Temptra cursed and then laughed.
“The cavalry is here,” she said and shook her head. “I’ll get what I want, you know I will, Drakon. The question is, will he still be alive by the time you come to your senses.”
Trickles of blood rolled slowly down the neck of the man Temptra was holding and Ravyn screamed, “No!”
The red haze that had surrounded Temptra thickened and a heavy stench of sulfur filled the air. Reese, Magnum, Aiken and Ziva came running moving through the remnants of the smoke as Temptra used it as a cover to vanish, taking the human she’d been holding with her.
“Cree!” Ravyn yelled and fought her way out of Steele’s grasp. She ran to the spot where Temptra had been standing, falling into Magnum’s arms as he’d just stepped in that same area.
“Where’s Cree? How did she get him? Where’s she taking him?”
Steele listened to more questions rolling from Ravyn’s lips, every syllable filled with such pain and anguish it sliced through his skin like a heated blade. Whoever this Cree person was, he meant a lot to her. That shouldn’t have bothered him, it shouldn’t have made him feel like crap for bringing her into his world and secretly wanting her for himself. But fuck, nothing was going the way it was supposed to anymore.
“What the hell happened?” Ziva asked when she came to stand near Steele. “And who’s that guy?”
“Take him!” Steele, fueled by rage and the unfamiliar sting of jealousy, directed them to secure the guy Ravyn had called Vertis. “Robles’s body is in the house. By the chunk taken out of his neck, I’m pretty sure Temptra decided she no longer had any use for the middle-man.”
He was moving now, going to where Magnum held Ravyn. She was punching at his chest, kicking and screaming for him to let her go, but Magnum remained unmovable. Steele picked her up and walked past the other vehicles to the one he’d driven here. He used his magick to disengage the locks and opened the back door, easing her onto the seat. Closing the door, he activated the locks and walked around to the driver’s side to climb in.
She was still screaming, but nobody outside of the vehicle would hear her. Steele started the engine and drove. After about twenty minutes her screams turned into tears and his heart pounded with each sob. His fingers stayed tight on the steering wheel as he made his way through traffic, using the time to gather his thoughts and his strength. He had no idea how Ravyn had fought through the mind cleansing, nor did he know specifically who the guy named Cree was to her. All he knew at this moment was that there was no way he could let her out of his sight again. If he did, Temptra would kill her.
The Reaper would get to scratch another name off his list and Temptra’s search for that dagger would continue to lead to death. He wasn’t going to let any of that happen, not on his watch.
Chapter Fourteen
Ravyn waited until the SUV stopped moving and she heard the engine click off. She’d buried her face in the backseat, inhaling the scent of leather as she made sobbing noises long after her tears had dried. She wasn’t one to detest crying, but instead believed that a good cry was cleansing and sometimes rejuvenating. But her tears never lasted long. They weren’t meant to, because progress couldn’t be dampened by them. Instead, she’d taken the time she knew Steele was using to try to figure out what to say to her, or what to do with her after all that had happened, to think about what her plan of attack was going to be—because she was definitely going to attack.
First, she’d deal with Steele and whatever he and his friends had done to her last night when she’d been at that mountain place and then, with that bitch that had taken Cree. A good deal of her rage was being saved for that too-cute heffa.
Lifting her head slightly, she tried to peek out the window but all she could see was black, so she figured it had gotten dark on the ride to wherever they were. Maybe he’d brought her back to that mountain place. Some of her thoughts were still hazy, but she remembered most of what she figured were the good parts—the parts Steele and his friends tried to make her forget.
I would never drug you.
Wasn’t that what he’d said last night when she’d asked how she got to the mountain? Rage simmered on a low boil as she balled her fingers into fists and prepared to lunge at him the minute he opened that door for her to get out.
He was saying something, probably talking into his watch again the way she’d seen him doing when they were back at the senator’s house. She remembered that now too, since the second she stared into that woman’s—Steele had called her Temptra—eyes, memories had been coming back in chunks and spots of what felt like an energy void. Like she knew what that was. She only knew what it felt like when she recalled those moments, it was as if nothing was there but energy. A feeling that circled and roamed like it was searching for somewhere to go and settle. Weird, yes, but then everything that had happened in the last two weeks was weird and she was ready to finally get to the bottom of it.
His door opened and Ravyn waited, her limbs ready to act according to the instructions from her brain. How this was going to end she wasn’t quite sure, but she refused to be on the receiving end of any more lies, duplicity or whatever the hell else was going on around her. Either he was going to be straight with her
