by Lara Adrian
Irina Odolf lived in a small, tidy town house on a tree-lined residential street on the outskirts of Berlin’s west end. Elise was surprised, though not shocked, that the woman had decided to make her home outside the Darkhavens after losing her mate to Bloodlust. She likely would have done the same in her situation.
“There were just so many reminders of what I was missing after he was sent away,” Irina explained as she and Elise sat down for coffee in the sun-filled dining area. Glass doors shaded by vertical blinds overlooked the community’s snow-patched common courtyard that ran along the backs of the houses. “Petrov and I have many friends in our Darkhaven, but living there without him was too difficult. I suppose if he comes home—when he comes home,” she amended, idly smoothing the lacy edge of the tablecloth. “When he comes home, then we’ll return there and start our life over again.”
“I hope that day comes soon for you both, Irina.”
The Breedmate looked up with a teary-eyed smile. “So do I.”
Elise took a sip of her coffee, dimly aware of a slow pound building in her temples. It had been present since she got into the taxi that brought her here, a trip that had taken her through the center of the city, where the din of human thoughts had battered her through the metal and glass of the car. But she used the focus that Tegan had shown her, and the worst of her psychic pain had faded to a manageable level.
Being this close to a lot of humanity was certainly a test. Irina’s neighborhood was a tightly packed cluster of homes, with a steady stream of cars traveling up and down the street outside, bringing even more noise to the chatter filling her head.
And underneath the general rumble of discontent she was receiving, Elise detected something darker … just out of her reach.
“Would you like to see the letters?”
Irina’s voice snapped Elise back to attention. “Yes, of course.”
She followed the woman out of the dining room and into a cozy little den at the end of the hall. A man’s desk sat across from an inviting reading nook, the masculine furnishings impeccably polished and organized, as though awaiting the imminent arrival of their owner.
Irina motioned Elise over to the desk, where an open shoebox sat next to an old weaving that had been laid flat. A stack of folded papers rested on top. “Here they are.”
“May I?” Elise asked, reaching to pick up the collection of letters.
At Irina’s nod, she unfolded the first one and glanced at the page. It was filled with a hasty, violently uneven scrawl. The words were barely legible, written in what appeared to be Latin, by a hand that seemed guided by madness. Elise fanned through the other papers, finding more of the same on them.
“Do you think it means anything?”
Elise shook her head. “I can’t be sure. I’d like to show it to someone, though. You’re sure you don’t mind if I take these?”
“Do what you’d like. I have no use for them myself.”
“Thank you.”
Elise glanced at the weaving that lay on the desk. It was incredibly beautiful and obviously very old. She couldn’t resist tracing her finger over the intricate stitches of the medieval garden design. “This is lovely. The detail is incredible, like a painting done with a needle.”
“Yes, it is.” Irina smiled. “And whoever made it had an interesting sense of whimsy too.”
“How so?”
“I noticed it when the piece was wrapped around the stack of letters. Let me show you.”
She folded the square cloth diagonally, turning up one edge so that the designs on the lower left and upper right corners touched. At the place where they met, the delicate embroidery revealed the hidden shape of a teardrop falling into the basin of a crescent moon.
Elise laughed, delighted by the clever artistry of the work.
“The woman who made this was a Breedmate?”
“Apparently so.” Irina carefully smoothed it out again. “It must be from the Middle Ages, don’t you think?”
Elise couldn’t answer, even if she had a guess. At that instant, a lancing blast of pain sliced into her mind. It was pure menace, something deathly evil … and it was suddenly very close.
Inside the house.
“Irina,” she whispered. “Someone’s here.”
“What? What do you mean someone—”
She held up her hand to silence the woman, fighting through the mental assault as her mind filled with the violent thoughts of the intruder.
It was a Minion, sent on a mission to kill.
“We have to get out of here right now.”
“Get out of here? But I don’t—”
“You have to trust me. He’ll kill us both if he finds us.”
Irina’s eyes went wild with fright. She shook her head. “There’s no way out from back here. Only the window—”
“Yes. Hurry! Open it and get yourself out of here. I’ll be right behind you.”
Elise silently closed the room’s door, then dragged the bulky leather chair in front of it while Irina worked on opening the ground floor window. The Minion was quiet in his stealth as he prowled farther into the town house looking for his prey, but the savagery of his thoughts betrayed him as loudly as a screaming alarm.
He’d been sent by his Master to kill her, but he meant to drag things out. Make her bleed. Make her scream. That’s what he enjoyed the most about his job.
And he was almost giddy with the idea that he’d get to exercise his perversions on two women instead of just the one.
Oh, God, Elise thought, revulsion surging up the back of her throat.
She called upon the power of Tegan’s blood inside her and her own determination, working furiously to focus through the chilling knowledge of what was stalking toward her up the hallway.
“The window lock is stuck,” Irina gasped, struggling in her panic. “It won’t open!”
That worried shriek drew the Minion like a beacon. Heavy footsteps pounded toward the end of the hallway now. Elise grabbed a thick book from a shelf and ran to Irina’s side, smashing the heavy binding against the window casement to loosen the sticky lock.
“There it goes,” Elise said as the mechanism finally gave way. She dropped the book and pushed the glass aside, then knocked out the screen and let it fall to the ground below. “Climb out, Irina. Go now!”
She felt the Minion bearing down on the room where they hid. His thoughts were malicious, black with menace. She heard his guttural roar the instant before he threw himself at the door. He came at it again, then again. The hinges screamed with the impact, the frame splitting as he came at the thing again with the force of a battering ram.
“Elise!” Irina shrieked. “Oh, my God! What’s going on?”
She didn’t answer. There was no time. Elise lunged for the letters, but as she pivoted with them toward the window and her only hope of escape, the Minion shoved the door open wide enough for him to heave into the room. He threw the obstructing chair out of his way and came at her, brandishing a dreadful-looking hunting blade in his hand. He snarled, and the stretch of his features gave prominence to a vicious scar that cut down his forehead and onto his right cheek. The cloudy eye in the path of that scar was gleaming with malice.
“Don’t run away so soon, ladies. We’re going to have a little fun.”
Hard fingers clamped around Elise’s neck before she could dodge the Minion’s reach. He shoved her onto the surface of the desk and leaned over her. Slapped her so hard with the back of his big hand that her vision swam and the whole side of her face rang with pain. With a powerful drive of his arm, he planted the tip of the blade into the wood next to her head, missing her by a deliberate, scant inch.
His grin was full of sadistic humor as his fingers closed tighter on her neck. “Play nice and maybe I’ll let you live,” he lied.
Elise kicked and twisted, but his grip was unrelenting. With her free hand, she cast about for anything to use as a weapon. The shoebox tipped on the desk, spilling its odd collection of
cuff links, pictures … and a pearl-handled letter opener. Elise tried not to call attention to her find, but she was determined to get hold of it.
“Let her go!” Irina shouted.
“You’d better not move,” the Minion growled, glancing up at her in warning. “That’s right, bitch. You stay put, or your friend here is going to eat steel.”
Elise closed her eyes as Irina sobbed at the window, paralyzed by terror. But in the moment the Minion was distracted, Elise’s fingers closed around the hilt of the letter opener. She knew it would be a sorry match against the knife her attacker had, but it was better than nothing at all.
The second she got a firm grip, Elise brought the makeshift weapon up in a sweeping arc. It struck the Minion in the side of his neck.
The deep puncture sent him rearing up off her with a howl, his fingers clutching at the bleeding wound. Elise didn’t realize he had gone for his own knife until he drove it toward her. She rolled away, narrowly escaping his clumsy, irate strike.
The Minion stumbled a bit, pressing his hand to his neck and looking dazed as the front of his shirt went red with spilled blood.
“You fucking bitch!”
He barreled toward her again, throwing his weight at her and knocking her to the floor. Elise thrashed in an effort to get out from under him, but he was a big man and he was furious now. She managed to roll over onto her back, the letter opener still clutched hard in her hand, trapped between the Minion’s arm and ribs.
She saw his knife come up near her face.
“No,” she gasped, sick with the weight of him and the acrid stench of his spilling blood. “Damn it, no!”
With a blind stab, she stuck the Minion with the letter opener. It went into his ribs, another deep wound that sent him yowling in pain. He reared back, choking and wheezing, giving Elise the chance to get away from him.
“Oh, God,” Irina gasped, staring in abject horror. “What’s going on? Who is that man? What does he want with us?”
“Irina, get out now!” Elise cried, grabbing the letters and shoving the other woman toward the open window.
They both hurried out, landing on the frozen grass below. Elise saw the Minion sitting on the floor inside, pale with shock and going nowhere fast. But she didn’t dare relax for a second.
“We have to get out of here, Irina. Do you have a car?”
The woman said nothing, her face going as pale as the snow outside. Elise took her shoulders and met her stricken gaze.
“Do you have a car, Irina? Can you drive?”
A glimmer of focus came back into her eyes. “What? Oh … yes … my car is parked over there. Next to the alley.”
“Then come on now. We have to go.”
CHAPTER
Twenty-four
Commotion in the foyer of the Darkhaven woke Tegan from a light doze in his guest room. Something was wrong. Really wrong. He heard Elise’s voice—heard the elevated pitch in her usually calm tone—and vaulted to his bare feet in an instant, all of his senses tripped to full alert.
Naked except for the pair of blue jeans he pulled on as he headed for the hall outside, he registered the muffled sounds of a female crying. Not Elise, thank God, but she was down there too, talking fast and clearly upset.
Tegan got to the staircase and glanced down to the open entryway of the estate. What he saw just about leveled him where he stood.
Elise, having just returned from somewhere outside, covered in blood.
Holy hell.
He rocked back on his heels, his stomach dropping like a stone to a vicinity somewhere around his knees. Elise was drenched in scarlet. The front of her clothes were stained deep red, as if someone had opened up her jugular.
Except it wasn’t her blood, he realized as the metallic odor of it drifted up to fill his nostrils. It was someone else’s blood—a human.
The relief he felt in that moment was profound.
Until a desperate brand of anger set in.
He put his fists on the railing and swung his legs over, dropping to the floor of the foyer on a tight-bitten curse. Elise hardly glanced at him as he stalked toward her, his body shaking with the depth of his fury. But all her focus was on stricken, incoherent Irina Odolf, who had collapsed onto an upholstered bench near the front door.
Reichen came in from the kitchen carrying a glass of water. He handed it to Elise.
“Thank you, Andreas.” She turned and offered the drink to the sobbing Breedmate. “Here you go, Irina. Drink a little of this if you can. It will make you feel better.”
Tegan couldn’t see anything wrong with the other woman aside from shock. Elise, however, looked like she’d just come in from the front lines. A livid bruise ran along her jaw and up the side of her cheek. “What the hell happened? And what the fuck were you doing outside of this Darkhaven?”
“Drink,” Elise coaxed her charge, all but ignoring Tegan. “Andreas, do you have a quiet room where Irina can lie down for a while?”
“Yes, of course,” Reichen replied. “There’s a sitting room here on the first floor.”
“Thank you. That should be fine.”
Tegan watched Elise taking control with a gentle command that came so easily to her. He had to admire her strength in the midst of obvious crisis, but damn it, he was fuming. “You want to explain why you’re standing here bruised and bathed in blood?”
“I went to see Irina this morning,” Elise replied, still not troubling herself to meet his angry gaze. “A Minion must have followed me—”
“Jesus Christ.”
“He broke into Irina’s town house and attacked us. I took care of it.”
“You took care of it,” Tegan said darkly. “What happened? Did you fight with the son of a bitch? Did you kill him?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t wait around to find out.”
She took the glass of water away from Irina, who wasn’t drinking much anyway, and set it down on the floor. “Are you able to stand up now?” she asked the woman, her voice caring and concerned. When the Breedmate nodded, Elise took her under the arm and helped her to her feet. “We’re going to walk you to another room where you can rest, all right?”
“Allow me,” Reichen said, smoothly moving in and taking Irina’s slack weight onto himself. He gingerly guided her out of the foyer, toward a pair of open double doors off the grand entrance.
When Elise started to follow them, Tegan reached out and caught her by the hand. “Elise. Wait.”
Given little choice, she paused. Then she blew out a slow sigh and turned to face him. “I really don’t need your disapproval right now, Tegan. I’m exhausted, and I want to get out of these awful clothes. So, if you plan on lecturing me, it’s going to have to wait—”
He pulled her to him and she fell silent as his arms went around her in a fierce embrace.
He couldn’t let go. He couldn’t speak. His chest was constricted with an emotion he didn’t want to acknowledge, but could hardly deny. It wrenched him, pressing like a vise around his heart.
Ah, fuck.
Elise might have been killed today. She’d managed to get away, sure, but she’d been in serious danger with that Minion and there was always the very good chance that things would end badly.
He might have lost her while he slept. When she’d been out of his reach, and he’d been unable to protect her.
The thought hit him hard.
So unexpectedly deep.
All he could do right now was hold on to her. Like he never wanted to let her go.
Elise had expected anger from Tegan. Perhaps arrogant male censure. She couldn’t have been more shocked to feel his arms holding her tight.
Good Lord, was he actually trembling?
She stood in the warm, strong cage of his embrace, and felt some of her edgy tension begin to break. The bone-deep fear she’d refused to let herself feel until now started to pour into her limbs. She leaned into Tegan’s welcome strength, bringing her hands up to rest against the hard muscles of h
is bare back, her unhurt cheek lying on the smooth plane of his chest.
“There are some papers,” she finally managed to say. “Petrov Odolf ’s brother wrote a bunch of letters. I thought they might be important. That’s why I went out to see Irina.”
“I don’t care about that.” Tegan’s voice was thick, vibrating against her ear. His fingertips pressed into her shoulders as he brought her away from him and stared down into her eyes. That gem-green gaze was penetrating, so intensely serious. “Jesus Christ, I don’t care about any of that right now.”
“It could mean something, Tegan. There are some strange verses…”
He shook his head, scowling now. “It can wait.”
He reached out and wiped at an apparent smudge on her chin. Then he tilted her face up to his. He stared at her for a long moment before he kissed her.
It was brief and tender, filled with a sweetness that robbed Elise of her breath.
“Everything else can wait for now,” he said quietly, a dark ferocity in his voice. “Come with me, Elise. I want to take care of you now.”
He led her by the hand, out of the foyer and up the main staircase to her guest room on the second floor. She walked inside with him, paused as he turned to close the door behind them. He glanced down to where her packed bag sat on the floor. When he looked back at her, there was a question in his eyes.
“I had been planning to leave Berlin today. I was going to go back to Boston.”
“Because of me?”
She shook her head. “Because of me. Because I’m confused about a lot of things, and I’m losing focus on what matters. The only thing that should matter—”
“Your vengeance.”
“My promise, yes.”
Tegan came to stand in front of her, his broad chest filling her vision, radiating a warmth she wanted so badly to feel against her again. She closed her eyes as he began carefully unbuttoning her bloodstained blouse. He peeled the sticky silk off her body and let it drop to the floor.
Maybe she should have felt awkward or at least resistant, allowing him to undress her after the awful way things had gone between them last night. But she was sickened by the gore on her clothes, and there was a shaking, distressed part of her that welcomed Tegan’s care. His touch was protective, not sexual, all steady strength now. Capable and compassionate.