by Adrian, Lara
“About an hour.”
Dante’s whiskey-colored eyes lit up beneath the black slashes of his brows. “Plenty of time to be there and back with Scrully before the sun rises.”
“Lucan,” Gabrielle interjected softly, but firmly. The auburn-haired beauty had the regality of a queen, and now was no exception. All heads turned toward her as she spoke. “I don’t think I like this. I’ve got a bad feeling.”
“How so?” The Order’s founder looked at his woman, all of his focus fixed on hearing her opinion.
“Opus isn’t playing games, Lucan. They’ve been a serious threat from the very beginning. And now we know for certain they have ultraviolet weapons. A lot of them.” She shook her head, true fear written on her pretty face. “Maybe we should take this new intel on Lars Scrully back with us to D.C. when we return, then work on a plan of attack after we’ve had more time to consider it.”
Lucan listened to his mate in sober silence. All of the warriors grew serious and quiet, everyone grimly considering the gravity of the facts she was pointing out.
It took Lucan a moment to reply. When he did, his deep voice was low and gentle. “Yes, Opus does have UV on their side now. But they’re going to have it no matter how long we wait to strike. And to wait will only risk letting Scrully or the others in Opus’s cabal have more time to get the upper hand.”
Gabrielle nodded, but Aric could see that as sound as her formidable mate’s logic was, it did little to erase her worry.
Lucan went on, his steely gaze moving to the four commanders who trusted him to lead. “Right now, we have the element of surprise working for us. We should use it to our advantage.”
“We hope we have the element of surprise,” Nikolai commented. “Lately, it’s feeling as though Opus is staying one step ahead of us.”
“What are you saying? You think we’ve got a leak somewhere?”
“I don’t see how we could. All of our contacts in JUSTIS and elsewhere have been double and triple checked. They’re solid, Lucan.”
Rio glanced at his friend, a haunted look in his topaz-colored eyes. “If that’s true, then any breach would have to come from somewhere outside of those networks. Possibly someone we trust.”
The massive warrior knew a thing or two about that. The scar on his face had come on the heels of the worst betrayal a man could suffer--that of his own mate. It wasn’t until Rio met Dylan that he was finally able to heal on the inside. The wounds that marred him on the outside would always serve as a reminder of the pain that came in trusting the wrong person with his heart . . . and his life.
As Rio spoke, Aric thought back on Angus Mackie and the certainty that the gang leader and his followers hadn’t merely gotten lucky when they made the decision to vacate not only the tavern and its store room but Big Mack’s residence as well.
Sure, they could have guessed that trouble would be heading their way after the headlines Mercier’s wedding reception debacle had made. Or maybe they’d had an attack of nerves after the heinous act they’d pulled in ashing that Darkhaven family.
But Aric’s warrior senses prickled with unease when he considered all of the what-ifs and the scenarios he was reluctant to put into words.
And then there was Kaya.
Try as he might to deny it, he kept coming back to her remoteness, her emotional distance, following the Darkhaven attack. After her run that same day, she had been even more anxious and withdrawn. Her edginess hadn’t improved as she and the rest of the Montreal team had gone with the commander on the mission to grab Mackie. When she asked Nikolai for a private meeting, she looked about as miserable as Aric had ever seen her.
What did she need to talk with Niko about that couldn’t be said in front of everyone?
Was it something about the raid?
Then again, maybe it was simply Aric himself who was making her so uncomfortable.
Whatever it was, she didn’t seem ready--or willing--to trust him with it.
Not that she should. He hadn’t made her any promises. No, all he’d done was pursue her with single-minded purpose then seduce her. They had agreed to no strings or obligations, but the more time he spent with Kaya the less eager he was for his business in Montreal to end.
“So, it sounds as if we’re all agreed that we need to act swiftly” Lucan said, then he slid an apologetic glance at Gabrielle. “Most of us, that is.”
All four warriors nodded, their faces solemn yet determined. But then a further look passed between them. The exchange was unspoken, until Aric’s father took the lead.
“We’re agreed that we cannot wait to make our move on this new Opus lead, Lucan. But your mate is right to caution us that this is no ordinary mission. None of them are, now that Opus and their loyalists are in possession of UV weapons.”
Lucan Thorne’s scowl deepened to one of suspicion. “What are you trying to say, Harvard? If you’ve got something on your mind, spit it out.”
Chase nodded. “We’re going in to get Lars Scrully. Tonight. But we’re going without you.”
A growl erupted from the powerful Gen One. “The fuck you say. If you expect me to sit out on a mission with my dick in my hand--”
“You’re not going this time,” Dante said, his deep voice as firm as Chase’s had been.
Rio nodded. “The risk is too great. You’re Gen One, Lucan.”
“Yes,” he snarled. “And a blast of UV will kill any one of you the same as it will me.”
“But you’re the founder of the Order,” Nikolai added. “We can’t afford to lose you.”
He bellowed a sharp curse and shoved to his feet. “No. Fuck this. And fuck all of you if you think the Order will stop without me. We can’t afford to lose anyone, understood?”
“Lucan.” Gabrielle stood up and walked over to him. He stilled as she laid her hands on his broad chest. “They’re right. The Order can’t lose you. But you’re more than just the leader of these fine men and women who serve under your command. You’re the chairman of the Global Nations Council. Since First Dawn, whether you like it or not, you have become the voice of the entire Breed nation.”
His eyes flashed amber-bright with his barely banked rage. But Gabrielle’s words calmed him. It was clear to everyone in the room that this woman grounded him the way nothing else could.
“You’re staying behind this time.” Her demand was softly spoken, but brooking no argument.
He cupped her cheek in his big hand, his jaw clamped tight for a long moment. Then another low curse rumbled out of him.
Finally, he looked back at his comrades and Aric. “Tell everyone to assemble in the war room in ten minutes to receive their team assignments and mission directives. I want schematics of Scrully’s estate now, as in yesterday. Let’s go, people.”
As they all began to hop to his command, Lucan pointed a finger at Nikolai. “If I’m cooling my heels here tonight, then so are you. I’m not going to risk leaving that baby boy without a father in the first few hours of his life.”
Niko scowled, but after a moment, he gave a curt nod.
“Look alive,” Lucan ordered them all. “Time’s wasting already.”
CHAPTER 22
With a low-throated scream, a horned owl swooped off the bough of an immense pine in front of Kaya and her comrades as they crept into place in the forest that surrounded Lars Scrully’s enormous lakefront estate.
The warriors had split into three teams once they left the city. With Nikolai grounded alongside Lucan back at the command center, Mira and Sterling Chase were in charge of the unit tasked with surveillance as the other two teams got into place. Kaya, Mira, and Chase watched the northern border of the estate. Keeping an eye on the southern perimeter were Torin and Tavia, along with Lucan and Gabrielle’s son, Darion. Although Tavia had limited combat experience, it was the Breed female’s immunity to ultraviolet light that persuaded the Order’s commanders to permit her along on the mission.
For the same reason--along with the added bonus of h
er ability to shadow bend like Aric and her father--Carys Chase had been assigned to the second team of six, which was moving into position at various points around the property, running reconnaissance and waiting for the command to sweep onto the grounds and take out any guards who tried to block the assault. Led by Dante and Rio, the team also had the experience of Rafe and Kellan, both proven warriors. And while Carys’s mate Rune was new to the Order, he had earned his fighting skills in illegal cage matches back in Boston before he met her.
Rounding out the mission’s operatives was the third team, the vanguard consisting of Aric, Balthazar and Webb. None of the units were cleared to move in until Aric and his partners gave the all-clear.
“Shouldn’t we have heard from them by now?” Kaya could hardly keep the edge of worry from her quiet whisper to Mira.
Her friend nodded. “They should be approaching from the lake any minute now.”
As if on cue, the team’s earpieces crackled with an incoming transmission from elsewhere in the field. But instead of Aric’s deep voice announcing that he and Bal and Webb had emerged from the water as planned, it was Darion Thorne’s low growl that came over the communication link.
“Alpha. Bravo. We’ve got a problem down at the southern gate.”
Mira’s grave stare flicked to Kaya and Commander Chase. “What kind of problem?”
“Two security guards with acute lead poisoning. They’ve both been shot execution-style.”
“Shit.” Mira touched her ear and spoke with clipped urgency. “Torin, can you get close enough to pick up a reading for us?”
“On it, captain.” Silence fell for a handful of seconds that felt like days to Kaya. Then the warrior with the ability to psychically detect shifts in the energy forces of a place came back on the line. “I’m sensing a lot of fear and panic radiating from within the residence. There’s more death inside there too.”
Kaya’s stomach clenched. “Something’s not right.”
“No, it’s not,” Chase replied. “We’re too late. Opus’s assassins have already been here.”
The sudden staccato report of gunfire ripped through the quiet of the surrounding night. Mira’s face went grim. “Holy hell. They’re still here.”
As she said it, a bolt of lightning lit up the inky black sky near the lake. Then another.
Kaya looked toward the large body of water, where Aric, Webb, and Bal were currently swimming in as an amphibious team to breach the estate’s weakest perimeter. More light exploded in that vicinity. The bright illuminations reflected on the lake’s surface like fireworks.
Cold dread swept through Kaya’s veins. “It’s UV. Oh, my God. They’re shooting at them with ultraviolet!”
“Abort,” Mira called over the comm link. “All units abort right now!”
A reply came back at nearly the same time. “Bal’s down.” Webb’s usually calm voice had a catch to it now, and an edge of fear that Kaya had never heard in the arrogant male before. “Ah, Christ. They just ashed Bal. Fuck!”
Kaya’s hand flew to her mouth. A jagged moan leaked past anyway, anguish she couldn’t hold in. No. Not him. Not Balthazar.
Mira’s face held the same bleak disbelief, but the captain kept her composure. “Where are you, Webb?”
“Near the dock. Motherfuckers have me pinned down with UV fire.”
In the few seconds it took to receive that awful news, Tavia, Torin, and Darion arrived from their lookout points to rejoin Mira, Kaya, and Chase.
“We’re pulling out,” Mira told them. “If Opus has already been here, I doubt Scrully will be any use to us now. And I’m not going to lose anyone else over that asshole.”
“Aric’s already inside,” Webb reported. “As soon as we came out of the water and ditched our gear, we started taking heavy gunfire and UV. Before I knew it, Bal was down. Then Aric turned into shadow and I lost sight of him.”
“Oh, God,” Kaya murmured, every instinct she had twitching with the need to go after him. Even though Aric was more than capable of taking on a small army of human assailants purely by virtue of his Breed genetics, the thought of him charging into danger alone was too much to bear. Both the warrior in Kaya and the woman wanted nothing else but to be alongside her partner. “I’m going in too.”
“So am I,” Tavia and Carys announced at the same time. The pair of daywalking Breed females were united in their fury and their determination.
“You’re not going in there without me,” Chase demanded, his stance as unyielding as his hard gaze. “Neither one of you leaves my sight.”
Tavia’s eyes crackled with amber fire. “We’re going. And you’re staying.” The tips of her fangs glinted in the low light of the fading UV rays. “Don’t you dare try to override me on this. There’s no room for argument here, my love.”
The commander’s jaw went taut, but the only protest he uttered was a low growl as Tavia briefly touched his rigid cheek.
“All right, that’s settled,” Mira said. Then she spoke to the other Breed warriors who’d gone silent on the comm link. “The rest of you, stand down too. We’re going in.”
Carys’s Breed gaze glittered with the same fierce determination as her mother’s. “I’ll go provide cover for Webb.”
“Be careful,” Tavia said. Then she glanced at Mira and Kaya. “I’ll head for the house. Aric knows what he’s doing, but he may need some help. I’ll look for Scrully while I’m inside.”
At the captain’s nod, both daywalkers vanished into the woods.
“Let’s go,” Mira said.
Heart racing, Kaya fell in beside her friend and comrade. They made much slower progress than Tavia, who was likely already at the mansion and finding her way inside. Kaya and Mira raced through the thick forest that hemmed in the expansive limestone brick house and its sprawling footprint.
Up ahead, the rapid chatter of automatic gunfire. More explosions of UV light flashed in and around the house from attackers unaware that those Breed-killing weapons were no good against the daywalkers who had infiltrated the place. Men’s voices shouted orders near the stronghold; here and there, a human scream cut short as either Aric or his mother took them out.
With their own weapons in hand, Kaya and Mira reached the edge of the woods and hunkered down, peering out at the frenzy of activity near the mansion. They unleashed a hail of bullets on four guards jogging around from the back of the house, dropping them one by one. Kaya’s training kept her focus laser-sharp, her remorse for killing on a back burner.
She only wished she could say her soldier’s training was enough to stanch her concern for Aric. But as she and Mira rushed out of the trees and down to the lakefront mansion, all she could think about was the man she loved.
No sense in denying that fact, especially to herself.
She was in love with Aric Chase. The thought of losing him--the mere idea that he could meet with harm at the hands of their enemies tonight--put a hollow ache in the center of her breast.
“Around to the back,” Mira said. “The house is nothing but glass looking out over the water. All the easier to blast our way in from that side.”
Kaya nodded, reloading with a fresh magazine. “Let’s do it.”
She and Mira shot out the wall of soaring glass, standing back as the sharp, heavy shards rained down on the bricked terrace where they stood. The breach brought three men running into the large great room inside. Before they could open fire, Kaya and Mira mowed them down then stepped around the corpses to enter the residence.
Just as they did, bullets sprayed at them from the open loft area above. Mira squeezed off a volley of shots as she took cover behind an imposing carved wood bar that dominated one whole side of the room. Meanwhile Kaya dove out to the adjacent hall just as another armed man thundered her way. Rolling into a crouch, she squeezed the trigger of her semiautomatic pistol and the big human went down like a rock.
“Aric,” she whispered urgently into her comm’s mic. “I’m in. Where are you?”
&nbs
p; His sharp, angry curse was a relief all by itself. “Kaya? Damn it, stay put.”
A deafening cacophony of gun blasts ripped over the open link before it went dead silent. “Aric!”
Ultraviolet light couldn’t hurt him, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be shot to death with enough rounds to the head or vital organs. There were other ways he could be killed too. Possibilities she dared not even imagine.
She started moving even before she realized her boots were chewing up the floor beneath her. From the schematics of the house the team reviewed before leaving base, Kaya recalled the location of a back staircase that led to the second floor. The gunfire she heard over her comm had come from above. If Aric was up there too, she had to find him.
She found the stairs and started bounding up them on silent feet. Halfway to the top, a gunman rounded the corner and spotted her. He swung his weapon up and took aim at her. Kaya fired first, but had no choice other than to leap over the railing to avoid the returned shots.
She dropped to the floor below, bullets spraying her from behind. More than one struck home. The searing pain made her let out a scream.
Blood streaked the floor where she’d fallen and in a path behind her as she staggered on a wounded leg into a sheltered position against the wall of the stairwell. As soon as her assailant peered down to look for her, she raised her gun and filled his chest full of lead, ignoring the fiery protest of her bleeding biceps. The man fell over the banister in a heavy heap at her feet.
To her horror, as she sagged back against the wall, panting from blood loss and agony, three more guards closed in from all sides.
She struggled to lift her bloodied arm to defend herself. But in that next instant all she saw in front her was a blur of shadow and quicksilver movement. When it stopped, Aric was there, standing between her and the broken bodies of three dead gunmen whose necks had all been savagely twisted.