by Lara Adrian
And now she recalled that among her father’s research at the Back Bay brownstone were port logs dating back as far as two years ago concerning shipment activities for Crowe Industries. Her father had been scrutinizing Crowe more than a year before the incident at the peace summit.
Why was Harrison standing there chatting with Reginald Crowe like old chums in the photo? Had it been part of his covert work with JUSTIS?
Devony didn’t recognize the third man. Evidently, her father hadn’t, either. He’d drawn a circle around the man’s semi-obscured profile and had jotted a question mark on the image.
She had spent the past six hours scouring the internet for information or other images, and running facial recognition apps to see if she could find anything out about the unknown man. She had even logged in to JUSTIS’s secured site using her father’s credentials she’d memorized—the ID and password she thought he’d carelessly left in his safe behind her mother’s portrait in Boston.
Now, she wondered if he’d wanted her to have that information too. Maybe he’d left all of his notes and research for her to pick up in his absence. For all the good it did.
She had lost everything to Opus’s firebombing and to the Order. And tonight she had found exactly nothing on the mysterious third man.
If her father thought she could resolve the question for him after his death, he had given her too much credit. All the photograph had done was raise a lot of troubling questions in her mind.
As did the date he’d scrawled onto the envelope. The day before the bombing at JUSTIS’s London headquarters.
Had he known about the danger? Had he some inkling of what was about to happen?
She dismissed both notions immediately. Her father never would have let his beloved wife and son get anywhere near that building if he feared it might be compromised. He would have sounded a swift and very vocal alarm within the organization the instant he suspected there might be trouble brewing.
So, no. He couldn’t have known any of that.
But he had been concerned enough about his son and the two men in the photo to place it somewhere she would eventually discover it, should anything happen to him.
God, she hated to think that he might have feared for his own safety.
Or that he feared for her brother’s and had been unable to protect him in the end.
Could the third man have had something to do with the attack on JUSTIS? Had Harrison been the true target of a bombing that had killed so many?
Her mind swam with a thousand possible scenarios and tangled theories, each one seeming to give birth to many more.
Obviously, she had spent too much time sitting behind her father’s workstation tonight. Her obsessive need for information and answers was beginning to wear on her body and her mind.
She got up from the desk and stretched, realizing she hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink since she arrived. Being a daywalker, she didn’t need nourishment the way humans did. She didn’t need to consume blood every few days the way Rafe and other members of the Breed did, either.
She’d drunk from human blood Hosts before, but how she would ever do that again after she’d tasted Rafe’s blood, she had no idea. She didn’t want to think about that eventuality.
She didn’t want to think about Rafe at all, but he’d been living in her thoughts all night, just as he lived in her blood through their bond.
Forever.
She didn’t even have to concentrate to feel his presence inside her now. He felt almost close enough to touch, which was a particularly harsh cruelty when she knew she had closed the door on her relationship with him—literally and figuratively.
But, wishful thinking or not, the comforting buzz in her veins accompanied her as she headed into the kitchen to make some tea.
Her anger with Rafe had ebbed hours ago. Her hurt was still raw, her heart still frayed and aching, but she couldn’t hate him. She hadn’t ever hated him, not even a little.
She loved him.
And more than anything, she wanted to see him again.
As she put the kettle on and rummaged for the tea and a mug, she realized that it wasn’t only her anger that had faded.
During the months following her family’s deaths, she had been driven by grief and fury. Revenge was what she lived for, not doing what was right or just. Those noble principles that she’d admired growing up, even aspired to, had morphed into something ugly and reckless after the JUSTIS bombing.
She had lost her grounding once she set out to avenge her loved ones. It had been buried by her pain over her family’s murders, turned into a poisonous hatred that had hardened her to the world around her. It had hardened her heart.
She still wanted Opus Nostrum to pay for her family’s slaying and everyone else in the London office that awful night, but her personal vendetta had galvanized into something stronger, steelier.
A sense of purpose, not vigilantism.
Coming to know Rafe had done that for her. Partnering with him in a shared cause, opening herself up to him as a friend and confidante, as a lover.
He had made her realize she didn’t want to be alone on her quest. She wanted to be part of something more.
With him.
The kettle whined on the stove. Devony poured hot water over the diffuser and breathed in the soothing, orange-and-spice fragrance of the loose tea leaves.
She felt an odd prickle at the back of her neck as she took the first careful sip.
Her head came up, and she listened for a moment to the utter silence of the empty Darkhaven.
She didn’t hear anything, but she was certain she wasn’t alone inside the house now.
A jolt of hopefulness arrowed through her. “Rafe?”
No one answered. Holding her steaming mug, she padded out of the kitchen to the short hallway that led out to the foyer.
If Rafe were close, shouldn’t she feel his presence through their bond? She felt certain she would, but her hope was irrational as she stepped into the open area at the front entrance of the Darkhaven.
It wasn’t Rafe.
The instant her gaze lit on who stood there, her tea slipped out of her grasp. She didn’t even feel the hot liquid splashing against her bare feet and ankles as the mug crashed to the tiles in front of her. Her heart was too full, her mind too stunned, to feel anything except disbelief and a surge of overwhelming joy.
“Harrison?”
Her brother looked thinner than she recalled him, his handsome face a little gaunt against the bright copper-penny color of his brush-cut hair. Devony stepped around the spill on the floor, elation almost sending her racing forward to embrace him.
Almost.
Something halted her. She wasn’t sure why she hesitated, but uncertainty stilled her footsteps. Her instincts seemed to freeze her limbs despite the desperate hope bubbling inside her.
“Harry.” She wrapped her arms around herself instead of him. “My God. Is it really you?”
His mouth curved. “It’s me, Dovey.”
His nickname for her from the time they were children. It should have comforted her, but somehow, paired with the odd look on his face, the endearment rang hollow now, his voice airless and strange.
“But . . . how are you here?” She shook her head, torn between confusion and astonishment. “Where have you been all this time? Why didn’t you try to contact me? Does this also mean that Mum and Dad are—”
He shook his head. “They’re gone.”
“Gone.” The word felt so cold, so inconsequential falling off his tongue. She knew it was simply a fact, however painful.
Yet she felt their deaths settle on her all over again now that she was looking at her brother, alive and well. Somehow, miraculously, unharmed.
“They’re more than gone, Harrison. They’re dead. You all were, at least that’s what I’ve believed all this time. You, our parents, and a hundred other people who were also in that building when the bomb took it down. Yet here you are.”
&
nbsp; He tilted his head as she spoke. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”
“I am. You have no idea how many times I’ve wished to see you—all of you—again. But I’m . . . confused.” God, she only wished she were confused. Because the most logical explanation for him to be standing in front of her right now was one that sent a chill into her veins. “How is it possible? There were no survivors. Opus left nothing but rubble behind that night. So, please explain to me how you were the only person to escape that blast?”
“We’re at war, Dovey.” He took a step toward her. “People get hurt in war. People die.”
A feeling of nausea swept over her at his bland tone. “I’m not talking about war. I’m talking about cold-blooded murder. Opus Nostrum killed our parents. They killed your colleagues at JUSTIS. As of now, they also want to kill me.” She exhaled a shaky breath as she stared into the face of this emotionless semblance of her brother. This stranger. “I don’t suppose I need to tell you that, though. Do I?”
When he didn’t deny it, something shattered inside her. The part of her that had loved her brother, admired him as a hero for his commitment to upholding the law. The part of her that had mourned him these past five months alongside her parents.
“How long, Harry? When did Opus get their hooks into you?”
He shrugged, approaching a couple more steps. “Does it matter?”
“It does to me. Were you already on their side when Reginald Crowe tried to detonate his bomb at the summit earlier this year?” He didn’t answer, which was answer enough. Devony scoffed. “What happened? How did they brainwash you?”
“Brainwash?” He chuckled. “I’m seeing clearly for the first time because of Opus. They want peace—true and lasting peace. But they know it won’t come to fruition without war. A big war, one that can reset the balance of power and put better minds in charge. Stronger minds.”
“You mean, like Reginald Crowe? Things didn’t work out so well for him, as I recall.”
Anger flared in her brother’s dark eyes. “Reginald Crowe was a brilliant man. All the members of Opus’s inner circle are the best minds this world has ever seen. I didn’t realize that until Crowe took me into his confidence. I was working a covert op, assigned to help break up a corrupt network of government officials on the take. Instead, I met Crowe and a few of his associates. They showed me what could be, what we could create together.”
Devony scoffed quietly. “And then the covert agent became the convert.”
He smiled, and this time it was genuine. “The summit was only the beginning. The Order got in the way of that. They killed Reginald Crowe, but we’ve gotten stronger since then. The Order won’t be in our way for long.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Opus can’t be stopped. We will not be stopped.”
“You’re crazy, Harrison. You’re out of your mind.”
“And you’re always so fucking self-righteous,” he hissed, the tips of his fangs glinting in the low light of the foyer. “You and our parents. Especially them, always preaching about higher purpose and duty. Trying to tell me about honor when my Opus brethren and I are doing the noblest work right under everyone’s noses.”
“Is that why you killed them that night at headquarters?” Her voice was wooden, her heart heavy with the understanding of what her brother must have done. “The reports after the bombing all speculated that it was an inside job. No one could’ve placed the explosives and executed their precision detonation without intimate knowledge of the building . . . and of who was likely to be there that night. It was you.”
He released a beleaguered sigh. “Why couldn’t you just stick to your music, Dovey? What the hell were you thinking, going after LaSalle? Or fucking that warrior from the Order?” He practically spat the words, his face contorting with barely restrained rage. “You’re an embarrassment to both of us. I’m so disappointed at what you’ve become.”
She arched a brow, fury igniting in her blood. “Right back at you, brother.”
“Opus wants you dead now,” he announced blandly. “I don’t want that. I knew you’d come running back home after they blew up the Boston Darkhaven. They’ve given me a chance to show you the way, Devony. I hope you’ll be smart enough to take it.”
“Smart enough to become one of Opus’s pawns, like you? That’s not smart, Harry. It’s weak. And that’s never going to be me.”
He laughed as if she were the crazy one. “Do you understand what I’m offering you?” He held up his hands the way he would show off precious treasures. “With our power, you and I working together, we could be unstoppable. We could run Opus together one day.”
Devony inched back on her bare feet as he began to approach once more. “You’re out of your mind, Harrison.” He was clearly, dangerously, insane. No longer the brother she grew up with, but a tool of Opus Nostrum. And their parents’ killer. “Our father was getting close to the truth, wasn’t he? I think sooner or later, he was going to figure out you were the enemy.”
Harrison smiled, lifted his bulky shoulder. “Probably. I wasn’t going to let that happen, you understand.”
“Of course not,” she said. “I think he knew that too. I think that’s why he left behind months of research for me to find. I think that’s also why he hid a photograph of you and Crowe and another man in the hopes that I would come across it after Dad was gone.”
“What photograph? What other man?”
“That’s what I want to know. I’m going to find out, Harry. I’m not going to rest until Opus is destroyed.”
Rage burned in her brother’s eyes. His lip curled back from his teeth and fangs. “You need to give me that photo, Devony. And all of our father’s research. You need to give all of it to me. Right. Fucking. Now.”
She shook her head, taking another cautious step away from him. “I don’t have Dad’s files anymore. Your brilliant friends at Opus blew it all up when they torched my house.”
He smirked. “Your loss is my gain, then.”
“Not quite. The Order has copies of everything.”
A roar erupted from him. “You idiot!”
He lunged. In that same instant, she used her mind to hurl the sharpest chunk of her broken mug at her brother’s head. She put all her strength behind it. The jagged shard connected with the bone over his right eye and tore the skin open. He staggered back, blood dripping down his face.
His growl was unearthly. “You bitch. Now you’re going to suffer.”
He grabbed hold of her before she could escape his reach. His hands bit into her arms like talons, his eyes throwing off rage like a furnace.
She felt his power lock on to hers, seeking the connection so he could siphon her. But the hold wouldn’t take. “What the—? You drank from someone. You slut! You’re fucking bonded to that Order scum?”
Devony wrenched loose and shoved her brother backward with the full force of her strength. He crashed into one of her mother’s antique tables. It exploded beneath him, splintering into pieces as he fell to the floor.
She had to get out of there. She had to escape so she could let Rafe and the Order know that Harrison was corrupt. More than that, she needed to make sure they had the photograph her father had left for her.
She flashed into the office and grabbed it, stuffing it into the back pocket of her jeans. Harrison was struggling to his feet as she zipped past him in the foyer.
But now it wasn’t only him she had to contend with.
Two other Breed males stepped inside the front door. Cold eyes held her as they blocked her exit from the house. Unlike her brother, this pair was armed with guns and knives.
Harrison swiped angrily at the blood running into his eye and down the side of his face. “I told you they gave me one chance to show you the way.” He spat a mouthful of blood onto the heirloom rug. “You’re beyond my help now, Devony. Or my mercy.”
“So, you’re just going to let your death squad friends kill me?”
“
Yes, Devony.” He walked up to her, stared her squarely in the eyes. “I don’t see anyone who’s going to stop them. Do you?”
“I will,” Rafe answered.
CHAPTER 28
Mathias Rowan had a car waiting for Rafe when the Order’s private jet touched down at Heathrow. If Rafe had known Devony’s terror was going to flood into his veins like a cold river halfway from the airport to Kensington, he would have enlisted Rowan and the whole damn warrior team in London to accompany him.
He wished like hell he had some backup now, as he’d entered the Darkhaven through the back door and found her trapped inside with a trio of menacing Breed thugs. The well-armed pair in suits just inside the front door posed the most immediate threat to her. Both grabbed for their guns the instant Rafe appeared in the kitchen archway.
Rafe didn’t hesitate for a moment. He let one of his blades fly. It nailed the bigger of the two in the throat. His larynx impaled, the vampire sagged to his knees on a choked howl, clutching at the blade protruding out of the front of his neck.
The thug’s suited partner opened fire at the same time, hitting Rafe in the stomach.
Devony screamed. “No!”
Fuck. Her cry hurt him worse than the gunshot wound.
Rafe could handle the injury and the pain. He’d taken a lot worse before and it hadn’t slowed him down. But thanks to their blood bond, every hit he took would be echoed inside her. He was going to kill these three assholes tonight for that offense alone.
Devony launched herself at the shooter, eyes ablaze and fangs erupting behind her parted lips. The huge guy tried to shake her off his back, but he didn’t go down. And, just like his Opus death squad partner, he had come here to kill.
“Devony!”
Rafe hardly got the chance to form the thought, let alone leap to her defense, before the third Breed male came at him with murder burning in his whisky-colored eyes.