Lara Adrian's Midnight Breed 8-Book Bundle (166 page)

“A Gen One son, bred for the sole purpose of serving the cause,” Dragos said. “All of the Hunters in my personal
army are the strongest, most lethal weapons in the world. They have been specially raised and trained at my direction. They are flawless killers, and they are unfailingly loyal to me.”

“How can you be certain of that?” asked the Darkhaven leader from Hamburg, a shrewd male who would no doubt appreciate the realtime demonstration that Dragos had in mind.

“You notice this Hunter wears a collar. It is a GPS monitoring device, only this collar is also equipped with an ultraviolet laser. Every Hunter wears one, from the time he can walk. I can track his every move, locate him in an instant. And if he displeases me in any way,” Dragos said, casting a meaningful look at the Hunter standing so rigidly stoic beside him, “all it takes is one simple remote-controlled command and the laser activates, sending a UV light as thin as a razor around the Hunter’s neck, severing the head.”

One or two males at the table exchanged uncomfortable looks.

It was the German who spoke up first, his gaze glittering with interest. “What should happen if the collar is tampered with, or removed?”

Dragos grinned, not at the German, but at the Hunter himself. “Let’s find out, shall we?”

Although her every instinct screamed at her to creep in like a thief on the prowl, Renata strode through the west corridor of her enemies’ lair as if she had every right to be there. She heard the low rumble of male conversation coming from one of the large rooms out back. Elsewhere in the house, there was nothing but quiet, until…

A child’s soft sobs, drifting toward her from a stairwell leading to the second floor.

Mira.

Renata flew up the steps and followed the cries to the end of the hallway. A bedroom door had been locked from outside. She ran her hand along the top of the frame but didn’t find a key.

“Damn it,” she whispered, drawing one of her blades from the twin sheaths at her sides.

She wedged the point between the door and jamb just above the lock and gave it a hard lever. The wood cracked, loosening just a bit. Twice more and finally she had enough room to jimmy the thing free. With shaking, eager hands, Renata opened the door.

Mira was in there, thank God.

Her veil was gone, and as soon as she looked up and saw the black-clad figure coming into the room, she scuttled into the corner in absolute terror.

“Mira, it’s me,” Renata said, flipping open her dark visor. “It’s okay now, kiddo. I’m here to take you home.”

“Rennie!”

Kneeling down, Renata held out her arms. With a hitching little cry, Mira flew into her embrace.

“Oh, mouse,” Renata whispered, pressing relieved kisses to the top of her blond head. “I’ve been so worried about you. I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. Are you all right, sweetheart?”

Mira nodded, her small arms wrapped tightly around Renata’s neck. “I was worried about you too, Rennie. I was afraid I’d never see you again.”

“Me too, kiddo. Me too.” She hated to let go, but they still had to get out of there before Fabien and his cronies
caught up to them. Renata stood, lifting Mira up into her arms. “We have to run now. Hold on to me, okay?”

Renata hadn’t even taken two steps with the child before the rapid blasts of automatic gunfire erupted from all directions somewhere outside the house.

Dragos was eager to demonstrate the technological beauty of the Hunter’s UV collar when all hell broke loose outside the gathering. He shot a killing look at Edgar Fabien as the group leapt out of their seats in stunned alarm.

“What’s going on out there?” he demanded of their host. “Is this another of your fuckups?”

Fabien’s narrow face took on an unhealthy shade of pale. “I-I don’t know, sire. Whatever it is, I’m sure my agents will handle—”

“Fuck your agents!” Dragos roared. He scrabbled for the radio and barked an order for the driver to bring the boat around, then got right up into the face of the Hunter. “Outside, now. Handle this. Kill anyone in your path.”

The Hunter—his highly trained, flawlessly obedient soldier—just stood there, as immovable as a pillar of stone.

“Get out there. I command you!”

“No.”

“What?” Dragos could not believe his ears. He felt the gazes of his underlings root on him. He could taste their disbelief, their doubt. A silence bloomed, ripe with measured expectation. “I issued you a direct order, Hunter. Do it, or I will terminate you right here and now.”

With more gunfire ringing just outside the walls of the house, the Hunter had the audacity to look Dragos square in the eye and shake his head. “Either way, I am dead. If you want me to fight so you can live, disable my collar.”

“How dare you even so much as suggest—”

“You waste time,” he said, apparently unfazed by the chaos rising all around them. “Release me from this shackle, you arrogant son of a bitch.”

Just then, one of Fabien’s feeble watchmen came rushing to the open doorway. “Sir, we’ve got incoming shots arriving from the entire perimeter. We can’t be sure yet, but there must be a damned army closing in on us from the woods.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Fabien gasped. “Oh, sweet Christ! We’re all going to die!”

Dragos snarled in fury, not confident in the slightest that Fabien’s guards could find their own asses, let alone provide adequate cover for the group of high-ranking Breed males who were currently looking to Dragos as their leader to help them make their escape. Waiting for him to call the shots that would either spare them or take them and their budding revolution down in one fell swoop.

“We’re finished here,” he growled. “Everyone out the back door, to the boat. Follow me.”

As the group began to fall in around him, Dragos cast a glower from over his shoulder at the Hunter. Neither male said a word—mutual hatred easy enough to read in their gazes—as Dragos reached into his pocket and retrieved the device that controlled the Hunter’s collar and typed in the code that would disable it.

The instant the collar clicked into neutral, the Hunter reached up and tore it off his neck. Then, with a look that was part disbelief, part cold determination, he strode out the door and toward the heart of the disruption outside.

CHAPTER
Thirty-two

N
ikolai smiled to himself as his diversion tactic created sudden mass confusion all over the place. The agents on watch were tearing around in utter panic, more than one taking a hit from the gunfire blasting in from all directions of the forest. Niko summoned a vine from the tangle of branches above his head in the forest and bade the snaking tendril to wrap itself around the trigger of his last absconded Ml 6.

As the vine did its thing as the previous ones had, holding the rifle aloft and applying more and more pressure to the trigger as the coiling green runner grew thicker and more strong, Niko ran for the side entrance of the house.

It wasn’t hard to find Renata. Their blood bond was a beacon for him, leading him through the back of the place to an upward flight of stairs. Renata was just coming down them, Mira held tight in her arms. She met his gaze and, for an endless instant, neither of them said a word. Nikolai wanted to tell her how sorry he was. How relieved he was that she had found the child unharmed.

He had a thousand things he wanted to say to Renata in that moment, not the least of which being that he loved her and that he always would.

“Hurry,” he heard himself murmur. “You need to get out of here now.”

“The gunfire is everywhere,” Renata said, worry etching her features. “What’s going on?”

‘Just a diversion. I had to create a window of opportunity to get both of you out of here.”

She looked relieved, but only for a second. “Fabien and the others … I heard men leaving out the back way a couple minutes ago.”

“I’m on it,” Niko said. “Now go. Don’t stop for anything. Take Mira back to the vehicle. The Order should be rolling in any minute.”

“Nikolai.” He paused, holding Renata’s steady gaze, hoping to hear forgiveness if not an affirmation that she might still love him after everything that had occurred. She held his gaze, a crease forming between her brows. “Just…be careful.”

He gave her a grim nod, feeling none of his usual high from the adrenaline rush of awaiting combat. Those days seemed ages behind him, back when nothing much mattered to him except the glory of battle and the triumph of winning, however meaningless the contest.

Now everything mattered—especially where Renata was concerned. Her safety and happiness were all that mattered, even if it meant he might not be in the picture.

“Take Mira back to the vehicle,” he told her again. “Keep your head down and keep yourself safe. We’re gonna get you both out of here.”

He waited until Renata ran out, then he bolted for the back door of the house where his enemies had fled.

The speedboat was just pulling up to the dock out back as Dragos and the others hurried down the slope to meet it. From all around them in the forest and up near the house, Fabien’s Enforcement Agents scrambled like ants that had just gotten their hill stomped. Gunfire lit up the night, so haphazard it was impossible to tell which rounds came from the friendlies and which from the apparent intruders.

All Dragos knew was that he was not sticking around to let the Order or anyone else take him down.

As he and his group began to pile onto the boat, Dragos put himself in the way of Edgar Fabien.

“There’s no room on board for you,” he told the Montreal Darkhaven leader. “You’ve jeopardized enough with your idiocy. You stay here.”

“But… sire, I—please, I can assure you that I will not disappoint you again.”

Dragos smiled, baring the tips of his fangs. “No, you won’t.”

With that, he raised a 9mm pistol and fired a killing shot right between Fabien’s beady eyes.

“Away!” he ordered the boat’s driver, Edgar Fabien dismissed from his mind completely as the motor roared and the sleek watercraft sped out to the waiting seaplane at the far end of the lake.

He was too fucking late.

Niko took out a couple of agents on his way down to the lake, but by the time he got there, the speedboat making a bat-out-of-hell exit was little more than churning wake on the water. Nikolai fired a few shots after them, but he was only wasting rounds. Edgar Fabien’s corpse lay on the wooden dock. Dragos and the others were more than halfway across the lake now.

“Goddamn it.”

Fury and determination powering him, Nikolai started running along the shore, calling on the preternatural speed that all of his kind possessed when they needed it. The boat was fast, but the water was landlocked. At some point Dragos and his cronies would have to disembark and pick up another means of escape. With any luck, he could catch up to them before they totally got away.

He didn’t know how far he’d run—easily a mile—when all of a sudden his chest went cold with dread.

Renata.

Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. He could feel her emotion course through him as if it were his own. She, his brave, unflappable Renata, was right now scared to death.

Ah, Christ.

If anything happened to her…

No. He couldn’t even think it.

All thoughts of Dragos pushed aside, Nikolai wheeled
around and kicked his feet into high gear, praying like hell he could reach her in time.

She hadn’t seen the huge vampire coming at all.

One minute she was tearing through the dark woods with Mira held fast in her arms, and the next she found herself staring into the unforgiving face and merciless golden eyes of an immense Breed male whose naked torso, shoulders, and arms were camouflaged by a thick pattern of
dermaglyphs.

He was Gen One; Renata knew it instinctively. Her instincts also told her that this male was more lethal than most, stone cold.

A killer.

Terror rose up on her like a black tide. She knew that if she blasted him, she’d better be certain she could kill him swiftly, or else she and Mira both would be dead in that same instant. She didn’t dare attempt it when Mira might be made to suffer if she failed.

Mother Mary, to have come this far
—
to finally have Mira ensconced in her arms, mere steps away from freedom…

“Please,” Renata murmured, desperate to appeal to even his slightest inkling of mercy. “Not the child. Let her go…please.”

His silence was unnerving. Mira tried to lift her head from Renata’s shoulder, but Renata gently eased her back down, not wishing her to be frightened by the messenger of death who’d no doubt been dispatched by Edgar Fabien or Dragos himself.

“I’m going to set her down now,” Renata told him, not even sure he comprehended, let alone would comply.
“Just… let her go. I’m the one you want, not her. Just me.”

The hawklike golden eyes followed her every movement as Renata carefully extricated Mira from her grasp and slowly placed the girl’s feet on the ground. Renata put herself between the killer and the child, praying her death would be enough to satisfy him and his evil master.

“Rennie, what’s going on?” Mira asked from behind her legs, her small hands gripping the pantlegs of Renata’s Enforcement Agency fatigues as she peered around her. “Who is that man?”