a light on in the back, first floor. Come on. Let’s go say hello to Miss Lynch.”
Killing the headlights and engine, Rafe stepped out of the vehicle. As soon as his boots hit the pavement, his senses went tight with alarm.
“Jesus Christ.”
Aric swung a tense look at him. “You smell it too?”
Rafe nodded, his fangs prickling in his gums.
Blood.
Human blood. A fucking river of it, based on the way the stench was hitting his nose.
They rushed the house on silent feet, Rafe motioning Aric to round the place to the back while he took the front. Aric was gone in an instant, vanishing into the shadows.
Rafe touched the latch on the front door and found it unlocked. No signs of forced entry, but there was no mistaking that something bad had occurred inside. He stepped in, nearly overpowered by the olfactory punch that slammed into him as he entered Iona Lynch’s home.
The place was silent. As soundless as a tomb.
“Hello?” he called into the darkness, unsurprised to receive no reply.
He crept through the small foyer and past a neatly furnished little living room. Despite the stench of bloodshed filling his nose and making his irises burn with amber heat, he didn’t see evidence of a struggle until he stepped toward the galley kitchen in the back of the house.
Then, the impact of what had taken place here—very recently, from the look of it—shook him to the bone. He drew up short, his boots halted in a pool of fresh blood.
Aric had just entered the kitchen from the back door now too, and his low curse echoed Rafe’s th
oughts. “Holy hell.”
A young blonde woman lay crumpled and deadly still in the center of the blood-soaked kitchen tiles, a lethal gash at her throat. There was no question she was dead. She’d been cut so savagely, the wound had nearly decapitated her.
“Jesus Christ,” Aric murmured woodenly. “Guess we weren’t the only ones looking for Iona Lynch.”
Rafe clamped his teeth and fangs together on a ripe curse as he strode through the slick lake of spilled blood to reach the woman. He was fucking up a crime scene, but if there was any chance he could revive her, he had to try. Not only because it was the right thing to do, but because Iona Lynch was the Order’s best lead on Crowe and his Opus associates. They couldn’t afford to lose her.
Kneeling down in the mess, he gingerly rolled her onto her back and touched the hideous wound at her throat. She had no pulse, no breath. Her skin was cool and waxy beneath his fingertips. There was nothing for him to work with, nothing for his ability to latch on to and draw toward healing.
“Shit.” He glanced up at Aric and grimly shook his head. “I can’t help her. She’s too far gone by several minutes, at least. Goddamn it, we’re too fucking late.”
As he spoke, he heard the faintest shift of movement coming from somewhere nearby. It was muffled, but Rafe and Aric both stilled in recognition that someone else was there in the house with them.
Silently, stealthily, Rafe set Iona Lynch’s lifeless body down on the tiles and rose to his feet.
The soft rustle came again, and he followed it to the closed door of a bathroom just off the kitchen. Then he heard a low, pained moan.
He opened the door and found another woman lying in a fetal position in the corner of the cramped room. Petite as an angel, the strawberry blonde was dressed in black yoga pants and a form-fitting pink tank top rent off her shoulder from an obvious altercation. Only semiconscious now, her body was coming awake slowly from the bloodied contusion on the side of her head.
Blood spatter on the white porcelain sink indicated someone had smashed the woman’s head into the basin with enough brute force to knock her out.