by Lara Adrian
Renata opted for the stairs. She hurried toward them, past the spoke that branched off to the side. Another guard was in that stretch of hallway.
Damn it.
He saw her rush by. His boots thundered closer.
“Stop!” he shouted, coming around the corner of the corridor. “This is a restricted area—”
Renata pivoted and took him down with a hard mental blast. As he writhed on the floor, she gunned it into the stairwell and raced up the flight to the floor above.
For what wasn’t the first time, she berated herself for having left the lodge without any weapons. She couldn’t keep burning off her power before she even knew if Nikolai was here. She was only operating near half strength as it was; to fully recover from unloading on Lex that morning, she probably needed to shore up for the rest of the day. Unfortunately not an option.
She peered through the reinforced glass of the stairwell door, taking in the clinical layout of the place. A handful of Breed males in white lab coats strolled past on their way to one of the many rooms that branched off the main corridor. Too many for her to take on by herself, even if she was running on all cylinders.
And then there was the small matter of the armed Enforcement Agent posted at the far end of the hallway.
Renata leaned against the interior wall of the stairwell, tipping her head back and quietly exhaling a curse. She’d made it in this far, but what the hell made her think she could penetrate a secured facility like this and actually survive?
Desperation was the answer to that question. A determination that refused to accept that this might be as far as she could go. She had no choice but forward. Into the fire, if that’s what it took.
Fire, she thought, her gaze turning back to the corridor outside the stairwell. Mounted on the wall across from her was a red emergency alarm.
Maybe there was a chance, after all…
Renata crept out of the stairwell and pulled the lever down. A pulsing bell split the air, sending the place into instant chaos. She slipped into the nearest patient’s room and watched as attendants and clinicians raced around in confusion. When it seemed they were all occupied with the false emergency, Renata stepped out into the empty corridor to begin her room-to-room search for Nikolai.
It wasn’t difficult to decide where he might be. Only one room had an armed Enforcement Agent assigned to it. That guard was still there, manning his post despite the alarm that had sent the rest of the floor’s attendants scattering.
Renata glanced at the gun riding the guard’s hip and hoped like hell she wasn’t making a huge mistake.
“Hey,” she said, approaching him at an easy gait. She smiled brightly despite the fact that in that same instant he was scowling and reaching for his weapon. “Can’t you hear that alarm? Time for you to take a break.”
She hit him with a sudden, sizable blast. As the big male crumbled to the floor, she ran to peer inside the room behind him.
A blond vampire lay strapped to a bed, naked, convulsing and straining against the metal bonds that held him down. The Breed skin markings that swirled and arced over his chest and down his thick biceps and thighs were livid with pulsating color, seeming almost alive the way the saturations mutated from shades of crimson and deep purple to darkest black. His face was hardly human, completely transformed by the presence of his fangs and the glowing coals of his eyes.
Could it be Nikolai? At first, Renata wasn’t sure. But then he lifted his head and those feral amber eyes locked on to her. She saw a flash of recognition in them, and a misery that was palpable even from a distance.
Her heart twisted, burning with regret.
Good Lord, what had they done to him?
Renata grabbed the bulk of the unconscious guard and dragged him with her into the room. Nikolai bucked on the bed, snarling incomprehensibly, words that sounded close to madness.
“Nikolai,” she said, going to his bedside. “Can you hear me? It’s me, Renata. I’m going to take you out of here.”
If he understood, she couldn’t be certain. He growled and fought his bonds, fingers flexing and fisting, every muscle taut.
Renata bent down to strip a set of keys from the guard’s belt. She took his pistol too, and swore when she realized it was merely a tranq gun loaded with less than half a dozen rounds.
“I guess beggars can’t be choosy,” she muttered, stuffing the weapon into the waistband of her jeans.
She went back to Nikolai and started unlocking his restraints. When she freed his hand, she was stunned to feel it clamp down around her own.
“Leave,” he snarled viciously.
“Yeah, that’s what we’re working on here,” Renata replied. “Let go so I can unlock the rest of these damned things.”
He sucked in a breath, a low hiss that made the hairs at her nape prickle to attention. “You… leave … not me.”
“What?” Frowning, she pulled her hand free and leaned over him to loosen the other restraint. “Don’t try to talk. We don’t have much time.”
He gripped her so hard she thought her wrist would snap. “Leave. Me. Here.”
“I can’t do that. I need your help.”
Those wild amber eyes seemed to stare right through her, hot and deadly. But his punishing grasp eased. He fell back onto the bed as another convulsion racked him.
“Almost done,” Renata assured him, working quickly to unlock the last of his bonds. “Come on. I’ll help you up.”
She had to pull him to his feet, and even then he didn’t seem steady enough to stay upright, let alone make the hard dash their escape was going to call for. Renata gave him her shoulder. “Lean, Nikolai,” she ordered him. “I’ll do most of the work. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
He growled something indecipherable as she wedged herself under his bulk and started walking. Renata rushed for the stairwell. The steps were difficult for Nikolai, but they managed to make it down them all with only a few falters.
“Stay here,” she told him when they reached the bottom.
She sat him down on the last step and dashed out to clear their path to the shipping and receiving bay. The office at the end of the hall was still empty. Beyond the access door, however, the driver was still talking with the guard on duty, both of them anxious due to the bleat of fire alarms pealing all around them.
Renata strolled out with the tranquilizer gun drawn. The vampire saw her coming. Faster than she could react, he had drawn his pistol and fired off a shot. Renata hit him with a mental blast, but not before she felt a ripping heat slam into her left shoulder. She smelled blood, felt the hot trickle of it leaking down her arm.
Damn it—she was hit.
Okay now she was really pissed off. Renata blasted the vampire again and he staggered to one knee, dropping his weapon. The human driver screamed and dove behind the truck for cover as Renata strode forward and shot the vampire with two tranq rounds. He went down with barely a whimper. Renata walked around to find the driver cowering by the wheel.
“Oh, Jesus!” he cried as she came to stand before him. He put his hands up, face slack with fear. “Oh, Jesus! Please don’t kill me!”
“I won’t,” Renata answered, then shot him in the thigh with the tranq.
With both males down, she ran back to get Nikolai. Ignoring the screaming pain in her shoulder, she hurried him into the receiving bay and shoved him into the back of the supply truck where he’d be safe from daylight outside.
“Find something to hold onto,” she told him. “Things are going to get bumpy now.”
She didn’t give him a chance to say anything. Working quickly, she slammed the doors and threw the latch, sealing him inside. Then she jumped into the idling cab and threw the vehicle into gear.
As she crashed the truck through the receiving bay’s door and sped up the drive toward escape, she had to wonder if she’d just saved Nikolai’s life or condemned them both.
CHAPTER
Sixteen
His head was beati
ng like a drum. The constant, rhythmic pounding filled his ears, so deafening it dragged him toward consciousness after what seemed like an endless, fitful sleep. His body ached. Was he lying on the floor somewhere? He felt cold metal underneath his naked body, the heavy bulk of cardboard shipping crates jabbing into his spine and shoulder. A sheet of plastic covered him like a makeshift blanket.
He tried to lift his head but hardly had the strength. His skin felt livid, pulsating from head to toe. Every inch of him felt wrung out, stretched tight, hot with fever. His mouth was dry, his throat parched and raw.
He thirsted.
That need was all he could focus on, the only coherent thought swimming through his banging skull.
Blood.
Christ, he starved for it.
He could taste the hunger—the black, consuming madness—in every shallow breath that sifted through his teeth. His fangs filled his mouth. His gums throbbed where the huge canines descended, as though his fangs had been there for hours. Some distant, sober part of his logic noted the misfire on that calculation; a Breed vampire’s fangs normally displayed only in moments of heightened physical response, whether reacting to prey or passion or pure animal rage.
The drum still banging away in his head only made the throb of his fangs deepen. It was the pounding that woke him. The pounding that would not let him sleep now.
Something was wrong with him, he thought, even as he peeled his burning eyes open and took in the too-sharp, amber-washed details of his surroundings.
Small, confined space. Lightless. A box filled with more boxes.
And a woman.
All else faded once his gaze found her. Dressed in a long-sleeved black shirt and dark jeans, she lay in a fetal ball across from him, arms and legs tucked hard into the curve of her torso. A lot of her chin-length inky hair had fallen over the side of her face, concealing her features.
He knew her… or felt that he should.
A less cognizant part of him knew only that she was warm and healthy, defenseless. The air was tinged with the merest trace of sandalwood and rain. Her blood scent, some dim instinct roused to tell him. He knew it—and her—with a certainty that seemed etched in his own marrow. His dry mouth was suddenly wet in anticipation of feeding. Need coupled with opportunity lent him a strength he didn’t have a moment ago.
Quietly he levered himself up off the floor and moved into a low crouch. Sitting on his haunches, he cocked his head, watching the female sleep. He crept closer, a predatory crawl that brought him right on top of her. The amber glow of his irises bathed her in golden light as he let his starving gaze roam over her body.
And that ceaseless drumming was louder here, the vibration so clear he could feel it in the soles of his bare feet. It banged in his head, commanding all of his attention. Drawing him closer, then closer still.
It was her pulse. Staring down at her, he could see the soft tick of her heartbeat fluttering at the side of her neck. Steady, strong.
The very spot he meant to catch between his fangs.
A low rumble—a growl emanating from his own throat—rolled through the stillness of the place.
The female stirred under him.
Her eyelids flipped open, startled, then went wider. “Nikolai.”
At first the name hardly registered to him. The fog in his mind was so thick, his thirst so total, he knew nothing else but the urge to feed. It was more than an urge—it was insatiable compulsion. Certain damnation.
Bloodlust.
The word traveled through his hunger-swamped mind like a phantom. He heard it, knew instinctively to fear it. But before he could fully grasp what the word meant, it was ghosting away from him, back to the shadows.
“Nikolai,” the woman said again. “How long have you been awake?”
Her voice was familiar to him somehow, a peculiar comfort to him, but he couldn’t quite place her. Nothing seemed to make sense to him. All that made sense was that tempting thud of her carotid and the deep hunger that compelled him to reach out and take what he needed.
“You’re safe here,” she told him. “We’re in the back of the supply truck I took from the containment facility. I had to stop and rest for a while, but I’m good to go now. It’s going to be dark soon. We should keep moving before we’re spotted.”
As she spoke, images flashed through his memory. The containment facility. Pain. Torture. Questions. A Breed male called Fabien. A male he wanted to kill. And this brave woman… she was there too. Incredibly, she had helped him to escape.
Renata.
Yes. He knew her name after all. He didn’t know why she had come for him, or why she would try to save him. Didn’t matter.
She was too late.
“They forced me,” he croaked, his voice sounding detached from his body, rough as gravel. “Too much blood. They forced me to drink it … ”
She stared at him. “What do you mean, they forced you?
“Tried to… to push me into overdose. Addiction.”
“Blood addiction?”
He gave a vague nod and coughed, pain racking his chest. “Too much blood… it brings on Bloodlust. They asked me questions… wanted me to betray the Order. I refused, so they… punished me.”
“Lex said they would kill you,” she murmured. “Nikolai, I’m sorry.”
She lifted her hand as though she might touch him.
“Don’t,” he growled, snatching her by the wrist.
She gasped, tried to pull free. He didn’t let her go. Her warm skin seared his fingertips and palm, everywhere he touched her. He could feel the movement of her bones and lean muscles, the racing of her blood as it coursed through the veins of her arm.
It would be so easy to bring that tender wrist up to his mouth.
So tempting to pin her beneath him and drink himself straight into damnation.
He knew the precise moment that she went from surprise to apprehension. Her pulse kicked. Her skin tightened in his grasp.
“Let go of me, Nikolai.”
He held on, the beast in him wondering whether to start on her wrist or her neck. His mouth watered, fangs aching to pierce her tender flesh. And he hungered for her in another way too. There was no hiding his rigid need. He knew it was the Bloodlust driving him, but that didn’t make him any less dangerous.
“Let go,” she said again, and when he finally released her, she scooted back, putting some distance between them. There wasn’t far for her to go. Stacked boxes hemmed her in from behind, beyond that the wall of the truck’s interior. The way she moved, halting and careful, made the predator in him sense weakness.
Was she in some kind of pain? If so, her eyes didn’t reflect it. Their pale color seemed steely as she stared at him, defiant.
He glanced down and his feral eyes lit on the gleaming barrel of a pistol.
“Do it,” he murmured.
She shook her head. “I don’t want to hurt you. I need your help, Nikolai.”
Too late for that, he thought. She had pulled him out of purgatory at the hands of his captors, but he’d already gotten a taste of hell. The only way out was to starve the addiction, deny it from taking full hold. He didn’t know if he was strong enough to fight his thirst.
He wouldn’t be, so long as Renata was near him.
“Do it … please. Don’t know how much longer I can hold out … ”
“Niko—”
The beast in him exploded. With a roar, he bared his fangs and lunged for her.
The shot rang out that next instant, a stunning clap of thunder that finally, gratefully, silenced his misery.
Renata sat back on her heels, the tranq gun still gripped in her hands. Her heart was racing, part of her stomach still lodged in her throat after Nikolai had sprung on her with his huge fangs bared. Now he lay in a sprawl on the floor, motionless except for his shallow, labored breathing. Aside from his churning skin markings, with his eyes shut and his fangs hidden behind his closed mouth, there was little way to tell that he was the sa
me violent creature who might have torn out her jugular.
Shit.
What the hell was she doing here? What the hell was she thinking, allying herself with a vampire, imagining she might actually be able to trust one of their kind? She knew firsthand how treacherous they were—how lethal they could turn in just an instant. She might have been killed just now. There was a moment when she really thought she would be.
But Nikolai had tried to warn her. He didn’t want to harm her; she’d seen that torment in his eyes, heard it in his broken voice in that instant before he would have leapt on her. He was different from the others like him. He had honor, something she’d assumed was lacking in the Breed as a whole, given that her examples were limited to Sergei Yakut, Lex, and those who served them.
Nikolai couldn’t have known her weapon didn’t hold bullets, and yet he’d forced her to take him down. Begged her for it. She had been through some pretty rough things in her life, but Renata didn’t know that kind of torment and suffering. She was quite sure she hoped she never would.
The wound in her shoulder burned like hell. It was bleeding again, worse, after this tense physical confrontation. At least the bullet had passed through cleanly. The nasty hole it left behind was going to need medical attention, although she didn’t see a hospital in her near future. She also didn’t think it wise to stay near Nikolai now, especially while she was bleeding and the only thing keeping him away from her carotid was that single dose of sedatives.
The tranq gun was empty.
Night was falling, she was nursing a bleeding gunshot wound and the added bonus of her lingering reverb. And staying in the stolen truck was like hiding out with a large bull’s-eye target on their backs.
She needed to ditch the vehicle. Then she needed to find someplace safe where she could patch herself up well enough for her to push on. Nikolai was an added problem. She wasn’t ready to give up on him, but he was no use to her in his current condition. If he could manage to shake the terrible aftereffects of his torture, then maybe. And if not… ?
If not, then she had just wasted more precious time than she cared to consider.