Lara Adrian's Midnight Breed 8-Book Bundle (180 page)

“The prolonged lack of sustenance is painful, of course,” Dragos continued, “but in another few days, his bodily functions will begin to slow to a suitable level. We’ve been administering regular doses of sedatives to speed the process along, but unfortunately with this type of
operation, time is the only proven, most certain method… do tell me if I’m boring you, Herr Roth.”

Roth snapped himself out of his distraction. He inclined his head in a nod that was full of careful respect. “Not at all, sire.”

It was suicide to piss Dragos off, and based on the Breed male’s outwardly pleasant tone, he was positively seething.

“You’re beginning to concern me, Roth. Is the trouble you’ve been having lately with that pest back home in Germany diverting your attention away from more important matters?”

Although it grated, he lowered his head even farther. “No, sire. Not in the least.”

Dragos knew about the destruction of Roth’s Darkhaven in Hamburg and the country house. He knew Roth’s mate had been caught up in the violence, but he knew nothing of the fact that she and the one perpetrating the assaults had a history together.

Roth had his own history with Reichen, too. A hatred that began months before Claire entered the picture, though he often wondered if Reichen understood the depth of his enmity, or the lengths to which Roth had been willing to go in order to see Reichen suffer for it.

He had to rein in the current situation back home in Hamburg, and that meant making sure that Andreas Reichen met a swift, certain, and preferably painful, demise.

Roth lifted his head to meet the hard stare of his commander. “You’ve no cause for concern whatsoever, sire. Our mission is my only priority.”

“Good.” Dragos’s shrewd gaze drilled into him. “See that it is, Herr Roth.”

On the other side of the viewing window, the Ancient
let loose with another agonized howl. Dragos watched, unflinching, as the creature who was his father’s father clawed at himself and shrieked in pain.

“I’ve no further need of you at this time,” Dragos murmured without looking at Roth. “I will look for a report of your current status later this evening.”

“Yes, sire,” Roth hissed through a tightly held smile.

That smile turned to a sneer as he exited the lab and headed out to attend his business for Dragos. When his cell phone rang in his pocket, it was all he could do not to crush the thing in his fist as he stormed through the bunker.

“What is it,” he snapped into the receiver.

He listened, blood boiling in his veins, as an Enforcement Agent from Hamburg informed him that they had his Breedmate safely in custody.

“Is she alone?”

“Yes, Director Roth. And by some miracle, she appears to be unharmed. We have her with us here at your office in the Speicherstadt.”

“Excellent.” Roth turned into an unoccupied supply room and closed the door behind him. “Put her on the line. I would have a word with her.”

Claire wanted to ignore the Enforcement Agent knocking on the bathroom door, but she couldn’t hide in there forever. No more than she could avoid talking to Wilhelm, who was apparently on the phone right now, waiting to speak with her.

“Frau Roth,” called the agent. “Is everything all right in there?”

She got up from the floor where she’d been sitting and
went over to open the door. As she came out of the dark room, the agent thrust his cell phone toward her. She took it. Slowly brought it up to her ear.

As soon as she heard Wilhelm’s breath blowing hotly across the receiver, she knew that he was furious with her. Her veins jangled a warning that she had no patience to acknowledge.

“You lied to me,” she said by way of greeting. “But then, you’ve lied about many things, haven’t you?”

His answering scoff was as sharp as a blade. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The men you sent to the house earlier tonight. They had no intention of taking Andreas out of there peacefully. You sent a death squad to kill him.”

“Andreas Reichen is a very dangerous individual,” came the icy reply. “I was only thinking of your safety, Claire.”

“Really?” Her voice climbed up slightly, enough to draw anxious looks from her Enforcement Agency watchdogs. “If my safety was anything of an issue to you, then why did you insist that I stay there with him? You practically thrust me at him.”

A low-toned, amused chuckle grated across her nerves. “Truthfully, I don’t see the point of your distress, darling. You did manage to come out of the situation with your pretty neck unscathed, I assume.”

Claire dismissed the obviously weighted comment with a tight shake of her head. She wasn’t going to let him shame her when he made her sick with anger and revulsion and not a little fear. “What about the girl from
Aphrodite
, Wilhelm? Did she walk away from you unscathed?”

Silence stretched on the other end of the line and it
gave Claire the courage to keep going, to lay everything out in one rush of breath.

“What do you know about the attack on Andreas’s Darkhaven, Wilhelm? Did you have something to do with that?” She practically choked on the awful words. “Did you send a Minion into his home with a death squad on orders to kill everyone inside? Are you the cold-blooded murderer he says you are?”

“For Christ’s sake, Claire. Listen to yourself. You are spewing a lot of paranoid nonsense.”

“Am I?” She heard the hesitancy in his voice. She could practically hear the wheels in his shrewd mind turning, calculating his errors and how to smooth them over. “What is this thing between you and Andreas? Has he threatened to expose you in some way, or is this personal … because of the past?”

“I could care less about the past,” he replied, utterly devoid of emotion. “And unless I miss my guess, Claire, this thing between Reichen and me became about as personal as it could get just a short time ago. What kind of mate would I be to you if I let him defile the sanctity of our bond and simply walk away uncontested? There’s not a male alive in the entire Breed nation who would deny me the right to defend your honor.”

Oh, God. He was right
.

If the violence Andreas had orchestrated the past few weeks was not reason enough, in drinking from her, a blood-bonded Breedmate, he had just written his own death warrant.

Claire swallowed the lump of dread that crawled into her throat. “You’ve never loved me, Wilhelm. Have you? Why did you want me for your mate? Why do you care
what I do now, when I have never truly been a part of your life? Our bond has never been anything but a farce—”

“If you are looking for a way to justify your actions, Claire, you are sorely mistaken. The fact is, you are my mate. If and when I get my hands on Andreas Reichen, I will demand the full rights due me. You may count on that.”

She could hear the danger in his tone and knew from the sharp way he’d cut her off that she would find no mercy in him whatsoever. She had never been one to cower, but the thought of him sending more of his death dealers into the city after Andre made her heart squeeze like it was in a vise. “Wilhelm, please …”

“Don’t beg me, Claire. Not for him,” he snapped, full of venom. “Put the agent back on the phone now. You’re going to go with the Enforcement Agents to their headquarters and help them in their pursuit of this … animal.”

“Wilhelm, no—”

“Put the agent on the phone, goddamn you!”

She didn’t have to get the armed guards’ attention. Both of them gaped at her as Wilhelm’s furious outburst ricocheted across the room. One of the agents came over to her and extracted the phone from her reluctant grasp. He listened for only a moment before he motioned the other guard over to Claire and instructed him not to let her leave their custody.

Claire’s heart banged in her chest as the agent wrapped up the private conversation. She could see the confusion and sympathy in the Breed male’s eyes as he hung up and came toward her with the steady calm of a soldier accustomed to handling difficult situations.

“You need to come with us now,” he told her gently but firmly “We have orders, Frau Roth. I’m sorry.”

“No.” He reached for her and Claire’s panic spiked. “I won’t go with you. Take your hands off me!”

The second agent moved in, his expression grave. “Let’s not make this difficult, all right?”

Claire wrenched her arm out of the bruising grasp. She took two lunging steps away from them, fully prepared to bolt if she could just reach the door. She didn’t even come close. One guard was there before she had a chance to blink. The other came up behind her and shoved something hard and cold against the small of her back.

She felt the searing bite of the taser for only an instant before the shock took her legs out from under her. She crashed to the floor on a broken scream, pain rippling through her.

“Pick her up,” she heard one of them say from above her. “I’ll go open the vehicle.”

Claire felt large, hard hands hoist her to her feet. She heard the apartment door open, felt the incoming chill of night air skate across the floor from outside. Then a low grunt and a sick, sodden sound of someone choking, gasping, sputtering for breath.

The agent holding on to Claire let go as he faced whatever it was that now stood on the threshold of the open door. “What the fuck!”

Claire lifted her head and couldn’t hold back her cry of stunned relief.

Andreas
.

Oh, God… he came back for her
.

His big body blocked the doorway, his eyes blazing, fangs glistening white with menace. At his feet lay the bleeding corpse of the agent who’d tasered her, his throat brutally skewered and all but severed by a length of twisted black wrought iron. As the second agent drew his weapon
and prepared to fire, Andreas stalked inside and fired on him with his companion’s gun, killing him with the swift, deadly aim of a sniper.

Then he was at her side as if nothing else existed.

“Claire…Jesus Christ,” he said, his voice gruff, his expression as grave as she’d ever seen it. He smoothed his hands over her face, touching every inch of her as if he feared she was broken. His strong fingers trembled against her skin. For one moment she thought—desperately hoped—he might kiss her again. “Are you hurt?”

She shook her head, feeling wobbly and unstable until Andreas wrapped his arm around her shoulders and guided her away from the blood and death on the floor. “We’re not safe in the city now,” she told him. “I just talked to Wilhelm. He knows that I’m with you. He knows that you drank from me tonight.”

Andreas’s mouth compressed tightly. Something dark flashed in his eyes. Remorse, perhaps? Was it regret?

“I don’t think either one of us is safe from him now,” she said.

He stared at her for a long moment, an intense, searching look. Then he gave her a curt nod. “You’re coming with me, Claire. No matter what happens, I will keep you safe.”

CHAPTER
Ten

S
tripped of their weapons, keys, cell phones, and cash, Reichen left the dead Enforcement Agents where they lay, then motioned for Claire to follow him to the SUV parked on the street outside.

“Where will we go?” she asked him as they leapt into the vehicle and Reichen hauled ass away from the curb. “It won’t take Wilhelm long to have half the Agency on our heels.”

Reichen acknowledged that fact with a grim nod. “We can’t stay in Hamburg. It would probably be wise if we left Germany altogether.”

“And go where? He has contacts all over Europe. We can’t trust anyone in the Darkhavens or the Enforcement Agency not to turn us in to him the first chance they get.”

“We can trust the Order.”

In his periphery, Reichen saw Claire’s doubtful reaction. “The Order? From what I’ve heard about them, they don’t exactly have an open-door policy. Why would a dangerous group of vigilantes from the States be willing to help us?”

Reichen resisted the urge to correct her opinion of the Order, one that had been unfairly yet widely accepted among the general Breed population for generations. He slid a glance at her. “I’ve been working with Lucan, Tegan, and the other warriors for close to a year now. The night my Darkhaven was attacked, I was away from Berlin, following up on a mission for the Order. We’d been gathering intel concerning a spate of Gen One assassinations and looking into possible links to blood clubs around Europe.”

“You and the Order… working together?” She got quiet then, considering him in studied silence as he turned the SUV onto a busy boulevard that led out of Hamburg. “There’s so much I don’t know about you anymore, Andre. Everything about you seems so different now.”

Not everything, he thought, recalling all too easily how familiar she’d felt pressed against him, her mouth on his in a heated kiss. He felt possessive around her. Fiercely protective. All the things he’d felt with her in the beginning. Time had diffused none of it, though that hardly gave him cause to celebrate.

The need to hold her close right here and now was nearly overwhelming. He knew she was basically all right, but just the idea of her being shoved around by the agents—tasered by them, for God’s sake—made his blood boil with fury. The taste of her fear, her pain, still echoed in his veins.