“Yes, she did.” Although he was already tapping on his tablet, Gideon’s brows rose with blatant interest over the rims of his glasses. “But you’re too late. Brynne’s gone now.”
“Gone?” The newsflash hit Zael like a blow. “You don’t mean back to London?”
“No. Gone to feed in Georgetown. Tavia sent one of the warriors out with her as an escort.”
Zael wasn’t happy to hear she’d left the safety of the command center, let alone that she’d done so with another male. If she needed someone to protect her, then damn it, she could have asked him to take her.
Of course, she’d probably rather swallow her own tongue than ask him for help.
He realized he must have been wearing his displeasure on his face, because Gideon froze for a moment, cocking his head at him. Then he chuckled.
“Well, I’ll be damned.” He reached out and cuffed Zael on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Atlantean. Happens to the best of us.”
“What does?”
The warrior smirked. “You’ll figure it out.”
With that, he resumed his tapping, leaving Zael to stare after him as Gideon headed back down the corridor, once again thoroughly engrossed in his work.
CHAPTER 18
“You really don’t have to wait for me to finish here,” Brynne told the big dark-haired Gen One warrior who’d been tasked as her personal driver and bodyguard for the evening. “I feel ridiculous that Tavia insisted I be schlepped around like a child in need of supervision.”
To make matters worse, her sister had assigned Jordana’s warrior mate, Nathan, to the job. If Brynne had harbored even the slimmest hope of slipping her collar tonight in order to feed the way she needed to, she stood little chance of getting away from this warrior’s watchful eye.
“It could take a while,” she pointed out. “I’ll have to register and sign the contract before they even admit me.”
Nathan sat behind the wheel of the SUV as he parked at the curb, his expression unreadable. “Take whatever time you need.”
He wasn’t much of a talker, Brynne had gathered, but she wasn’t feeling particularly chatty herself. She’d been too busy calculating possible excuses for why she wasn’t going in to the blood Host parlor, and trying to guess how much longer she would be able to stave off the worst of her hunger if she didn’t get some relief tonight.
By the acid burn of her veins and the increasing throb of all her pulse points, she was perilously close to the edge already.
“You know, I’m a child of the labs too, Brynne.”
She glanced at him, startled by the unsolicited confession. “Yes. Tavia had mentioned it to me at one time. You were part of the Hunter program.”
“Assassins,” he confirmed grimly.
Brynne knew the basics. The same Breed madman who tinkered with DNA to create Tavia and her and a rumored dozen or more Breed females like them had also bred a race of Gen One boys from the Ancient he kept imprisoned in the lab and a cage full of Breedmates abducted from their families and used like chattel for his experiments and twisted pleasures.
Hunters like Nathan had been raised by handlers, as Brynne and her half-sisters had been. But where Brynne and the other Breed females were shackled by lies and abuse and genetic-stunting chemical therapies, the Hunters were kept obedient by the use of even crueler tactics.
Nathan looked at her finally, and there was a bleakness in his eyes that touched her. Not because she pitied him, but because she admired how normal his life seemed now, with Jordana. With the Order. With his mother, Corinne, and Hunter, her Gen One mate who was also a product of Dragos’s madness.
“No one who survived those damned labs did it unscathed,” Nathan said.
Brynne nodded. “I know.”
“Yeah, I know you do. But you look like you need someone to say it out loud for you now.”
She stared at him in the dim light of the dashboard. Although he had no idea how deep her wounds had gone, or how hideous her reality was even years and miles away from the torture of the labs, his compassion moved her.
She swallowed on an arid throat. “Thank you, Nathan.”
He gave a curt nod. “Go do what you have to do and take care of your needs. I’ll wait for you here.”
Certain she misheard him, or at least misunderstood his meaning, Brynne’s breath caught.
Did he know she dreaded walking into that parlor?
Holy shit. Was he giving her permission to go feed on her own terms?
“Nathan, I—”
She didn’t get the chance to say another word.
Without warning, something big fell from the roof of a nearby building and smashed onto a parked car about a block up the street. Metal crunched. Glass exploded. Alarm lights and sirens split the darkness.
People started screaming, pointing up at the roof of the nearby parking deck.
“What the fuck?” Nathan killed the engine. “Stay in the vehicle!”
He leaped out and vanished into the night before Brynne even realized he was moving.
She sucked in a gasp as she peered through the windshield.
Another body pitched to the street, plummeting down like a stuffed dummy freefalling off the parking garage rooftop. Except they weren’t dummies. They were humans—brutalized, broken, their clothing shredded and blood-soaked.
Savaged.
Nausea swamped Brynne as she realized what she was seeing. “Oh, my God.”
Something else descended to the street now. A Breed youth, his chin and the whole front of his body painted red from his crime. The young male dropped into a crouch next to his kill and howled like the animal he had become, his fangs enormous, his face feral with Bloodlust.
Holy shit.
The male was Rogue.
And he wasn’t alone. Another descended to the rooftop of a parked van, wearing more evidence of the slaughter.
Brynne instinctively reached for her JUSTIS-issued firearm, but her fingers came away empty. Dammit. She’d lost her service weapon the same day she’d lost her job with the agency.
Panic swept the street as swiftly as a flash
