Defy the Dawn

by Lara Adrian

  “N-nothing.”

  “Not even me?”

  Outrage surged inside her, but it was little match for the fire licking through her veins. She swallowed. “Zael, please…”

  She hated how small and choked her denial sounded. His firm grasp on her arm and her gaze said he wasn’t buying it anyway.

  Panic beat inside her rib cage like a trapped bird. She knew she could break loose from his hold if she tried. She was no mere mortal either. She had to be equal to him in terms of preternatural strength despite his larger size and muscular bulk. And while she didn’t actually think he would refuse to release her, she couldn’t summon the will to test him.

  “When was the last time you let a man hold you?” he demanded softly. “How long has it been since you let a man make love to you?”

  “That’s really none of your business.”

  “Wrong.” His mouth curved, but that smile was anything but friendly. It was masculine and carnal, and it sent liquid heat curling through every fiber of her being. “You made it my business last night, Brynne. You kissed me like you needed it more than your next breath.”

  She scoffed. “I was intoxicated, remember?”

  “You’re not now, and I think you want it just as badly as you did last night. You want me. You want this, but you’re too hard-headed or terrified to admit it.”

  “You’re insane.”

  “Am I?”

  Releasing her wrist to capture her face gently in his hands, he moved in close to her. Their bodies brushed against each other. His hard and demanding. Hers soft and yielding, melting under the heat of him.

  Brynne parted her lips to say something—she didn’t know exactly what—nor did she get the chance.

  “Oh,” a female voice blurted from behind them in the threshold. “Oh, shit! I’m so sorry.”

  Carys wheeled around, giving them her back as if she’d just walked in on them both standing there naked.

  Brynne winced. Had she arrived a few moments later, who knew what Carys might have seen. Who knew how far Brynne might have been tempted to let Zael go.

  Abruptly stepping out of his embrace, she smoothed the front of her blouse feeling awkward as hell. “It’s all right, Carys. We were just…talking.”

  She tried to ignore Zael’s disapproving growl as she walked to the open doorway and drew Carys back inside.

  “Please forgive me for interrupting like this,” the young Breed female said. Her discomfort went deeper than chagrin. There was something troubling about the set of her mouth. And her face seemed paler than normal, stricken. “My mother sent me to find you both. There’s been another attack.”

  Brynne’s stomach clenched. “In London?”

  “No. Right here in D.C.” Carys swallowed. “The Global Nations Council building has been attacked in broad daylight.”

  “Not another explosion,” Zael said. “We would’ve heard it. This close to the government center, we would have felt it.”

  “No, nothing like that.” Carys gravely shook her head. “Assassins opened fire inside the building a few minutes ago. Every high-ranking member on site today was killed.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Although there had been little question as to who had been responsible for the slaughter that took place in the Global Nations Council office, it was still a shock to see the brazen claim of responsibility by Opus Nostrum spread across the Internet and social media mere moments after the attack took place. Unsatisfied to simply issue a statement after the fact, Opus’s boasting claims were accompanied by live bodycam video footage recorded by the perpetrators as the killings took place.

  Lucan had already seen the footage once, but that didn’t make his blood boil any less as he watched again with the Order and everyone else present in the D.C. compound.

  Acting in unison, three men posted on the GNC building security detail had abruptly stepped out of rank and mowed down an entire office wing full of high-ranking council members and diplomats before turning their weapons on themselves. Every horrific second had been captured on video and streamed across the Web.

  The victims of the attack were all humans, representatives from around the world. Many of the men and women were colleagues Lucan knew personally in his role as chairman of the GNC.

  All of them executed in cold blood at the hands of Opus and their followers.

  “First JUSTIS, now the GNC,” Gabrielle said quietly from beside Lucan. There was fear in her voice, and in the blood bond that connected him to her. “Will the Order be next on Opus’s hit list?”

  Lucan gently stroked her worried face. “Make no mistake, both of these attacks have been strikes against the Order.” He met the grim gazes of his fellow warriors. “Opus hasn’t come for us directly, and they don’t want to. They tried that at the GNC peace summit and failed, which cost them their leader when we killed Reginald Crowe.”

  Sterling Chase nodded in agreement. “Each time they’ve come up against us, we’ve shut them down, weakened their foundation.”

  “Opus doesn’t need to risk taking us on in a true contest,” Lucan said. “What they want is chaos. They want fear and mistrust between Breed and man.”

  “To what end?”

  Lucan turned to see Brynne standing behind him alongside Zael. The former JUSTIS investigator’s cheeks were flushed with color, though whether in reaction to the bloody attack playing on the monitors or from some other cause, he couldn’t be sure.

  “We’ve seen that Opus has both Breed and human members,” she said. “How can they do this? Why unite with the purpose of killing innocent people from both of their races?”

  “To profit off the strife,” Zael murmured. “There are always fortunes to be made in war, regardless of which side you’re on. Unfortunately, peace is a far less lucrative business.”

  The Atlantean was right. And unless the Order found a way to clamp a lid on the panic before it got any further out of hand, Opus might damned well succeed.

  Lucan cursed as more video of screaming civilians and stampeding workers inside the GNC building filled the monitors. The attackers were dead, but the panic was still at a fever pitch.

  “I’m heading out to the government center,” he said, turning away from the images of carnage and terror.

  Gabrielle anxiously caught his hand. “It’s the middle of the day.”

  He didn’t particularly relish the idea of a daylight tour of duty either, given that without proper equipment, his solar-averse Gen One Breed skin would start sizzling in under ten minutes. But it had to be done.

  Opus attacked at a time of day that all but guaranteed little to no risk of Order interference. As the highest ranking official of the GNC and the leader of the Order besides, Lucan would be damned if he was going to sit back and wait for sundown before confronting the carnage and taking control of the situation.

  “I’ll prep the UV gear for both of us,” Dante said, zero hesitation.

  Chase and Tegan spoke up next, and soon the entire company of warriors—new and old—were volunteering for the patrol. It gave Lucan great pride to see the depth of commitment and courage in the faces that looked to him for leadership.

  He only hoped he wouldn’t let any of them down.

  Lucan nodded to his team. “Dante and Chase, prep the gear. Tegan and I will get the weapons and the vehicle loaded up. Brock and Kade, you suit up too.” He glanced to the other warriors. “I need the rest of you here. Hunter, you’re in command. Even if we don’t expect any direct hits from Opus, that doesn’t mean I want to risk leaving our base short-handed.”

  The stoic warrior had once been a stone-cold killer in his own right. If Lucan trusted anyone to stand between danger and the people he cared about, he could find no better guardian than Hunter.

  “What about the lead I dug up in Ireland?” Gideon asked.

  Lucan raked a hand over his head. “Shit. I don’t want to let it go cold, but we’ve got several fires to put out here.”

  “What lead?” Brynn
e asked.

  Gideon explained. “Just before the situation went all to hell today, I managed to crack through the first layer of encryption on Opus’s secured network. I followed a hunch down a rabbit hole and I found a name, one we haven’t run across before.”

  “You mean an Opus member?”

  “Possibly. It’s also possible we just got a hit on the woman Crowe had been visiting frequently for the past few years.”

  Aric Chase snorted a laugh. “You mean the reputed mistress? If this woman is under thirty, brainless, and full of plastic, odds are pretty good Crowe was banging her.”

  “We don’t have a physical description,” Gideon said. “We also don’t have work history, tax records, nada. All we’ve got is a name registered to an IP address, which I then ran down a bit more by hacking into several layers of the ISP’s parent company records. A few more database taps, log file scrubs, and I got a hit on a location in Finglas, County Dublin.”

  Dante and Tess’s son, Rafe, smirked. “Anyone with poor enough taste to be spending time with some Atlantean scumbag is suspect in my book.” Rafe shot a glance at Zael. “No offense.”

  Zael arched a wry brow. “You’re right. Crowe was a scumbag. What’s the name of this woman?”

  “Iona Lynch,” Gideon replied. “Any ties to your people that you know of?”

  “None that I’m aware of. Crowe may have been Atlantean, but he had been gone from the realm for a very long time. What he did and who he associated with in the time since is anyone’s guess.”

  “I’ve never heard the name either,” Brynne said. “If I could get access to my old JUSTIS records, I might be able to search—”

  “Been there, done that.” Gideon’s smile was a little sheepish, but mostly smug. “I’ve had my hands up JUSTIS’s skirts for a long time. Anything in their global databases or secured servers is ours as well. They don’t have anything on this woman. No one does.”

  “Except us now,” Rafe said. The warrior had his blonde mother’s looks but his father’s dark tenacity. “If this woman has anything to do with Crowe, she might be the only person we’ve got who can help us unmask the other members of Opus.”

  Dante nodded in agreement with his son. “And if Iona Lynch is part of Opus, then we need to get our hands on her and do it yesterday. We sure as fuck don’t want another situation like what happened with that Irish lawyer, Hayden Ivers.”

  The men were right. And Lucan was still simmering over the Order’s near miss with Ivers. They’d already had a team on the ground at the human’s house, closing in on the bastard, when Ivers popped some poison then set his own house on fire to avoid capture.

  Mathias Rowan looked Lucan’s way. “Shall I put my London team on this?”

  “No. You’re spread thin enough, between the panic in the fallout of the JUSTIS attack and now this hit on the GNC. I need you and your team ensuring the security of the council members over there, Mathias.”

  The London commander gave a nod. “Nova and I can be ready to return anytime.”

  “Within the hour. We’ll have the jet readied for you,” Lucan said. He met the concerned faces of the rest of the Order. “We need to be vigilant in our other cities too. Commanders should head back to your bases as soon as possible and be ready for the worst.”

  “Worse than what’s happened these past couple of days?” Aric Chase asked.

  “Something can always be worse, son.” Sterling Chase’s grim reply echoed what Lucan and the other warriors surely were thinking.

  Aric was new to the business of war, and although he was every bit as lethally skilled as any member of the Order, he was barely tested. He couldn’t be expected to understand what Lucan and the other warriors had learned through centuries of bloodshed and death.

  They had charged into too many battles with too many enemies to make the mistake of believing that any crisis was as bad as it could possibly get.

  Something could always be, and often was, far worse than you expect.

  All you could do was pray you beat the monster before it beat you.

  “Rafe and Aric,” Lucan said, his thoughts returning to the other problem they couldn’t afford to ignore. “We do need a stealth team to track down this Lynch woman in Ireland and hold her for questioning. Can the two of you be ready to leave with Mathias and Nova tonight?”

  The two warriors exchanged an eager look.

  “Hell yeah,” Rafe said. “Let’s go get the bitch.”

  CHAPTER 11

  After the warriors went off to carry out their orders from Lucan, Zael found himself pulled into a conversation with Dylan and Jenna. As much as he wanted to give both women his full attention, there was another female who was currently driving him to distraction.

  It didn’t help matters that she was gone.

  Brynne left the room as soon as the meeting had ended. Left it as abruptly as if her hair was on fire, to be more precise. No explanation. Not even a glance in his direction before she slipped away and didn’t return.

  Was something wrong?

  Where the hell was she?

  Finally, he couldn’t take not having those answers. With vaguely murmured excuses, he slipped out of the room and headed into the corridor at a determined pace. Maybe she was with Tavia and the other women. Then again, headstrong investigator Brynne might just as likely be in the technology center with Gideon, persuading him to brief her on all of the intel he was gathering on Opus.

  “If you’re looking for Brynne, she’s not down here.” Carys came out of another room up ahead in the corridor, accompanied by a dark-haired, hard-looking Breed male. The immense vampire held her hand possessively, yet tenderly, leaving no question that this was Rune, the cage-fighting nightmare she had recently taken as her mate.

  “Did you see where she went?” Zael didn’t even attempt to dodge the truth. It wouldn’t have done much good with Carys anyway, considering what she’d walked in on a short while ago.

  More accurately, what she had almost walked in on.

  She pointed to the elevator that went to the residential areas upstairs.

  “Thanks, Carys.”

  “Good luck,” she called after him with a giggle as he all but sprinted in that direction.

  Zael didn’t bother waiting for the lift. Using the small bit of crystal on the thong at his wrist, he closed his eyes and pictured the third floor corridor. Light flashed behind his closed lids.

  When he opened them a moment later, he was standing in front of the door to Brynne’s suite. He knocked on the panel and waited.

  And waited some more….

  “Brynne?” He knocked harder now, his preternatural hearing picking up the sounds of quiet movement inside. He tried the knob and swore when he found it locked from inside. “Brynne, is everything okay? Open up.”

  “Go away, Zael.”

  His concern for her well-being lessened somewhat when he registered the note of annoyance in her voice. “Open the door and tell me that. Talk to me.”

  “I don’t want to talk you. I’m leaving. I’m going back to London.”

  Like hell she was. Zael gave the doorknob a light twist and the lock tumbled open.

  Brynne gasped when she glanced up in midstride and saw him enter the room uninvited. Her look of outrage turned to fury as he stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

  “How dare you! How did you—”

  He held up his wrist, the one with the Atlantean bracelet on it. “Your kind isn’t the only one with its special skills.”

  “What do you want, Zael?” She frowned, folding her arms militantly across her chest. “And just what the fuck do you think you’re doing, barging into my private quarters like this?”

  At the moment, the only thing he was doing was staring at her, slack-jawed and instantly aroused. She stood in front of him half-dressed in just her white button-down shirt she’d worn that night in London. Her long legs were bare, exposing the delicate swirls and flourishes of her Breed dermaglyphs that tracked
down her slender thighs. The silky stems with those pretty, feminine glyphs seemed to go on forever.

  Beneath the loose hem of her blouse, he caught a tantalizing glimpse of skimpy black panties and more creamy skin. God, she was beautiful. Exotic and strong and exquisitely female.

  She was also visibly pissed off. At him?

  “What’s going on here, Brynne?”

  She stood her ground, glowering at him. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m getting dressed.”

  From where he was standing, it looked like she was getting undressed. And there were certain parts of his anatomy that approved of that idea very enthusiastically.

  “You said you’re leaving.”

  “Yes. I have to go back to London. That’s where I belong.” She turned away and began buttoning her shirt the rest of the way as she stalked to the bed. The pair of dark navy slacks she’d been wearing the other night lay folded there. Her shoes and purse were gathered nearby as well. “I mean to be on that plane with Mathias Rowan and the others later today.”

  Zael frowned at the announcement. “Don’t you think we should talk?”

  “About what?”

  Was she serious? He didn’t even know where to begin. “About this new Opus attack. About where you and I fit into the equation with the Order. We sure as hell need to talk about what’s happening between us.”

  “Nothing’s happening between us, Zael.” Sharp words, delivered with a flare of amber in her dark green eyes as she threw a hard glance at him from over her shoulder. “As for the rest of it, you heard Lucan and the other warriors just now. You saw what’s going on all around us. The whole world is going to hell right now.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “And it’s going there regardless of what takes place between you and me.”

  She scoffed. “You’ll say anything to get what you want, won’t you? Is that how all the men of your kind operate? I suppose that explains all of the fatherless offspring you and the rest of your Atlantean brothers have left around the world.”

  Zael’s jaw hardened at the jab. It wasn’t completely without merit, but he also saw it for what it was. A defensive strike, meant to push him away.