by Lara Adrian
“Carys Chase is not like you, Jordana,” Elliott said quietly as they crossed the room. “You must see that, don’t you, darling? She’s too wild. Reckless. Whether that’s due to her unusual Breed genetic makeup or an overly indulgent upbringing, I can only guess.”
“Indulgent?” Jordana nearly choked on a laugh. “Have you met her father, Sterling Chase? Or her mother, Tavia, who’s also Breed? Carys has always been held to exacting standards by her parents.” That was one of the things that had made Jordana and her friend so close. Although they seemed very different on the surface, Carys being a bit too adventurous and Jordana suffering from chronic overcautiousness, the two young women had much in common. “Carys and I may be different in some ways, but that’s what I happen to enjoy so much about her. Is being a little wild and reckless such a bad thing?”
She’d said it playfully, a small volley of flirtation in Elliott’s direction, just to test the waters. His mouth flattened and his blue eyes leveled on her from his sidelong look. “Wild and reckless usually gets someone hurt. You’re smarter than that, Jordana.” He reached over and gave her nose a light tap of his fingertip. “And that’s what I happen to enjoy so much about you.”
“Counselor,” called a jovial, elderly man who chaired one of Boston’s biggest banks. In addition to being one of Elliott’s human clients, he was also one of the museum’s most generous donors. His contributions to Jordana’s exhibit had helped her add ten more pieces to the sculpture collection.
“Counselor, good to see you!” the old man exclaimed, from beside his group of equally prominent colleagues representing the elite of both Breed and human society. “Come here and give us an excuse to talk to your lovely fiancée about Italian sculptors.”
“It would be my pleasure, Mr. Bonneville.” Elliott chuckled and steered Jordana toward the men. She forced a pleasant smile, allowing Elliott to take her hand in his warm, firm grasp as he practically pulled her along beside him. Dutifully, she shook hands with the banker and his colleagues, and with the other patrons who soon came to join their little circle.
Jordana smiled and laughed at all the appropriate times, hoping no one could tell that her heart was now battering around in her breast like a caged bird that would find a way out or die trying.
At the urging of Elliott and her growing audience, she regaled them with a discussion of her favorite works in the exhibit by Italian masters Bernini, Canova, Cornacchini, and other lesser-known artists.
God knew she needed the distraction.
Because if she didn’t have something keeping her feet rooted to the floor, Jordana was afraid she might be tempted to do something really wild and reckless.
She might walk out of the place—out of her perfect life—and never look back.
THAT NEXT MORNING, NATHAN AND HIS TEAM SAT AROUND THE large table in the conference room of the Order’s command center in Boston, reviewing their failure to locate Cassian Gray and putting together a new plan for their patrol set to begin again at sundown. Boston’s district chief, Sterling Chase, had every right to hand Nathan and his men their asses for returning to base empty-handed last night, but he seemed distracted today, his head not quite in the game.
Unusual for the experienced warrior who had twenty years with the Order and another few decades of Breed law enforcement under his belt before that.
Tavia Chase, Sterling’s mate and a member of the Order in her own right, was also present in the morning’s mission review and also less than fully engaged. She was seated with her spine rigid against the back of her chair. Her arms lay crossed in front of her, but the fingers of one hand drummed ceaselessly on her toned biceps. Her green gaze was distant, shadowed with a troubled preoccupation.
Had Aric and Carys brought last night’s anger home with them? Nathan was by no means an expert on reading emotion or weighing familial strife, but he had to wonder if that was the problem here today for Chase and Tavia.
Aric hadn’t betrayed his sister to their parents; that much Nathan did know.
The younger warrior had gone straight to the weapons room of the command center to work off steam after Nathan and the others brought him back to Headquarters. No doubt, he would be at it for a while, not only for the way he’d been frothing but also because Aric wasn’t part of the team’s morning conference.
Fresh out of training and not yet a full-fledged member of the Order, in a few weeks he would find his own squad of warriors in Seattle, when he was scheduled to report to Dante Malebranche, Rafe’s father, the head of that West Coast command center.
When the heavy mood in the room lengthened, Chase finally cleared his throat and brought the meeting back on task. “When we wrap up here, I have to call Lucan Thorne in D.C. and tell him we came up empty on Cassian Gray last night.” Chase’s shrewd blue eyes swept each warrior at the table, pausing the longest on Nathan. “I know I don’t need to tell any of you that the Order’s founder does not like failure. I don’t fucking like failure much either. But I hate excuses even more. So I’m not going to ask how the best team I ever trained—my most effective squad leader—pulled a patrol before either seeing it through to completion or running full-stop into daybreak.”
Neither Nathan nor his comrades spoke. Even if Chase had demanded to know what had caused the mission to search for Cass to be aborted, none of them would have thrown Aric under that bus.
Besides, Nathan agreed with his commander: Blame solved nothing. And the truth was, Nathan felt equally culpable. He’d gone easily enough to the museum reception after Aric.
And while he was admitting damning truths and personal derelictions of duty, Nathan had to count among his the fact that his curiosity about Jordana Gates hadn’t ended when he returned to Headquarters with his team.
While Aric had vented his fury in the weapons room, Nathan had spent several hours online and in the Breed nation’s International Identification Database, researching Jordana’s apparent date at the event.
Or, rather, her imminent mate, Elliott Bentley-Squire.
Nathan had delved into every documented fact and figure he could find—all told, hours of digging. But he’d found no reason to dislike the wealthy, socially acceptable male.
Nor did he care to acknowledge that he’d been looking for cause to despise the trusted friend of Jordana’s father, simply for the way she had let Bentley-Squire touch her, even though her eyes hadn’t seemed able to break Nathan’s gaze from the moment they first saw each other at the party.
The look in Jordana’s eyes haunted him, even now. As if she’d been silently pleading for him to rescue her … to claim her.
Until her would-be mate noticed her distraction and Jordana had denied even knowing who Nathan was.
If he needed a reason to convince himself that beautiful, tempting Jordana Gates was a bad idea, certainly this was it. Nathan preferred his sexual dalliances to be uncomplicated, impersonal. A biological satisfaction of something his body needed in order to perform at its peak.
The way he viewed it, fucking was no different than feeding.
And he preferred to do neither close to the place he called home.
“We did learn something about Cassian Gray last night,” Nathan said, bringing his thoughts back in line where they belonged. “Cass’s office at La Notte was orderly, too much so. Anything of value to someone looking into him or his interests had been removed.”
To the left of Nathan at the table, Rafe smirked. “His private apartment had been vacated too, except for an interesting collection of restraints and spiked collars in the bedroom.”
Elijah and Jax chuckled along with Rafe, but Nathan remained serious, glad to put his mind back on the trail of their quarry. “Cass already knows he’s being pursued. His employees at the club said we’d just missed him, but it’s probable they were lying to us. My guess is he cleared out of there days ago.”
“I wonder if Cass realized he’d been outed the moment Kellan touched him.” This from Tavia, her first comment of the e
ntire morning. “He might be fully aware that the Order suspects he’s not human and would come after him soon enough.”
Nathan nodded with the rest of the warriors around the table. Kellan Archer was recently reunited with the Order and since mated to Mira, one of the few female squad captains. The couple had been at La Notte on a mission of their own no more than a week ago, when Kellan and Cassian Gray became embroiled in a brief altercation. Kellan pushed the club owner, tactile contact that had roused the Breed male’s unique psychic gift to read human intention with a touch.
Cassian Gray had been a blank slate.
Cass wasn’t Breed; there was no mistaking that fact. But Kellan had realized at once the man wasn’t human either.
He hadn’t been sure what else Cass could be—no one had been—until a few nights ago in Washington, D.C., at a global peace summit event that had ended in an act of terror meant to sabotage the gathering and blow hundreds of Breed lives away in the process.
Lucan Thorne and most of the Order’s elder members included.
The individual who’d tried to carry out the plot under the banner of a shadowy organization called Opus Nostrum hadn’t been human or Breed.
No, Reginald Crowe had been something else entirely: Atlantean.
Known publicly around the world as a billionaire business magnate with holdings all over the globe, Crowe was, in actuality, one of a powerful race of immortals that had existed on Earth unknown for millennia. They had been as much a secret to the human population as the Breed.
And now the Order understood the Atlanteans to be an even greater threat than any enemy they’d ever faced before.
“It’s been three days since Crowe’s death and it’s still trending on all the news outlets around the world,” Jax said, spinning one of his hira-shuriken stars on the conference table. “If Cass is Atlantean, the killing of one of his own by the Order would be enough to send him to ground.”
Eli exhaled a drawled curse. “Unfortunately, Crowe’s death—and all the shit that went down before that—was a little too public to be contained.”
The ultraviolet bomb at the summit had been only one of Crowe’s crimes in his role as Opus Nostrum’s leader. Before plotting to derail the gathering and ash every Breed dignitary in the building, Crowe’s cabal had arranged for the murder of a brilliant human scientist and that man’s uncle, a senior member of the Global Nations Council, the governing arm responsible for ensuring peaceful relations between the vampire and human populations of the world.
“It’s true, we’re at a disadvantage right now,” Chase interjected. “The only good to come of the exposure of Crowe’s actions and his death is the fact that now the public, Breed and man, is united in their fear of Opus Nostrum. Only the Order is aware of the Atlanteans and the bigger threat Crowe divulged before he died.”
The threat of a brewing global war being plotted at the hands of the Atlanteans and their exiled queen.
“The Order has already waged a battle—and won—against a sinister member of our own race,” Tavia murmured quietly. “To think that another, more insidious enemy has been lurking in the shadows all this time …” She slowly shook her head, unwilling or unable to finish the grave direction of her thoughts.
“And we’ll win again, love.” Chase reached over to stroke his mate’s cheek, then he turned his steely, determined gaze on Nathan and the others. “Lucan is making a very public show of working with human and Breed law enforcement to root out Opus Nostrum. However, the Order’s primary mission is something far more crucial, more covert. If what Crowe said is true, then everything we’ve been through to this point in time—including our hard-won battle with Dragos—was merely preparation for the war still to come.”
“If Cassian Gray knows anything about Crowe’s threat,” Tavia added, “worse, if he’s part of it, he has to be contained. We can’t let him get away.”
“He won’t,” Chase assured her. “Lucan has arranged for each of Crowe’s former wives—his widow and the five exes who came before her—to be quietly interviewed at the D.C. headquarters.”
Rafe grunted, his mouth spreading into a wide grin. “Invitations to tea, followed by a friendly game of twenty questions and a mind-scrub?”
Chase slid him a wry look. “Something like that, yeah. If any of the women who knew Crowe best have any knowledge about his true nature or his dealings as part of Opus Nostrum, we’ll find out soon enough.”
“As for Cass,” Nathan said, “we’ll find him too. We’ll bring him in. His employees, his known allies and associates—we’ll leave no lead unturned. Tell Lucan, neither Cass nor his secrets will elude us for long.”
Chase gave him a tight nod. “Excellent,” he said, and dropped his open palms to the table in finality. He rose from his seat, and the rest of the group stood up with him. “If there’s nothing else, Tavia and I have some personal business of our own to contend with this morning.”
“It’s Carys,” Tavia volunteered to Nathan and the other warriors. “She’s moving out. Today.”
“Moving out,” Nathan murmured guardedly, surprised by the news, though surely not as surprised as the young woman’s parents must be. “That seems like a sudden decision.”
As he spoke, he caught the uncomfortable looks exchanged between his teammates as all three made a hasty exit from the conference room.
The bastards.
He’d punish them later for abandoning him to this unwanted drama.
“Carys says she’s been considering this for a while now,” Chase replied. “But I know my daughter, and she’s holding something back. I’ve already asked Aric if he knew of any reason she might be upset about something—or upset with us—but he’s been no more forthcoming than her.”
Nathan grunted. “Do you know where she’s going?”
Tavia answered him. “She’s moving in with Jordana at her apartment across town. Nathan, do you know anything about this?”
He gave a slight shake of his head. “It’s the first I’m hearing of it.” The answer was as close to the truth as he could slice it without betraying the sibling conflict of the night before.
“I realize Carys is an adult, and she’s free to live her own life,” Tavia reasoned aloud. “She’s always been impulsive, but this just doesn’t seem like her. More than that, I don’t know if I’m ready to let go of her,” she added, turning a baleful look on Chase. “I know, I’d never truly be ready for this day to come, but especially not now, knowing dangerous people like Cassian Gray are skulking around, unaccounted for. Who knows what he or his cage-fighting thugs might do if they realized one of the Order’s children—a female, no less—was living somewhere in the city away from our protection?”
A growl vibrated in Chase’s chest now. “I’ll forbid her to leave.”
Tavia sighed. “You can’t and you know it. Trying to force her will only make her dig her heels in harder. Carys is a headstrong young woman—not that either of her parents should be surprised by that.”
“No,” Chase replied, his eyes gentle on his mate, even if his tone remained firm. “But if she’s leaving because she’s got a head full of steam over something, or if she’s in some kind of trouble—”
Tavia shook her head. “If she’s upset or in any trouble, you know she’ll only try to shield us from worrying about her. Nathan, what do you think? Are we being too protective if we try to make her stay?”
Fuck. How he’d found himself in the role of family mediator, Nathan had no bloody idea.
But it was difficult not to be moved by Chase and Tavia’s obvious love and concern for their child, even if Carys was a full-grown woman, twenty years old. She was stronger than most later-generation Breed males, and more than capable of taking care of herself.
“You raised her to be independent—Aric too. If Carys feels she’s ready to live on her own, she’s going to do it. No matter what anyone says or thinks. But if you’ll sleep better knowing my team and I will keep a close eye on her, consider it done.�
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“Thank you, Nathan,” Tavia said, exhaling her relief while Chase gathered his mate close and gave Nathan a brief nod of appreciation for his offer. The three of them exited the conference room to the corridor outside. They paused there, and Tavia lifted her head from where it rested against Chase’s shoulder. “I still think it can’t hurt to talk to her one more time, see if I can persuade her to change her mind.”
Chase grinned. “Your powers of persuasion may work flawlessly on me, love, but good luck dealing with your daughter. And you’d better work fast. She’s upstairs now, packing up her things with Jordana.”
Nathan stood there as the couple excused themselves and strolled away hand in hand.
Jordana Gates was there right now, upstairs in the estate. Helping Carys collect her belongings, a task that would likely keep Jordana under the same roof as Nathan for the next couple of hours at least.
Christ.
He pivoted abruptly and stalked down the corridor in the opposite direction of Chase and Tavia, toward the passage that would lead him to the weapons room.
It was about as far away from the living quarters of the mansion as he could get. A few hours of physical training was just what he needed. Hell, the way his blood was churning through his veins now, he might not come up for air until the night’s patrol was ready to head out.
With any luck, by the time he surfaced, Carys and her new roommate would be long gone.
JORDANA BLEW OUT A SIGH AS SHE CAME TO A STOP IN A LONG, empty corridor—one of many confusing arteries in the Chases’ sprawling estate.
Had Carys said to turn left-left-right-left once she was in the Order’s command center wing of the mansion, or left-right-left-left?
Shit.
A simple quest to fetch more packing tape for her friend had now delivered Jordana deep into the warriors’ domain. It wasn’t like she’d wanted to be there. Not when the odds of encountering Nathan in that part of the mansion seemed a bit too likely for her peace of mind.