by Lara Adrian
“Who are you?” the man croaked, the whites of his eyes growing wider as he struggled—and failed—to get loose. “Please, let me go.”
“Tell me where she is, and maybe I won’t kill you.”
“Please!” the man wailed. “Please, don’t hurt me!”
Brock chuckled darkly, then his acute hearing picked up the sound of rushing footsteps, moving stealthily behind the butcher tables and equipment in the adjacent room. He glanced up … just in time to see the glint of a steel pistol barrel trained on him.
The shot erupted, shattering the office window and ripping into the flesh of his shoulder.
Brock roared, not from pain but fury.
He swung his gaze on the bastard who shot him, pinning the human with the fiery amber light of his eyes, which had transformed from their normal dark brown to the molten color of his other, more lethal nature. Brock curled his lips back off his teeth and fangs and bellowed in rage.
There was a high-pitched shriek as the man holding the gun turned tail and ran.
“Oh, Christ!” wailed the wheezing human whom Brock still held fast by the throat. “I do nothing to her—I swear! Bitch broke my nose, but I didn’t touch her. G-Gresa,” he sputtered, lifting his hand to point in the direction his buddy had fled. “He shot her, not me.”
At that unwelcome newsflash, Brock’s fingers tightened around the fragile human windpipe. “She’s been shot? Tell me where the fuck she is. Now!”
“T-the chiller,” he gasped. “Oh, shit. Please don’t kill me!”
Brock squeezed punishingly harder, then tossed the blubbering son of a bitch against the far wall. The human cried out in pain, then dropped in a sniveling heap on the concrete floor. “You’d better pray she’s all right,” Brock said, “or you’re gonna wish I had killed you just now.”
Jenna huddled on the floor of the large walk-in refrigerator, her teeth chattering, body shivering in the cold.
Outside the sealed steel door, loud noises sounded. Heavy crashes, men shouting … the abrupt crack of gunfire and the bright clatter of breaking glass. Then a roar so intense and deadly, it jerked her head upright just as it was starting to become too weighty to keep lifted, her eyelids growing too difficult to hold open.
She listened, hearing only silence lengthening now.
Someone neared the cold cell that held her. She didn’t need to hear the thud of approaching footsteps to know that someone was there. As chill as it was inside, the blast of icy air coming from the other side of the locked door was arctic.
The latch gave a snick of protest in the instant before the entire steel panel was ripped from its hinges on a deafening metallic squeal. Steam poured out of the opening, shrouding a massive, black-clad mountain of a man.
No, not a man, she realized in dazed astonishment.
A vampire.
Brock.
His lean face was so stark, she hardly recognized him. Huge fangs gleamed white behind the broad mouth that was drawn grim and furious. His breath sawed in and out between his lips, and behind a dark pair of wraparound sunglasses, twin coals blazed with a heat Jenna felt as surely as a touch when he scanned the fogged space and found her slumped and shivering in the corner.
Jenna didn’t want to feel the rush of relief that swamped her as he strode inside and dropped down onto his haunches beside her. She didn’t want to trust the feeling that said he was a friend, someone to help her. Someone she needed, in that moment. Maybe the only person who could help her.
She started to tell him she was okay, but her voice was thready and weak. His ember-bright eyes seared her through the veil of his dark shades. He glanced down and hissed when he saw her wounded thigh and the blood that had soaked the leg of her jeans and formed a small pool beneath her.
“Don’t talk,” he said, stripping off his black leather gloves and pressing his fingers against both sides of her neck. His touch was light but comforting, seeming to warm her from the inside out. The chill drifted away from her, taking the pain of her gunshot wound with it. “You’re going to be all right now, Jenna. I’m gonna get you out of here.”
He stripped off his black duster and wrapped it around her shoulders. Jenna sighed as the heat from his body and the scent of him—leather and spice and strong, deadly male—enveloped her. As he leaned back, she noticed that a bullet hole had torn through the beefy round of his shoulder.
“You’re bleeding, too,” she murmured, more alarmed by his injury than by the thought that her rescuer was a vampire.
He shrugged off her concern. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll live. It takes more than that to slow down one of my kind. You, however …”
The way he said it, the grave look that ran across his face as his shaded eyes drifted to her bleeding thigh, seemed almost accusatory.
“Come on,” he said, reaching out to gently scoop her into his arms. “I’ve got you now.”
He carried her out of the refrigerated room like she was nothing but feathers in his arms. At five foot eight and fit, a tomboy from the time she took her first steps, Jenna had never been the type to be toted around like some kind of fragile fairy princess. As a former cop, she’d never expected that from a man, nor wanted it.
She had always been the protector, the first one into danger. She hated that she was so vulnerable now, but Brock’s solid arms felt so good underneath her, she couldn’t muster the will to be offended. She held on tight as he strode through the small plant, past the grisly meat hangers and more than one broken, lifeless person lying on the floor.
Jenna turned her head away and buried her face in Brock’s muscular chest as they cleared the last room of the plant and exited to the outside. It was dusk on the street, the snow-packed alleyway and crouching buildings bathed in the darkening blue of evening.
As Brock stepped off the stoop, a sleek black SUV rolled up from a cross street. It came to a stop at the curb and Kade jumped out of the backseat.
“Ah, fuck,” Alex’s mate growled. “I smell blood.”
“She’s been shot,” Brock said, his deep voice grave.
Kade stepped closer. “You okay?” he asked her, his light gray eyes taking on a faint yellow light in the gathering darkness. Jenna nodded her reply, watching as the points of his lengthening fangs glinted behind his upper lip. “Niko and Renata are with me,” he told Brock. “What’s the situation inside?”
Brock grunted, dark humor beneath the dangerous tone of his voice. “Messy.”
“Figures,” Kade said, quirking a wry look at him. “You don’t look so good yourself, my man. Nice hit to the shoulder. We need to get Jenna back to the compound before she loses any more blood. Renata’s behind the wheel of the Rover. She can take her in while the rest of us clean up inside.”
“The human is my responsibility,” Brock said, his chest vibrating against Jenna’s ear. “She stays with me. I will bring her to the compound.”
Jenna caught the look of curiosity that flashed across Kade’s face at Brock’s statement. He narrowed his eyes but said nothing as Brock strode past him to the idling SUV, Jenna carried lightly in his arms.
CHAPTER
Six
How we doing?” Renata asked Brock from behind the wheel of the black Rover as the vehicle sped out of South Boston on a course for the Order’s compound. Her green eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, slender dark brows knit in a frown. “Our ETA’s about fifteen minutes out. Everything okay back there?”
“Yeah,” Brock replied, glancing down to where Jenna lay, resting quietly across his lap in the backseat. He had sliced off one of the seatbelts and tied it around her thigh as a tourniquet, hoping it would help stanch the blood loss. “She’s hanging in.”
Her eyes were closed, her lips slightly parted and tinged with blue from the cold she’d been subjected to inside the meat chiller. Her body still trembled under the cover of his leather duster, though he guessed her shuddering was more in reaction to shock than any amount of discomfort. His Breed talent was making sure of
that. With one palm cupped around her nape, the other stroking her temple, he drew Jenna’s pain into himself.
Renata cleared her throat pointedly as she watched him in the mirror. “What about you, big guy? Hell of a lot of blood back there. You sure you wouldn’t rather drive and I’ll look after her until we get to the compound? Say the word and I’ll pull over. Won’t take but a minute.”
“Keep driving. Situation’s under control back here,” Brock said, although he wondered if Niko’s shrewd Breedmate would buy it, given that his growled reply was spoken through gritted teeth and fully extended fangs.
It had been hard to contain his reaction to Jenna bleeding when he first found her inside the building. Now that he was trapped in close confines with her, feeling the heat of her spilling blood through the leather of his duster, smelling its coppery fragrance, and hearing the low thud of each heartbeat that pushed still more blood from her wound, Brock was living a private hell in the back of the SUV.
He was Breed, and there was none among his kind who could resist the pull of fresh human blood. It didn’t help him any that the last time he’d fed had been … hell, he wasn’t even sure. Probably pushing a week, which would have been bad even in the best of circumstances. And these were hardly the best of circumstances.
Brock focused all his effort on pulling Jenna’s pain. Easier to keep his mind off his hunger that way. It also helped keep him from noticing how soft her skin was, and how the curves of her body fit so nicely against him.
The absorbed pain of her injury—and the slighter irritation of his own—was the only thing that kept his body from having yet another sort of reaction to her, as well. Even then, he couldn’t totally ignore the uncomfortable tightness of his fatigues, or the way the light flutter of her pulse against his fingertips where they rested against her nape made him yearn to put his mouth against her instead.
To taste her, in all the ways a man could crave a woman.
It took a great deal of effort to shake the thought from his mind. Jenna was a mission, that’s all. And she was human, with the fragility and short shelf life to go along with it. Although if he was being honest with himself, he’d be the first to admit that he had long preferred mortal females over their sisters who were born Breedmates.
When it came to romantic entanglements, he tried to keep things casual. Nothing too permanent. Nothing that might last long enough for him to let down a woman who had grown to trust him.
Yeah, he’d already been there, done that. And he damn well had the guilt and self-loathing to prove it. No desire to go down that particular stretch of road ever again.
Before his memories could drag him toward the shadows of his past failings, Brock glanced up and saw the gated entrance of the Order’s compound looming ahead. Renata announced their arrival to Gideon on her hands-free headset, and as the Rover rolled to a stop at the tall iron gate, it unlocked and swung open to welcome them inside.
“Gideon says the infirmary is prepped and waiting for us,” she said as she drove to the fleet garage in back.
Brock grunted in response, hardly able to speak now for the crowding presence of his fangs. The whole back section of the Rover was bathed in amber, the glow of his transformed eyes throwing off light like a bonfire even from behind the dark lenses of his shades.
Renata parked the vehicle inside the large hangar, then jogged around to help him get Jenna out of the backseat and into the elevator that would take them down from street level to the compound headquarters belowground. Jenna roused as the doors closed and the hiss of the hydraulics went into action.
“Put me down,” she mumbled, struggling a bit in Brock’s arms as though she was annoyed with the assistance. “I’m not in pain. I can stand up by myself. I can walk—”
“No, you can’t,” he said, cutting her off, his words terse and rasping. “Your body is in shock. Your leg needs tending. You won’t be walking anywhere.”
Through the daze of her lingering shock, Jenna glowered at him, but kept her arms linked around his neck as the elevator came to a stop at the compound below. Brock stepped out, walking briskly. Renata followed, the lug-soles of her combat boots thudding in counterpoint to the soft, wet patter of blood that dripped to the floor from Jenna’s wound.
As they rounded a curve in the corridor that would take them to the infirmary, Lucan met them in the passageway. He stopped dead in his tracks, feet braced apart, hands fisting at his sides. Brock could just make out the subtle flaring of the Gen One’s nostrils as the scent of fresh blood traveled the corridor.
Lucan’s eyes zeroed in on the bleeding human, their gray color flashing with sparks of light, pupils narrowing swiftly to catlike slivers. “Holy hell.”
“Yeah,” Brock drawled. “Gunshot wound to the right thigh, .45-caliber round with no sign of exit. We tied it off, but she’s lost a damned lot of blood between here and the place in Southie where I found her.”
“No shit,” Lucan said, his fangs clearly visible now, twin points gleaming as he spoke. He grated out a harsh curse. “Go on, then. They’re waiting for her in the infirmary.”
Brock gave the Order’s leader a grim nod as he continued past him. In the infirmary, Gideon and Tess had prepared an operating table for Jenna. Gideon’s face went a bit pale at the sight of her, and when he clamped his jaws together, a muscle jerked in his lean cheek.
“Set her down right here,” Tess said from beside the surgery table, jumping in when Gideon, the otherwise calm and collected Breed male who’d stitched up his fair share of combat wounds for the other warriors, seemed at a loss now that the patient in question was human and leaking red cells like a faucet.
“Fuck me,” Gideon said after a long moment, his British accent coming on stronger than normal. “That’s a lot of blood. Tess, can you—”
“Yes,” she put in quickly. “I can handle it on my own.”
“Okay,” he said, visibly affected. “I’ll, ah … I think I’m gonna wait outside.”
As Gideon made his exit, Brock placed Jenna on the stainless steel table. When he didn’t move away, Tess glanced up at him in question. “You’re injured, too?”
He shrugged his good shoulder. “It’s nothing.”
She pursed her lips, not entirely convinced. “Maybe Gideon ought to make sure of that.”
“It is nothing,” Brock repeated, impatient. He took off his shades and hooked them into the collar of his black shirt. “What about Jenna? How bad is she?”
Tess glanced down at her and gave a faint wince. “Let me have a look. It’s a shame my talent is suppressed because of the baby, or I could heal her in a few seconds, instead of the hour or more it’s likely going to take to get the worst of the bleeding under control.”
Tess had been a skilled and caring veterinarian before she moved in to the Order’s compound and became Dante’s mate. She’d since taken on a vital role as Gideon’s right hand in the infirmary, tending to much larger—and, no doubt, more disagreeable—clientele than she’d dealt with in her former clinic in the city.
As a Breedmate, she also possessed an extraordinary talent—one that was unique to her and which would be passed down to the son she would bear, as Brock’s mother had passed her own down to him. Tess had a healing touch, as well, only her ability went even further than his. Where Brock’s talent gave him the power to absorb human pain, the effect was only temporary. Tess could actually restore health, even restore life, in any living creature.
Or, rather, she had been able to, before pregnancy had stifled her power.
But she was still a damned good physician, and Jenna could not be in more capable hands. Still, Brock found it difficult to step back from the operating table, in spite of the bloodthirst that was twisting his gut and wringing him out from the inside.
He stood there, stock-still, as Tess scrubbed her hands, removed the makeshift tourniquet, then did a cursory visual examination of the wound. She asked Renata to stay nearby and assist her, then spoke reassuringly to Jenna, e
xplaining what she had to do to extract the bullet and tend the wound.
“The good news is, there’s no bone damage and, from what I can tell, it will be a fairly simple procedure to remove the bullet and repair the artery it nicked.” She paused. “The bad news is, we’re not really equipped down here for this type of injury—meaning a human injury. In fact, you’re the first non-Breed patient that’s ever been in the compound’s infirmary.”
Jenna’s gaze slid to Brock as if to confirm what she was hearing. “Lucky me, stuck in a vampire hospital.”
Tess smiled sympathetically. “We’ll take care of you, I promise. Unfortunately, we don’t have a need for things like anesthesia. The warriors don’t require it when they come in with injuries, and those of us who are mated have the blood bond to aid with healing. But I can give you a local—”
“Let me help,” Brock interrupted, already moving around the table to stand at Jenna’s side. He held Tess’s questioning look. “I don’t care about the blood. I’ll deal. Let me help her.”
“All right,” Tess replied softly. “Let’s get started.”
Brock stared unblinking as Tess picked up a pair of scissors from the instrument tray and proceeded to cut away Jenna’s ruined clothing. Inch by inch, from the ankle of her right leg to her hip, the blood-soaked denim fell aside. In scant minutes, all that covered Jenna’s lower body was a skimpy pair of white cotton bikini panties.
Brock swallowed, his throat working audibly at the combined one-two punch of seeing so much soft feminine skin while his senses were drenched with the coppery siren’s call of Jenna’s blood.
He must have growled his hunger out loud, because in that same instant, Jenna’s eyelids lifted, startled. No doubt he was a scary sight, looming over the operating table, his gaze rooted on her, every muscle and tendon in his body strung as tight as piano wire. But fearful or not, Jenna didn’t look away. She stared him down, unblinking, and he saw in her courageous hazel eyes a bit of the frontier cop he’d heard she used to be.