by Lara Adrian
“We all do, Lucan.” His Breedmate, Gabrielle, moved in closer and nestled against him, her voice calm and rational, even in the face of terror like the kind that was dealt tonight. That steadiness was one of the things he’d always admired about her.
But she clung tightly to him as she spoke. Whether she intended the physical contact as a reassurance to herself or to him, Lucan wasn’t sure.
Gabrielle looked at Mathias Rowan, who led the Order’s command center in London. “Do we know how many people were in the building tonight?”
Mathias might have been home in England tonight himself, but he’d recently come to the States with his newly expecting Breedmate, Nova, to visit his friend Sterling Chase in Boston.
Mathias gave a vague shake of his head, his arm around Nova’s shoulder as the pair watched the horror unfold on the monitors. “They’re still working to get an accurate count. Given the late hour of the attack, there were few human members of JUSTIS on site.” His gaze was as sober as his voice. “My men over there are on the ground as we speak. Thane, the team’s captain, says there were no survivors. From the looks of it, he thinks we should expect Breed casualties to be in the high double-digits, possibly a hundred.”
A ripple of outrage traveled the gathered warriors. The women’s reaction was quieter, a couple of the Breedmates sniffling as they struggled to hold back tears. Most affected of them all was Sterling Chase’s mate, Tavia.
Her half-sister, Brynne Kirkland, worked in London as a JUSTIS investigator. Tavia had been frantically trying to reach her ever since the first news of the attack surfaced.
“Has there still been no word?” Gabrielle asked the other female.
“Nothing yet.” Tavia’s worry drew her mouth into a flat line. “Brynne emailed me before heading in to JUSTIS headquarters this morning. She said she expected to be in debriefing meetings at least all day about Fielding’s death. She said she’d call me after she was out. I’ve called her several times and emailed, but…” She drew in a shaky breath. “Brynne’s flat is in that same neighborhood. If she wasn’t still at the JUSTIS building tonight, then she was probably home when…”
Her words trailed off again, her voice constricted. Chase drew her against him and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. He offered no words or false hope, just held his mate as his grim gaze met Lucan’s.
“We have to stop Opus before they grow any bolder,” the Boston commander said.
Lucan nodded. “Yes, we do. And we will.”
He was well aware that this assault would not be the last. Nor would it be the worst still to come, based on their dealings with the cabal whose main goal seemed to be global chaos and terror. The type of kindling that never failed to spark war.
And every man and woman in the room with Lucan now also knew that Opus Nostrum was only one enemy they had to contend with.
The other force that had declared itself the Order’s enemy was even worse for the fact that it was unseen—unknown thus far, except for her name.
Selene.
The exiled queen of the hidden race of immortals whom legend and myth had called Atlanteans.
If the Order’s information was to be trusted, Selene was preparing for a strike of her own. According to what they knew, she had been plotting, waiting to make her move. What they didn’t know was how or when. Perhaps if they did, they would know how best to stop her. Failing that, Lucan and his warriors would have no choice but to destroy her.
Before she had the chance to destroy them.
And to accomplish that, the Order was prepared to utilize every advantage they had over the Atlanteans and their mad queen.
As Lucan contemplated all of the grave work ahead of him and his warriors, his comm unit vibrated with an incoming call on his private, encrypted line.
He could count on one hand the number of people who had direct access to him—most of them gathered in the war room with him now.
Except for one recent addition.
He put the phone to his ear and heard a deep voice of an individual he’d only come to know a few days ago. A man the Order had little choice but to trust as a much-needed ally.
“Lucan, it’s Zael.” Sirens screamed in the background, punctuated by the low, distant percussions of explosive aftershocks. “I’m in London with Brynne. We need help.”
CHAPTER 5
Brynne wanted to pretend the humiliation of having propositioned Zael—and been rejected—hadn’t actually happened. She wanted to pretend a lot of things hadn’t truly happened tonight, chief among them the heinous attack on her colleagues at JUSTIS.
But it was impossible to ignore anything that had occurred these past several hours as she sat alone with Zael inside the luxury cabin of the Order’s private jet en route to Washington, D.C.
Opus Nostrum had destroyed the entire London headquarters in one fell swoop.
No survivors. Nearly a hundred JUSTIS officers and officials incinerated in the blast, all but a dozen or so of the victims Breed. Men and women Brynne had worked with for the bulk of her career with the organization. People she liked, simply gone in an instant.
The rubble from the explosion was burning as the jet had taken off from outside the city. It would likely take days before the two-block diameter pyre finally cooled.
Her city would never be the same.
Around the whole world, nothing would ever be the same now.
Opus had made that point clear tonight.
Brynne jiggled the ice in her glass then took a long drink of the cold liquid. Water this time, even though her grief and fury called for something stronger. Witnessing the inferno that had devoured her longtime workplace—former workplace, she reminded herself grimly—had been enough to sober her on the spot. The way she felt after tonight, she might never touch another drop.
Zael was watching her from his seat across the cabin. He’d been uncharacteristically reserved since they boarded the jet. Even now, he kept his tongue and his distance, allowing her much needed space to process and reflect.
She set her empty glass on the console next to her. “I keep picturing myself walking those networks of corridors,” she murmured softly. “I keep seeing their faces—the other officers and investigators I worked with on a daily basis at that building. I can’t stop running through their names in my mind, doing a mental body count.”
Zael nodded gravely, but didn’t say anything. He got up and slowly walked over to take the leather seat facing her. His copper-threaded blond hair had gotten tousled from their race across London to view the destruction firsthand.
He raked the thick waves back from his brow and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his bent knees as he gave her time to get all of the words out. His oceanic blue eyes held her gaze, solemn in his sculpted, sun-bronzed face.
And while she was certain she must reek of smoke and death, his scent was fresh and clean, as crisp as a sea breeze. Its presence calmed her.
In this moment, with everything she once knew now blown to bits a thousand miles behind them, he calmed her.
More than she’d ever stoop to admit.
“I stayed late at headquarters most nights,” she said. “Sometimes, if I finished one case earlier than expected, I’d start right away on another. Sometimes I worked all night.”
Being a daywalker, a very rare thing among her kind, she didn’t have to work at night like her Breed colleagues. But more often than not, she chose to. Why wouldn’t she? It wasn’t as if she had anyone waiting at home.
And she’d loved her work. It had been the one constant in her life, her purpose. The one thing she could call her own.
Until today.
“JUSTIS was all I had, Zael.”
She practically cringed as the admission slipped past her lips. But she was too tired and empty to hold it back. And the weight of the terror and violence dealt on the hundred killed and the organization she’d pledged her life to was almost too much to bear.
Glancing away from him, she looked out
of the oblong window at her side. In the distance, the sun was just beginning to crest the far horizon. She stared at it as if seeing it for the first time, all too cognizant of how fortunate she was to be alive to witness it. The realization raked at her, putting an acid burn in the back of her throat.
“If I hadn’t been let go today, I’d have been there with the rest of them at headquarters.”
“And you’re feeling guilty that you weren’t.”
She swung her gaze back to him, astonished that he understood. “Many of those people left behind mates and children. They had lives waiting for them to return.”
“Are you saying you don’t?”
Oh, God. She’d gone too far down a path she had no intention of sharing with him.
Least of all him.
“JUSTIS was important to you, I get that. But it’s not all you have. For one thing, you’ve got a very worried sister coming to meet us when we land in D.C.”
Brynne couldn’t deny the tender pang in her chest at the mention of Tavia. They’d only been able to exchange a few words when Zael had called in to the Order to report their location.
Tavia had been beside herself with concern—a notion that Brynne was still adjusting to. Although her connection to Tavia was strong, she and the other daywalking Breed female had not even known about each other until they were adults.
“Tavia and I are half-sisters,” Brynne said, somewhat dismissively, hoping to close the door on this line of conversation before she allowed the Atlantean to crawl any further into her head.
“Did you have the same mother or the same father?”
Brynne stared at him. He didn’t know the history she and Tavia shared?
The madman’s laboratory. The breeding program that produced genetic anomalies like daywalkers and Breed females that had never been seen in the world before. The brutal experiments and abuse. The decades-deep web of betrayal that was used to keep the progeny of that breeding program under control until they could be utilized as weapons of war.
If Zael didn’t know those pitiful facts about her, Brynne wasn’t about to be the one to tell him.
Haunted by memories she’d kept locked up all of her life, she shook her head. “I’m tired. I don’t want to talk anymore.”
But there was another pitiful fact that she preferred would not come to life anytime soon. One that needed to be discussed, no matter how much she dreaded it.
“Speaking of Tavia and the rest of the Order, I would like to have your word that you won’t mention what happened between us tonight.”
Zael sat back in his seat, his gaze trained on her under the rise of his brows. “You mean the dancing?”
She glowered. “I’m talking about all of it. I’d like you to promise me you’ll keep our indiscretion to yourself.”
“Our indiscretion.” Dark amusement lit his eyes. “If I recall correctly, I wasn’t the one thrusting my tongue down someone’s throat on a crowded dance floor then drunkenly suggesting we needed to tear each other’s clothes off and get horizontal ASAP.”
If she could have wilted into the leather seat, she would have gladly done so. Thank God she didn’t go to bed with him. It was unbearable enough just to think she might have.
Cheeks flaming with outrage, she lifted her chin. “As you so accurately pointed out, I’d had too much whisky and it went to my head. I wasn’t myself. I had no idea what I was saying and I sure as hell didn’t mean any of it.”
Zael grinned. “Don’t get me wrong. I liked who you were on that dance floor, Brynne. I hope I’m going to see that woman again, but preferably when she’s sober.”
She scoffed. “None of that would’ve happened if I’d been sober. Nor will it ever again.”
“You sure about that?”
“Completely.”
Although it hadn’t been purely whisky doing the talking with Zael back in the bar. Or the kissing. Or…the rest of it.
She wanted to think so then. She desperately wanted to believe so now too.
She wanted to reassure herself that what happened with him had been an impulsive mistake. One that would not be repeated.
But she knew better. The one person she couldn’t fool was herself.
And possibly Zael.
She could see that by the way he looked at her as the jet began its descent into D.C. air space. He held her unsettled gaze with unflinching, arrogantly assured intensity, as if he was recalling every second of their encounter the same way she was. As if he still felt the hard drum of desire in his veins too.
Brynne wanted to deny what she saw in him, what she felt.
But the truth sizzled in the air around them, and in those fathomless bright blue eyes that told her in irrefutable terms that what happened between them on that dance floor back in Cheapside was only a beginning, not an end.
CHAPTER 6
Brynne still wasn’t speaking to him, even after they arrived at Order headquarters that morning. As soon as they’d touched down at the airport and were met by Tavia and her hulking warrior son, Aric—both of them daywalkers—Brynne had been swept into the military-grade black SUV amid tight hugs and anxious chatter with her sister.
As for Zael, he’d ridden shotgun up front with Aric, all too conscious of Brynne’s disgust with him and the tension that only seemed to expand for every minute she strived to act like he didn’t exist.
When they were brought into a private meeting room where Lucan Thorne and the rest of the Order’s senior command had already assembled, she stubbornly kept her distance, taking a position as far away from him as she could get. Zael might have been tempted to continue goading her just for the pleasure of it, but the gravity of the situation facing everyone now demanded all of his attention.
Live feed from London filled the monitors that lined the back wall. On another wall, three more Breed warriors looked in on the meeting via video screens—one reporting in from Berlin, another from Rome, the other from Montreal. Zael had been briefly introduced to both of them in this same manner his first time to Order headquarters a few days ago.
He nodded to Andreas Reichen and Lazaro Archer, the European-based commanders, then to Nikolai, the formidable Siberian-born Breed male in charge of operations in Canada.
The mood in the room was thick with solemnity as the gathered members reviewed the carnage of last night and discussed their next tactical move against Opus Nostrum.
“Tell all of your teams to increase patrols immediately,” Lucan growled from the head of the long conference table. “I want every recruit in combat gear tonight. We need an obvious Order presence in every major city starting at sundown.”
Zael didn’t miss the pause in conversation as he strode inside. He was still a stranger in their midst. The outsider they had no choice but to trust.
How it happened that he—a former warrior of the Atlantean queen’s legion—had recently found himself in the position of advisor and ally to blood-drinking killers spawned from his people’s greatest enemies, he had no idea.
Except the group of Breed males in the room with him were not killers. Not brutal animals like their race’s Ancient fathers had been.
Not cowardly murderers like the skulking, anonymous members of Opus Nostrum.
The men of the Order were warriors, like Zael once was—before he defected from Selene’s vengeful reign to walk a different path, far away from her Atlantean court.
As of a few days ago, the Order wanted him to return to the fray—fighting on their side this time. Against his own people, if that’s what it came down to. He’d gone away thinking they asked too much. He still hadn’t decided if he was ready to stand against his queen, but he couldn’t deny that tonight Opus Nostrum had earned another enemy in him.
“It’s a relief to see both of you are safe,” Lucan said, extending his hand to Zael in greeting. He nodded to Brynne, who vigilantly kept her position near Tavia across the large room. “We’re still collecting intel from our back channels and teams on the ground, but so f
ar it looks like JUSTIS was the only target. They wanted to make a statement.”
“And they did,” Zael agreed. “But thugs like these thrive on making bold statements. That’s how they build their empires. That’s how they ensure the loyalty of their true believers.”
On the video feed from Montreal, Nikolai uttered a curse. “Not to mention ensuring there’s enough chaos and fear that a terrorized public will be ready to do anything to make it stop.”
Sterling Chase dropped his fist on the conference table. “Not on our watch. Goddamn it, this shit with Opus has gone too far already. Multiple assassinations. The attempt to blow up the GNC peace summit a few weeks ago. Manufacturing and distributing Breed-killing UV technology, and narcotics to turn any law-abiding Breed into a blood-craving monster. Their list of criminal acts is as long as my fucking arm.” The Boston commander’s fury only gentled as he glanced at Tavia. “And then, a couple of nights ago, the bastards took our daughter.”
“We got Carys back,” Tavia said, holding his tormented gaze. “She and Rune are both safe and celebrating their blood bond. Thanks to everyone in this room. Especially Brynne.”
Brynne’s head snapped up at the mention. “Me?”
Tavia smiled. “If not for your quick thinking, we might not have realized Carys had been taken from Neville Fielding’s party. The Order might’ve arrived too late to help her and Rune escape from Riordan and his men.”
Brynne looked uncomfortable with the praise. Her eyes darted around the room—although, Zael noticed, still careful to avoid him—before she glanced down at the floor. “I was only doing my job.”
“And you’re damned good at it,” Lucan said. “Your instincts about Fielding being dirty were spot-on. Without your hunch and your cooperation in getting us inside that party to search for intel, we’d be a lot further behind Opus than we are now.”