by Lara Adrian
Nathan’s words were rough and dark, but his hands were warm and gentle on her as he held her close, keeping her face averted from the carnage. She didn’t want to acknowledge how welcome his touch was in that moment. She meant nothing to him, so feeling his comfort now only added a deeper sting to the shock she was feeling.
She pulled out of his hold on a ragged cry. “It’s him,” she murmured. “I know him.”
Nathan’s black brows crashed together over his stormy eyes. “Who?”
Jordana gestured in the general direction of the victim, too stricken to look again. “That man. I was just talking to him a couple of hours ago.”
Nathan’s scowl deepened. “You talked to him?” His dark voice went from concerned to demanding, almost bordering on suspicious. “You saw him today? Where, Jordana? When?”
“Jordana,” Carys said, walking over now with Rune. “What’s the matter, honey? Are you all right?”
“It’s him. The man I met in the exhibit this afternoon. He was alive earlier today and now he’s—” Jordana’s stomach lurched, choking off her words. Her chest ached with a sense of loss she could hardly reconcile for a stranger she’d known only a few minutes. “I don’t understand how this could happen. Why would anyone want to kill Mr. Cassian?”
A swift, uncertain look passed between Carys and the two Breed males. Even in her distress, Jordana noticed the change in the air.
“Mr. Cassian?” Carys asked gently. “Jordana, that man over there is Cassian Gray.”
When Jordana didn’t react, Nathan added, “La Notte’s owner. Until tonight, no one would admit to having seen the bastard or to knowing where he might be.” He slanted a dark look at Rune. “I guess the Order wasn’t alone in trying to track Cass down.”
The fighter held the warrior’s stare. “Like everyone told you, Cass dropped off-grid for a few days without warning. It wasn’t that unusual for him.”
Nathan grunted and turned his attention to Jordana. “Why was Cass at the museum today—did he tell you that? What exactly did he say to you? What did he want?”
Jordana shook her head, confused. She hadn’t known the club’s proprietor by name, had only glimpsed him once or twice from a distance on those rare occasions when she’d gone with Carys to watch Rune fight.
What she vaguely recalled was a man with a shock of stiff, white-blond hair and black leather clothing bristling with metal studs and buckles. Not the drab-dressed everyman she’d met today.
“There has to be some mistake. I don’t know the man who runs this club. He’s not who I saw in the exhibit. He doesn’t even look like him—”
“It’s Cass,” Nathan insisted. “He’d altered his appearance and stayed out of the public eye, no doubt because he knew the Order was after him. Maybe he did it because someone else was after him too. The one who chased him down and took his head tonight.”
Jordana winced at the reminder. “The man at the museum today wouldn’t have those kind of enemies. He talked to me about sculptors he admired, about art and some of the pieces we have in the collection. He seemed like a decent, nice man—”
“He was a criminal,” Nathan cut in. “More than likely, far worse than a criminal. If I’d seen him anywhere near you, it would have been my blade biting into his neck.”
She stared up into his sternly handsome face, into stormy blue-green eyes that kindled with the faintest embers of amber light. She didn’t know what skewed reality she had to be living in that would make the kind of possessive, violent remark he’d just made seem like a pledge of affection. Certainly not in her reality—the one she’d chosen to retreat back into after she’d let Nathan nearly seduce her in her building’s elevator.
He cared for her about as much as he might care for any of his bed partners here at La Notte’s sex dens. Possibly less.
Jordana forced herself to break his arresting eye contact. “If I’m supposed to be flattered that you would use me as an excuse to murder an innocent civilian, you’re sadly mistaken.”
His thundercloud eyes narrowed on her. “He was no innocent, Jordana. Trust me on that.”
“Trust you?” She scoffed. “I don’t even know you.”
She turned and started walking away, needing space to breathe, to process everything that had happened today. She felt sickened by the death of the man she’d genuinely enjoyed meeting—whoever he truly was. And she couldn’t deny that seeing Nathan again, even under these awful circumstances, had affected her more deeply than she cared to admit.
In spite of how it hurt her to see him at La Notte with another woman so soon after he’d left her, Jordana couldn’t keep her pulse from beating a little harder around him. She couldn’t keep her foolish heart from wishing things had gone differently last night, that they could start over again, beginning with that reckless first kiss.
She hurried her pace, hoping she could round the corner and make it to her vehicle before the weight of everything she was feeling overwhelmed her.
While Carys and Rune stayed back, she heard Nathan’s long strides coming up fast on her heels. “What the hell is that supposed to mean—you don’t even know me?” His already deep voice dropped to a lower, arrestingly intimate tone. “Seems to me we got pretty familiar last night.”
She stopped abruptly and wheeled around on him, struggling to keep her voice controlled enough so that only he would hear. “Please, don’t remind me about last night.”
He halted where he stood, his square-cut jaw rising a notch. “You’re upset with me. Because of what happened between us in the elevator, or the fact that Bentley-Squire interrupted us and we didn’t get the chance to finish what we started?”
Jordana exhaled a sharp, outraged laugh. “I wish last night had never happened.”
“That makes two of us,” he said quietly, his face hard and unapologetic.
So he regretted it too? God help her, but she didn’t want to feel wounded by that admission. She wanted to feel only anger that he could bring her to the crest of something so incredible—something she’d shared with no other man before him—then turn around and slake his need on one of the trained professionals at the club.
Jordana spotted the leather-clad brunette sex worker near the back door of the building, one of several La Notte employees who’d since come out to gawk at the crime scene. She couldn’t help picturing Nathan’s hands on the female.
Equally painful to imagine was the thought of what the brunette might have done for him to earn the fistful of money Jordana had seen the woman tuck away after Nathan left one of the club’s private BDSM dens.
“I never should’ve kissed you,” Jordana murmured. How much simpler would her life be if she’d just stayed on the safe, secure little path that had been laid out for her?
How much happier would she be if she’d never let herself reach for something reckless, something as dangerously seductive as the Breed male standing before her now?
“I never should’ve let you touch me, Nathan. I wish I could take it all back.”
A low growl escaped his throat as he reached for her. She pulled back, avoiding the contact. “No, don’t. Stay away from me.”
He studied her for a moment, his eyes locked on her. “Tell me you really mean that, and I will.”
“I mean it.” She forced herself to hold steady, in spite of the widening ache in her breast. She had to do this. For her own sanity, she had to put him out of her mind and out of her life. “I don’t want to see you again, Nathan. I wish I’d never met you.”
He said nothing. Just stood before her in agonizing silence, his inscrutable gaze seeming to cut straight through her, as cold and unfeeling as a blade. His face was unmoving, impossible to decipher if he was relieved or insulted by her rejection.
The walls she’d so naively thought she might pull down were in full force as she looked at him now, perhaps rising even taller than they had been before. Nathan wasn’t someone who let others in easily; she’d sensed that about him early on.
&nb
sp; Now that she was pushing him away, he would shut her out completely. And she knew once he did, there would be no getting back inside.
One of his teammates—Aric Chase’s best friend, Rafe—called to Nathan from back at the crime scene. “Captain, heads up. Squad from Joint Urban Security is en route from downtown. This place’ll be crawling with JUSTIS officers in less than ten minutes.”
Nathan acknowledged the report with a vague lift of his hand. In flat, maddening silence, he stared at Jordana for what seemed an eternity.
Then he simply turned away from her, walking back to his waiting crew of warriors and the grisly reality of his dark world.
NATHAN LEANED BACK AGAINST THE ORDER’S PATROL VEHICLE next to Rafe, trying to pretend he wasn’t brooding from his confrontation with Jordana as he idly watched a team of six officers from the Joint Urban Security Taskforce Initiative Squad process the crime scene outside La Notte.
Shit, he was worse than brooding. He was pissed off and bewildered.
She wished she’d never met him? She had no idea. The best thing she could do for him was take her haughty indignation and all-too-tempting body and stay far the hell out of his way.
Out of his head.
Out of his life.
And the fact that he was stewing over the female an hour after she’d gone only jacked his frustration higher. He wasn’t used to letting anything, or anyone, get under his skin. His Hunter training had conditioned him to ignore distractions, to dismiss anything that might sway him from his course. Any obstacle in his path was either shoved aside or trampled beneath him, left behind and instantly forgotten.
It was how he survived. It was how he came through the fire of his childhood, his mind and body equally honed, his heart as ruthless as a blade.
He was a master of control, and yet Jordana Gates had somehow begun to chip away at that impenetrable foundation. Like a small trickle of water through a mountain of stone, she’d managed to find a breach and slip inside.
Try as he might to put her out of his thoughts, to close himself off to the desire he felt for her—to deny his maddening need to possess her, now that he’d had the first taste—he couldn’t get her out of his head.
The best thing she could have done for him was storm off in justifiable fury, determined that she never see him again.
And yet he brooded.
He stewed.
Told himself to let her run back to her safe life with Elliott Bentley-Squire and consider it a bullet dodged.
He tried to pretend that every muscle in his body wasn’t twitchy with the hunger to go after Jordana right now and take her down beneath him, show her pleasure like no other man ever would.
With more effort than he cared to admit, Nathan wrestled his focus back to the situation at hand. While most of the combined human/Breed JUSTIS unit stood around trying to look important as they made phone calls and manned crime scene blockades set up around the club, they’d tasked one of their junior members with the unpleasant job of photographing the evidence. The twenty-something human, an obvious rookie, had already vomited twice since his team arrived an hour ago.
Rafe chuckled beside Nathan as the young officer butterfingered his camera and nearly dropped it into the blood pool surrounding Cass’s headless body. “Twenty bucks says the new guy doesn’t make it back to his squad car before he passes out.”
As Rafe spoke, Elijah strode over with Jax to join them. “Now, that’s just mean, picking on the human.” Eli grinned. “I got forty on the Breed detective over by the club door. He’s been trying to hold his shit together, taking statements from the staff and fighters, but that vampire’s gonna need an assist before the kid does. I give him about two minutes before he goes all fangy standing around this much spilled hemoglobin.”
Jax grunted. “Hell, we don’t get out of here soon, I’m about to sprout fangs myself.”
Although the blood was dead and no longer viable to any of their kind as sustenance, there was hardly a Breed in existence who could ignore the prolonged sensory torment of the lake of blood surrounding Cassian Gray’s remains. Even Nathan felt the throb of his lengthening canines and the sharpening of his pupils as he stared at the headless body across the dark, wet pavement.
Then again, blood thirst was only part of his problem tonight.
The bigger instigator to his dangerous mood was more than likely tucked away safe and sound in another male’s arms right about now. Nathan growled at the thought.
The unbridled sound of aggression drew his team’s gazes, Rafe’s more questioning than that of the others. “You okay, Captain?”
“No,” Nathan muttered. Refusing to acknowledge the reason for his lingering discontent, he jerked his chin in the direction of the crime scene. “Instead of putting Cassian Gray’s ass in an interrogation cell back at Headquarters, I’m watching JUSTIS mop up our best potential source of intel on Reginald Crowe. Hell, Cass might have been our best source of intel on the Atlanteans themselves as well.”
Rafe’s nod was grim. “True, but this slaying did answer one question. How many deaths by decapitation do we see on average?”
Eli arched a brow. “Not counting Crowe’s little helicopter blade mishap on that rooftop in D.C. last week? Exactly none.”
“Someone was making a statement here,” Jax suggested.
Nathan had to agree. “As we suspected, Cass wasn’t human. Whoever killed him obviously knew that too.”
Rafe met his gaze in the dark. “But who would want Cass dead—Opus Nostrum? Or someone Cass might’ve crossed in his business dealings at La Notte? No doubt the man took a lot of secrets with him tonight.”
“Could be whoever wanted him dead had a secret of their own to protect,” Eli added.
Nathan stared at the carnage across the way, considering all of the disturbing possibilities where Cassian Gray’s murder was concerned. “Someone knew what he was and how to kill him. This was an execution. But even so, that doesn’t tell us why.”
And there was another question still gnawing at Nathan.
What the hell was Cassian Gray doing at the art museum today? That the bastard had gone there within hours of his being killed was suspicious enough. But to have gone there and merely chatted with Jordana about art, when he was so concerned with being found out he’d changed his appearance and been MIA from his club and staff for nearly a week?
What business did he have at the museum? It didn’t make sense that he would spend precious time—not to mention risk coming out of hiding—to go there today.
Nor did it sit well that Jordana was evidently the last person to see Cass alive.
What did he want with her? Because Nathan was damned certain it wasn’t coincidence that put the elusive club owner at Jordana’s exhibit. He’d had a reason to go there. She may not realize it, but Cassian Gray left something with her today. He did something, said something—something Nathan was determined to find out.
And if he was looking for that answer, what was to say Cass’s killer wasn’t doing the same thing?
For all he knew, Jordana could be in the crosshairs already.
Holy fuck. If Cass had put Jordana in harm’s way, intentionally or otherwise—
A murderous flare of rage shot through Nathan at the thought, a deep protective instinct that he had no right to feel where the Darkhaven female was concerned. Still, the ferocity of his emotion stunned him.
But his fury was self-directed too.
He’d let Jordana walk away from him tonight. Hell, he’d all but shoved her away.
Bad enough he’d let jealousy and stung pride rule his warrior’s logic in neglecting to debrief a possible intel source. But in allowing Jordana to leave the crime scene, he’d left her completely unprotected, should Cass’s killer trace the Atlantean’s steps back to his visit to the museum.
That logical part of him that had been missing earlier tonight tried now to remind him that Jordana likely wasn’t without a Breed male to keep her safe from imminent harm. She had
her de facto mate to protect her—a choice she’d willingly made last night.
As if Elliott Bentley-Squire were capable of looking after a woman like Jordana.
She needed a better male, a stronger male. The kind of male who would throw down his life for her in an instant.
The kind of male who would have leapt on Nathan last night and pounded him into a bloody pulp for the liberties he’d taken with her in that elevator.
Nathan snarled low under his breath. Told himself the current of urgency coursing through him was more about protecting a potential Order asset than assigning himself as a personal bodyguard to the woman he craved so fiercely, so unwelcomely.
The woman who just a short while ago had insisted she wanted nothing more to do with him, and rightly so.
As the JUSTIS officers cleared the crime scene and packed up the body, Nathan ordered his team to report back to base. Then he pivoted away and began to stalk across the dark pavement.
Rafe jogged after him. “What’s going on?”
“Jordana,” Nathan stated simply. “She was the last person to see Cass alive.”
“Jesus,” Rafe muttered. “Are you sure? How do you know that?”
“She told me. Cass showed up at the museum this afternoon. She spoke with the bastard.”
Rafe frowned. “About what? Why the hell would he go there?”
Nathan kept walking. “That’s what I intend to find out.”
“You mean we,” Rafe said. “As in the Order. As in we call this in to Headquarters and let them decide how best to proceed with the female.” When Nathan didn’t respond, Rafe grabbed his shoulder. “Jordana Gates is a civilian and a potential intelligence lead now, Nathan. You know the protocol on something like this.”
Yeah, he did.
He knew Order procedure and protocol inside and out. Hell, he’d lived and breathed it for most of his life. But that didn’t keep his feet from moving in the opposite direction of what he knew was the right and proper thing for a warrior to do.