Lara Adrian's Midnight Breed 8-Book Bundle (179 page)

“I need some air,” he muttered. “Jesus Christ, this was a fucking mistake coming here with you. I need to get the hell out of here.”

“Andreas.” He pivoted to head for the door, but before he could take more than a couple of steps, Claire was right behind him. “Where are you going? Talk to me, please.”

He kept walking, hoping like hell she would just let him go. He wanted Roth to pay for what he’d done, but did he really have a right to take Claire down in the process? Some selfish part of him reasoned that it would only be fair if Roth’s mate was part of his price. What better vengeance than to ruin the corrupt son of a bitch and claim his woman for his own?

Jesus.

He didn’t want to go there.

As tempting as it was, that wasn’t what this was about. He’d gone to great lengths decades ago to shield Claire from the deadly monster he had become. He hadn’t done that only to come back and destroy her now… had he?

“Andreas, please don’t walk away from me.” Her voice trailed him as he reached to open the door. She let out a choked, humorless laugh, full of pain and raw contempt. When she finally found her voice again, it was soft with condemnation. “Goddamn you. How can you still make me feel this way after all these years? Damn you for leaving me! And damn you for coming back like this, just when I thought you were gone forever and I might finally be able to forget you.”

In spite of every instinct that shouted for him to put one foot in front of the other and take his deadly business with Roth far away from Claire, Reichen paused. She didn’t know how dangerous he was right now. Or maybe she did, but was too confused and pissed off to care.

She drew in an audible breath, then blew it out on a defeated-sounding sigh. “Goddamn you, Andre, for standing here and making me doubt every choice I’ve ever made.”

He turned to face her justifiable outrage. Blood thirst swamped him as he looked at her, his physical need for sustenance warring with the carnal desire that no amount of chill night air would be able to cool. She was so beautiful and strong. So good and honest. And she was furious with him now; the frantic ticking of her pulse at the base of her buttery light brown throat was testament to that.

Reichen couldn’t look away from the steady pound of her heartbeat.

The fire had taken its toll on him as much as the hit he took to the chest earlier tonight. He was no longer in control of his thirst; it had overthrown his will now. It was all he knew as he moved toward Claire, everything about him that was Breed and male trained wholly on this woman.

“Why did you leave me?” she asked as he neared her.

He grunted, savoring the vanilla sweet scent of her blood as it raced beneath the surface of her delicate skin. “To protect you.”

She frowned, dubious. “From what?”

“From the worst of me.”

She gave a slow shake of her head. “I was never afraid of you, Andre. I’m still not afraid.”

“You damn well should be …
Frau Roth.”

He bared his fangs and pinned her in the amber glow of his transformed eyes—one brief moment’s warning, enough for her to back away from him or hit him or scream. She couldn’t know how hard it was for him to give her even that much. He moved closer to her, crowding her with his body, even as he told himself he still had honor, that the fire living inside him hadn’t yet burned away all of his humanity.

But that was a lie.

He felt the bleak hollowness of that hope crumble the instant his fangs bit into the tender flesh of Claire’s throat.

She gasped. Her hands came up between the hard press of his body against hers, her palms flattened across his sternum. He felt her sudden tension, her jolt of shock and adrenaline as he caged her in his arms and drew the first taste of her warm, rich blood into his mouth.

At first, he fed with mindless hunger. Gulp after gulp, driven by the primal need for nourishment. But through the haze of his blood-fevered mind, as he drank from Claire’s vein, he began to feel something… else.

Her blood scent swamped him, filling his head like the sweetest intoxication. The rapid beat of her pulse against his tongue now blossomed into a visceral pound that echoed in his own blood. Possession rose within him, dark and dangerous. He held her fast in his bite, savoring the taste of her as his body went rigid with the need to claim her in a more carnal way, as well.

He felt her fingers digging into his back as he drank from her, breath rasping in soft, shallow pants against his ear. His senses filled with her. A low, humming power flowed into him, power he felt roaring through his cells and into every fiber of his body. Deeper still, into the fabric of his soul, the core of his entire being.

Claire was the first, the only Breedmate he’d ever drunk from, and now there could be no other for him so long as she lived. All that was Breed in him came alive as though he’d been asleep all his life and now overflowed with a profound awareness of this female—now and forever. An eternal stamp, a bond of blood.

A connection to her that he could not undo except by death, hers or his own.

“Andreas.”

Claire’s soft cry of distress tore through him like a knife.

Horrified at what he’d just done to her—to both of them—he sealed her wound with a quick sweep of his tongue and reeled back on his heels. Her cheeks were flushed dark rose, her breath sawing through her parted lips as she stared at him in abject shock. Reichen felt her dread like his own. Every intense emotion she felt from now on would be his, as well.

“Andre,” she whispered, lifting her hand up to touch his healing bite. Her face was twisted with a miserable sort of confusion. “Oh, my God…What have you done?”

He took a step backward, leveled by shame.

Claire belonged to another male. Not him. She had given herself to Roth, whether Reichen liked it or not. She was already blood bonded, as Roth was blood bonded to her. Now, with this unconscionable breach of that sacrament, Reichen had imposed himself on that bond.

In drinking from Claire, he had irrevocably linked himself to her.

He would be drawn to her always. Aware of her always. It was the most sacred gift a Breedmate could give one of his kind, and he had taken it from her—stolen it—in an act of pure selfish need.

“Forgive me, Claire,” he murmured. Sick with himself for how deeply he wanted her, with or without the drumming intensity of a blood bond, he drew farther away from her. He drifted backward, inching toward the door. “Ah, Christ… Please, forgive me.”

CHAPTER
Nine

A
ndreas, wait.”

He didn’t wait. No, he wouldn’t even look at her. Spinning around, he was at the door faster than her human eyes could follow the motion. He threw the door open to the cold night. Stepped onto the concrete stoop outside.

“Andre…”

The brief glance he cast at her over his shoulder was feral and hot. His fangs gleamed stark white, frighteningly large. Claire could still feel their sharp points at the tender spot on her neck. If she lived a hundred more years, she didn’t think she would ever forget the shocking, sensual pain of his bite. Or the pleasure.

God, the searing, wondrous rush of pleasure to feel Andreas suckling from her vein.

It had damned them both in an instant. She knew it, and so did he; the truth of it had been written across the taut lines of his face, and was now, in the tormented glow of his gaze as he paused to stare at her under the light of the streetlamps.

She was not his to claim. Claire had to remind herself of that fact when her legs started to move instinctively toward him. She belonged to another by blood and vow, if not by love.

Another who would have felt the emotional spike in Claire’s body as if it were his own. According to Breed law, there was no greater sin than to betray the sacrament of the blood bond.

But as Andreas wheeled around and leapt off the stoop, and Claire ran to the door only in time to see him disappear into the night, she knew a far worse sin. The sin of having given herself to someone as his blood-bonded mate while her heart still yearned for another.

Thirty years ago, she had been a young woman barely into her twenties—naive about so many things, not the least of which was the existence of another race of beings that thrived on blood and darkness, incredible beings that were somehow human … yet far from it.

She had been a student abroad on her own for the first time when she was assaulted by a vampire in this very district of Hamburg. She’d been spared from the bite by another like him, not a crude beast who lunged at her from the shadows but a tall, golden, sophisticated gentleman named Wilhelm Roth.

He took her into his home—his Darkhaven, as she would learn it was called—and offered her his protection
while she was in the city. Claire had liked Wilhelm Roth and his mate, a timid young woman named Ilsa who bore the same odd birthmark on her ankle as Claire had on the side of her neck. Claire learned a lot in those first few weeks of living among the Breed as Wilhelm Roth’s ward, including the fact that it was entirely possible for her to fall in love with one of their kind, which is exactly what happened once she met Andreas Reichen.

After four months together, she’d been devastated when Andreas had abruptly vanished from her life. Wilhelm Roth had given her a strong shoulder to lean on. Not long afterward it had been Claire’s turn to offer him support, when he lost Ilsa to a Rogue vampire attack. Claire had known even then that compassion and sympathy were hardly the same thing as love. Wilhelm hadn’t seemed to mind that her heart was still broken and bleeding for Andreas when he pressed her to be his mate later that year. Then again, it wasn’t even a week after they were blood bonded and mated that Wilhelm moved her out to the country while he remained in Hamburg.

What a terrible, foolish mistake she’d made. She knew that now—a bitter lesson when her head was filled with doubts about Wilhelm and her heart was breaking all over again for Andreas.

Claire was still reeling from that understanding as a black SUV screeched to a halt at the curb below her. Two heavily armed Enforcement Agents climbed out of the vehicle and caught her in the blinding beam of a flashlight.

“Frau Roth?” one of them asked, clearly surprised to find her there. “We were alerted by silent alarm to a break-in at the office. Are you all right?”

She didn’t know if she responded or not. She felt numb, adrift… bereft.

“Is anyone else in the building?” the other guard asked her.

“Are you alone here, Frau Roth? How did you manage to escape the madman who’s been wreaking bloody havoc the past couple of nights?”

Claire had no answers for them. All she wanted to do was run after Andreas, but the two big, well-armed agents kept her close as they ushered her back inside and began a search of the place.

“Don’t worry,” one of them assured her. “This nightmare is all over now. We, along with Director Roth, are going to get the bastard who attacked your home and put him down like the rabid dog he is.”

“That’s right,” agreed the second man, smiling as if to reassure her. “You’ll see. Soon you’ll be someplace safe, as if none of the past two nights ever happened.”

Claire excused herself to the bathroom and sat in the darkness, trying not to scream.

In an underground facility hidden below an unspoiled forest in southern New England, a creature that did not belong to this age—or, in fact, this Earth—bared its enormous fangs and let out a bone-jarring roar. Seven feet tall, hairless and naked except for the thick tangle of undulating skin markings that covered it from head to toe, the Ancient was an awesome, terrible sight to behold. All the more so as it paced the cylindrical UV prison that confined it, murder blazing from the thin pupils nestled in pits of fiery amber.

Watching from a safe distance above in the observation room of the high-tech laboratory wing, Wilhelm Roth was distracted by a sudden, simple truth: His Breedmate was
betraying him with Andreas Reichen. Roth’s senses told him the instant she’d bled for Reichen. The taste of it was acid on his tongue. Like the captive Ancient in the other room, Roth shook with the sudden urge to bellow in wild rage, but he clamped his molars together and bit back his fury.

Even now he could feel Claire’s torment, the spike of her emotions—her confusion and despair—reverberating in his own veins. That she still pined for Reichen came as no surprise to him. She’d tried very hard to banish her feelings for him all these years, but her will was weak and her blood had easily given her away. Not that Roth had ever particularly cared about Claire’s faithless heart. Love was a fleeting, fickle emotion that he’d never had much use for. Ambition and drive, possessions and winning… these were the things he valued.

And he was a damned sore loser.

“The Ancient has been denied feeding for twenty-one days,” said the Breed male who watched with Roth from the windowed observation room above.

His name was Dragos, although he’d gone by another name, one of several aliases, when he first approached Roth about joining his revolution. Or, rather, his
evolution
, as Dragos’s plan was intended to elevate the Breed from the shadowy underworld they were forced to inhabit now, to a place of supreme power over mankind. One that would see Dragos and a few of his hand-picked associates at the helm.