As they stepped outside the building, Brynne’s apology sat on the very tip of her tongue. All of the alcohol in her bloodstream seemed to dissolve under the weight of her embarrassment, leaving her feeling cold and foolish.
And never more alone.
“Zael, I—”
She didn’t know what she could say to fix things. She wasn’t even sure she knew how.
But then something bright in the starlit distance caught her eye—something disturbing, setting the skyline across the Thames aglow.
A fire.
No, it was more than a fire. It was a churning, massive plume of flames and roiling, thick gray smoke. Outside the club, a crowd was gathering to look at the spectacle.
As they all watched in silent horror, a low rumble sounded across the water…followed by the unspeakable crash and roar of crumbling metal, glass, and mortar.
“Oh, my God,” Brynne murmured. She glanced over at Zael, feeling all of the blood drain from her face. “That’s the government block at Vauxhall Cross. That building that just went down? Zael…It was JUSTIS headquarters.”
CHAPTER 4
Order Headquarters
Washington, D.C.
Lucan Thorne had been a warrior far too long and seen too damned much for anything to take him by surprise anymore. Yet as he stood in front of a wall of video monitors in the Order’s war room at headquarters, watching with most of his lieutenants and their mates as the heart of London’s government district burned, he couldn’t deny the cold sense of disbelief that gripped him.
The iconic white building that once housed the famed British MI6, and, for the past twenty years, the global operations headquarters for JUSTIS…gone.
Nothing but rubble. The highly secured, impenetrable modern fortress and all who’d been inside it tonight, consumed by the massive cloud of dark ash and searing fire that lit up the London skyline like a volcano.
“Opus Nostrum wasted no time claiming responsibility,” Gideon said grimly from beside Lucan. “It’s all over the Internet now.”
The Order’s technology expert had a tablet in hand, scanning underground sites where hackers and other society misfits liked to boast and preen for one another. Gideon was as much a warrior as any of his comrades, but he also had skills that would leave any black hat computer genius in his wake.
Lucan ground out a tight curse. “We should’ve seen this coming.”
“No one saw this coming,” Gideon said. “There was no chatter, no posturing. No threats. Nothing but silence leading up to this attack.”
“Even so, we should have known they wouldn’t let us take out two of their key players without some kind of response.”
Sterling Chase, head of the Boston command center, shook his head as he considered. “This kind of assault takes time. It takes planning and coordination. You don’t just roll up to a high-security government facility with enough firepower to raze the place.”
Dante, another of the longtime Order members, grunted in agreement. “Not without getting your own ass blown to pieces as soon as your toe crosses the property line.”
“There were no reports of unusual activity anywhere in the area,” added Tegan.
The massive male was first generation Breed, like Lucan—both of them powerful Gen Ones, both of them centuries-old founding members of the Order. They had gone from friends to enemies and back again in the long time they’d known each other. Now, both mated to extraordinary women who’d given them each brave sons who shared their fathers’ commitment to the Order, Lucan and Tegan had become as close as kin.
“No one saw this coming,” Tegan said, “let alone had time to prevent it.”
As much as Lucan wanted to believe that was true, the leader in him didn’t feel the weight of the blame on his shoulders any less.
“Is that what we’ll tell the public when they ask how this was allowed to happen? That we were all caught unaware and now we’re standing around with our dicks in our hands?”
“JUSTIS never wanted our help, Father.” Lucan’s son, Darion, stared at him from the other side of the room. The adult Breed male stood with a few of the other warriors’ grown sons who had gathered in the war room as the first reports were coming in from London.
As he spoke, several heads of the younger recruits nodded.
“Ask anyone in JUSTIS or the Global Nations Council,” Dare went on. “They don’t trust us and they don’t approve of our methods. They haven’t from day one.”
“Neither did the old guard of the Breed’s famously ineffective Enforcement Agency,” Rio pointed out. “But we outlasted them too.”
The Spanish warrior’s statement drew assenting comments from his fellow comrades Brock and Kade. Even Hunter, the formidable former assassin, voiced agreement.
Lucan glanced back to the fiery destruction still filling the video monitors. “I don’t give a damn about JUSTIS’s approval, or the GNC’s, or any other organization that talks a good game right up until a real threat comes around and blows them all to shit. I care about peace. I care about protecting the lives of the innocents who can’t do it for themselves.”
“We all do, Lucan.” His Breedmate, Gabrielle, moved in closer and nestled against him, her voice calm and rational, even in the face of terror like the kind that was dealt tonight. That steadiness was one of the things he’d always admired about her.
But she clung tightly to him as she spoke. Whether she intended the physical contact as a reassurance to herself or to him, Lucan wasn’t sure.
Gabrielle looked at Mathias Rowan, who led the Order’s command center in London. “Do we know how many people were in the building tonight?”
Mathias might have been home in England tonight himself, but he’d recently come to the States with his newly expecting Breedmate, Nova, to visit his friend Sterling Chase in Boston.
Mathias gave a vague shake of his head, his arm around Nova’s shoulder as the pair watched the horror unfold on the monitors. “They’re still working to get an accurate count. Given the late hour of the attack, there were few human members of JUSTIS on
