by Cynthia Eden
She hurried down the hallway, far too conscious of Shane’s footsteps behind her. She passed offices. Saw desks, phones. But no people.
She stilled in the middle of that hallway and turned to face Shane. “Where is everyone?”
His face was tense. “This facility hasn’t been used in a while. It’s a back-up location.” He hesitated, then said, “It’s a place that the senator doesn’t know about. It wasn’t officially on the Para Unit’s books.”
“Stop it,” she whispered as she stared into his eyes and took a step away from him.
He advanced toward her. “Stop what?”
“Staring at me as if—”
“As if I want to eat you alive?” Another slow, gliding step. “But that’s exactly what I want to do.”
Her wrist throbbed again, and the pleasure seemed to roll right through her whole body. It shouldn’t happen. She shouldn’t be so attuned to him.
He’d said they could be mates. She didn’t want his words to be true, did she?
“You realize that the senator was the one setting you up. Pulling the strings.”
She shook her head. “Donald has been my friend for years.” Her mother had worked as one of his aides. Donald’s daughter had been her best friend when she was a kid. But that had been before…
Before Chloe changed.
She cleared her throat and retreated another step. “Donald pulled some strings to get me clearance for projects like this one, yes, but he wasn’t using me. He was helping me.” Shane and the others had it all wrong.
Shane shook his head. “Pate has known for some time that a powerful werewolf was setting a plan like this in motion. A plan that would turn humans into prey.”
She turned away from him. Kept hurrying down that hallway. There had to be a way out of there. “You’re wrong,” she said again. “He’s no werewolf.” And this place was a maze. Her steps tapped faster against that gleaming tile.
In a blink, Shane was in front of her. She stopped, gasping. She hated that too-fast way he could move. Hated it.
“No, love, you’re wrong, but I guess you’ll have to figure that out for yourself, won’t you?” He seemed sad then, but he pointed to the left. “You can leave that way. You’ll even find a car waiting outside for you. Use the GPS navigation system, and you can be back home by nightfall.”
No way. He was just going to let her go? “Are you serious?”
He nodded. “But it’s a fucking ridiculous plan. The werewolves have your scent. You leave here, and they will find you.”
“And the alternative is…what? To stay hidden here, a prisoner?”
“You wouldn’t be a prisoner.”
She would be. “For how long?”
“Until the threat is over.”
That was pretty much not an answer. “And what happens if Pate gets the urge to bottle me up again?” She glanced to the right and saw the video camera perched on the wall there. No doubt, Pate was watching and listening to them at that very moment.
“I won’t let him.”
She wanted to trust him, but the door to the left was so close…Olivia slid away from him.
“Don’t do this.” His voice was flat. “It’s going to be the wrong choice.”
Her body felt cold. Her wrist—she pushed it against her side. “The werewolves won’t find me. I can disappear.” On her terms. Not Pate’s.
“You don’t want to stand with the Para Unit to face whatever the hell is coming?”
“I just want my life back.” That door was temptingly close. “That’s all.”
Her hand pushed against the door.
“And what about me?”
The question sank into her, and, without looking at him, she found she could be honest in these last moments. “You scare me, Shane. You make me want things that I shouldn’t. You make me…want you.” She shoved against the door. Sunlight spilled inside and on her. “And the way I feel when I want you—” Wild, desperate, on the edge of control. “That terrifies me most of all.”
She walked into the light and left him in the shadows.
***
The door clanged shut behind Olivia.
“You’re really going to let her walk away?” Connor asked.
Shane had known the damn werewolf was close by. “Her life. Her choice.”
You make me want things I shouldn’t. You make me…want you.
Her blood had given him a rush, one that still had him feeling drunk—and needing more. “She doesn’t want to be with the Para Unit.” Not that he blamed her. They’d nearly killed her. He glanced at Connor, gave him a faint nod. “I can count on you for back-up?”
“Yeah, but you and Pate really need to work on coming up with better plans in the future. This one is shit.” Connor leveled his stare at Shane. “You’re risking your life for her. A woman you just met days ago.”
The werewolf didn’t get it. “I’ve been on this earth for more than two thousand years.”
Faint surprise widened Connor’s eyes.
“I’ve seen countries rise and fall. Watched more death and pain than you can imagine.” Those memories would never fade. “I didn’t think there was any pleasure left for me here, then I looked up on a storm-tossed ferry, and I saw her.” In that moment, so much had changed for him.
“It’s…it’s the blood bond that I heard Pate talking about, isn’t it? I overheard him telling Holly that the blood was tying you to Olivia because the woman was some sort of genetic match for a vampire—”
“It’s not the blood. I was addicted to Olivia before my first taste.” He could hear the car cranking outside. Time to go. “Tell Pate that the debt is paid.”
Olivia didn’t want to stay with the Para Unit. She didn’t trust them. Fine.
He yanked open the door. Olivia was starting to pull away.
Did she really think he’d let her face the danger alone? He leapt forward and came down a few feet in front of her car. She slammed on the brakes and the scent of burning rubber filled the air.
Then she honked at him.
His lips twitched.
Olivia rolled down the window. “Vampire, are you crazy?”
He took his time walking to the passenger side of her vehicle. He climbed in. Stretched out.
“Uh…what are you doing?” Olivia demanded. She pointed to the nondescript building behind him. “Your team is in there.”
“And the woman I want is right here.” He caught her hand, lifted it to his mouth. Pressed a kiss to her wrist. “I’m not letting you go off alone, not with the werewolves out there.” And with the senator ready to close in…
Olivia might think the man was her friend, but Shane held no such illusions.
“Wait…are you saying…you’re…choosing me?”
She seemed stunned. Had she seriously thought he wouldn’t keep protecting her? Now that was rather insulting. “Maybe one day,” he told her quietly, “you’ll choose me, too.”
Olivia blinked those dark, gorgeous eyes of hers, eyes that could take a man to his knees.
“I’d advise against going to your place,” he said and pressed one more kiss to her wrist. She shivered. “They’ll be waiting there. After all, the senator knows where you live. The werewolves won’t even have to bother tracking you. They’ll just be staking out the place.”
She bit her lower lip. “Donald…has always been good to me.”
Donald is a dead man walking. “My place,” he told her. “We’ll be safer there.”
He could see the hesitation in her eyes, but after a few moments, she nodded and slowly pulled her hand from his grasp.
The car accelerated smoothly, and they left the Para Unit behind.
***
From his office, Eric Pate watched the black vehicle drive away. “The game is in motion.”
Behind him, Holly sighed. “People’s lives aren’t part of a game. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
He turned toward her and decided to ignore her question. “Y
ou’re dead certain about the results of Dr. Maddox’s DNA analysis and her blood work?”
“Yes. I don’t make mistakes.” Now she sounded a bit disgruntled because he’d questioned her, but Holly rallied quickly. “One of her parents was human, I’d bet my life on it.”
Olivia Maddox wasn’t the first hybrid he’d come across. She wouldn’t be the last, either. And with the others, their paranormal sides had often been dormant, needing a trigger to emerge.
Blood and fire.
“He triggered her,” Eric said, certain now of the senator’s intent. “If you want to wake a beast, what better place to do it than in Purgatory?”
“But what is he going to do with her now?”
His fingers tapped against his chin. “That’s what Shane will find out for us.”
Hiding Olivia within the Para Unit would have done no good. Other agents—humans—would have just gotten caught in the crossfire when the attack came. Senator Quick had too many powerful friends and far too much pull in the FBI.
Hiding her wasn’t an option, but using her as bait…that certainly was.
Holly raised her brows. “I get that Shane felt like he owed you…but why was that? I mean, if he’s some all-powerful vamp—”
“He’s the strongest vampire I’ve ever met.” And he’d come across more than his share.
“Then how did you convince Shane that the guy actually owed you?”
He remembered a battle on sand that burned, and blood that formed the only river around them.
Before Eric had joined the FBI, he’d been an Army Ranger, working in the Middle East. “I met him on my second tour,” he said, voice soft. He didn’t usually talk about his Ranger days, not with anyone, even Holly. “Detonations were going off all around me. Screams were filling the air. And I thought I was going to die.”
Holly didn’t speak.
“There was a school up ahead. So small, right in the middle of that freaking desert. I could hear the children crying out from inside.”
She flinched.
And he kept remembering. “Shane went to help the children.” He could still hear the explosion. “I don’t even know how the hell he got there, or why he was there, but when the detonation went off, a detonation that should have killed those kids, that fucking insane vamp was right on top of it.” Absorbing the blast.
Nearly getting torn apart.
“Fire can kill a vamp.” And Shane had been willing to run into fire for Olivia. Don’t give her that much of yourself, man. “I helped him.” An exchange of blood in a place where he could feel the cold touch of death. “We both made it out of there.” And Eric …he was mostly alive now because of that change.
Mostly.
“You’re his friend.”
He was. “Yes.”
She walked toward him. Tipped back her head. The smile that crossed her face was sad. “What do you think your friend will do to you if Olivia Maddox dies?”
He already knew. Shane was protective of his allies, but his enemies…he showed them no mercy. “He’ll kill me.”
Chapter Ten
“This isn’t what I expected,” Olivia said as she walked into the lush apartment that overlooked the lights of Seattle. Night had just fallen, but the buildings all around them glowed with illumination.
Shane shut the door behind them. “Let me guess…were you picturing some kind of medieval castle, maybe a dungeon, some restraints?”
Her cheeks flushed.
“Been there, done that.” He stalked toward her. Brushed his hand over her cheek. “Would be willing to do it again in a heartbeat for you.”
She caught his hand. “I don’t understand you.”
His smile flashed, and it was a predatory grin. “That drives you crazy, doesn’t it? Your whole deal is that you have to understand the monsters. But maybe you can’t figure out what makes us all tick. Maybe there are some things you’ll never know.”
His body was so close to hers, and the sensual awareness that he sparked within her just wouldn’t lessen no matter how many times she tried to calm herself down.
Riding with him in the car had been close to torture. He’d filled that small space. Dominated it. Every time he’d shifted even a tiny bit, she’d been hyper aware of him.
“I want to know about you.” And she did. This man had left the FBI behind, and he’d come with her. He kept protecting her, looking out for her. No one had done that before. After she’d lost her mother at eighteen, Olivia had been on her own.
I don’t feel like I’m alone anymore.
He rolled his shoulders, but didn’t pull away from her. “What if you don’t like what you learn?”
“You’re the white knight, the guy who keeps rushing to the rescue.” Not the monster she’d thought. “What’s not to like there?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been feared, rightfully so, for centuries.”
She tightened her hold on him. “You were born a vampire.”
“Do you understand what that means? The bloodlust, the hunger—they were with me, always. I grew up thinking it was normal to track and hunt prey…prey that was human.”
She didn’t let go.
“My father thought it was great sport to hunt humans. Of course, it was more challenging to go after the werewolves. And they tasted better.”
“Shane…”
“That’s what my life was. Death and pain. I was a monster. I am a monster. There are sins on my soul that can never be erased, no matter what I do.”
Atonement. “That’s why you work for the FBI. You’re trying to make up for what you’ve done.”
Now he did pull away. He strode toward the window. Stared out at the night. “A part of me always knew…what I was doing, what I was…it was all wrong. But when someone calls you a fucking god, hell, the power rush you get is too strong to deny.”
He put his hands on the glass window pane.
“We ruled the world then, until I looked around and saw it was a world full of death and pain. The children begged for mercy, the women fled, and the men were in agony.”
She shook her head, trying to shove away the images that his words pushed into her mind.
“My father was the leader. The most powerful vampire in existence, and he didn’t expect an attack to come from the one he trusted above all others.” His laughter held a cold, bitter edge. “Maybe that’s why I was able to take his head. He trusted me too much to expect a betrayal.”
He’d killed his own father? She hurried forward.
He turned to her. “You’re supposed to back away when a man makes a confession like that. When he tells you of the bloodlust and the death, you should be afraid.”
She was. Her breath felt cold in her lungs. “You haven’t hurt me.” Not once.
“Not yet,” he said, his jaw tightening. “My father wanted me to be just like him. There was a village that was trying to resist him, trying to fight back against us. They called us devils, and my father wanted to show them what hell was truly like.” His eyes were cloudy with memories. “I saw the children there. Terrified. And I saw my bloody past…it had to stop.” His lips thinned. “So I stopped it.”
There was pain there, filling the air all around him.
Then he smiled, and it was a chilling sight as his fangs flashed. “I could tell you good things, you know. About how I’ve saved lives. Stopped killers. But the scales never really balance, and I’ve always known, deep inside, that my father was right.”
“Shane…”
“I am just like him. I have the same darkness. It pushes me. It calls to me. It tempts me.” He paused. His eyes narrowed. “Or it did, until something else tempted me more.”
He tempted her. Danger, darkness, a vampire with a past so bloody and tortured. But he tempted her.
“My earliest memory,” she heard herself whisper, “is of being trapped by blood and fire. The fire was closing in on me and the blood…it was on my hands. My feet. I was screaming, but there was no escape for me.
”
He didn’t speak. It was his turn to listen.
“I always knew something bad had happened to me, but I never could break through and figure out just what it had been. When I asked my mother, when I’d tell her about the nightmares that would never stop, she’d just whisper—”
Olivia broke off because now her mother’s whispers made a strange sense to her. And they left her chilled.
“She’d wish that I would have peace,” she finished, voice breaking. “And that the darkness would leave me alone.”
Only it never had. The darkness had been a living, breathing thing inside of her. Whispering sometimes, twisting insidiously within her. And she’d sought out killers, others who must feel that same darkness because she’d wanted to control herself.
Wanted to stop whatever it was that seemed to live in her heart.
Djinn?
Yes.
Her gaze fell to his throat. “I can’t believe Pate just let me go. Isn’t he worried about what I might do?” A few wrong words had sent Holly to the floor.
“I’m not worried,” Shane said softly. “Because you’re strong. Far stronger than you seem to realize.”
His words brought her eyes right back up to his.
“I want you,” he told her, the words stark and hard. “And I will always want you. I look at you, and I fucking feel complete. Like I found something I didn’t even know I was missing.”
She wanted his words to be true. Wanted the strange connection she felt with him to be real.
Because she hadn’t felt that connection with anyone else.
“I won’t let anyone hurt you. Any who comes after you—human, vamp, werewolf—they’ll have to go through me first.”
He sounded so fierce. Her vampire.
She leaned into him. Put her hands on his shoulders. Made her choice. “And anyone who comes after you will have to deal with me.” Because she wanted to see where this would go. Their connection, their desire…where would it take them?
She didn’t care about some fated nonsense. She cared about the way he made her feel.
For so long, she’d felt as if she were the secret freak in the room, even when she was with killers.