Deeper Than Midnight (31 page)

T
he long hours of daylight dragged by in excruciating slowness. Corinne felt each minute pass as though every one carved away a small piece of her heart along with it.

Nathan was gone.

After the years of hoping for the chance to see him again, after the endless prayers for a miracle that might—somehow—grant her the ability to escape her imprisonment to reunite with her child and be the family she dreamed they could be … he was gone.

Slipped through her fingers, not due to any prophesied end but by his own choice.

The fact that he was alive and missing hurt only slightly less than the idea that she might have lost him to the vision Hunter had described. Nathan was gone, and in the wake of that fact, Corinne was bereft.

She sat with Hunter in the back of the box truck, both of them waiting for sundown and another chance for Hunter to search for Nathan. He’d gone after him in the minutes after Nathan had fled, but Hunter’s search of the area had been fruitless, dawn driving him back to the truck empty-handed.

In the time since, they had moved several miles from the log cabin homestead that had served as Nathan’s cell. Hunter felt the risk of discovery by Dragos’s operatives was too great to remain there any longer than they had. Corinne had reluctantly agreed.

Now all she could do was wonder where her son had run off to and pray his conditioning as one of Dragos’s unquestioning soldiers didn’t make him return to the very evil Corinne had wanted to deliver him from. That is, if the sun that blazed outside the truck didn’t take him first.

“If you were him,” she said to Hunter, “where would you go?”

Hunter reached over and took her hand in a gentle grasp, tracing the pad of his thumb over her Breedmate mark. “He is a survivor, Corinne. That’s what his training has taught him to be. He is highly intelligent, and he is, I am sure, extremely familiar with his surroundings. I found a number of caves in the area when I searched for him. By now he could be hiding in any one of them.” He considered for a moment, then added, “Without the collar to restrict his movement to the area immediately surrounding the cabin, there’s also a chance he could be anywhere.”

She nodded, appreciating that Hunter didn’t feel the need to cushion her from the truth. There would be no more secrets between them anymore, no matter how small. It was something they’d promised each other as they’d made the journey to the isolated cabin in the Georgia woodlands last night, after Hunter’s disclosure of Mira’s vision had nearly rent them apart.

Corinne exhaled a shaky sigh. “At least we were able to change the outcome of the vision. If nothing else, at least we know now that not everything Mira sees must come true.”

Hunter shook his head. “There was no altering of what I saw in Mira’s eyes. The vision she showed me played out exactly as she predicted. It was my interpretation that was wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everything you said in those last few moments was part of it, Corinne. You asked me to spare him. You pleaded for me to let him go. All your words, just as you said them, were part of Mira’s precognition.” He brought her fingers up to his mouth and pressed a gentle kiss to them. “When I raised my hand and prepared to bring it down on him, you physically tried to stop me. And I let my hand drop anyway. I had to—it was the only way.”

“I don’t understand,” she murmured. “You didn’t kill Nathan. The vision was wrong.”

“No,” he said. “The blow I delivered should have killed him—it
would
have, if his collar had not been disabled. That was the thing I didn’t know, the thing the vision had not revealed to me. I didn’t realize until the moment it was happening that the strike I made against your son was meant to save his life, not take it away.”

“Thank God,” Corinne whispered, curling herself into the shelter of his embrace. “But Nathan is gone anyway. I’ve lost him, just the same.”

“We will find him,” Hunter said, his deep voice rumbling from all around her, low and soothing, as strong as his protective arms. “I give you my vow on this, Corinne. No matter how long it takes, or how far I must go to see it through. I will do this … I do it for you. Everything for you.”

She turned her head to gaze up at him, moved by his promise.

“I love you,” he told her. “My life now and for the rest of my years is committed to your happiness.”

“Oh, Hunter,” she sighed, emotion catching in her throat. “I love you so much. You’ve already shown me happiness I didn’t think possible for a very long time.”

He bent and dropped a kiss on her brow. “And I have never known any of the things you’ve made me feel in our brief time together. You have made me want to experience everything in life. I want to experience it all with you at my side … as my mate, if you deem me worthy.”

“I don’t want to live a day without you either,” she confessed. “You are a part of me now.”

“I want that,” he said, catching her lips in a sensual, passionate joining of their mouths. When he drew back a moment later, his eyes were glowing bright as coals. His fangs gleamed, the sharp points extending even farther as he gazed at her. “I can’t help but desire you. I want to taste you again. This feeling I have for you is more than intense,” he said roughly. “It is a possessive thing, greedy. I look at you, Corinne Bishop, and all I can think is that you are
mine.
”

“I am yours,” she confirmed, stroking the proud jaw and muscled cheek of the male she wanted beside her eternally. “I am yours alone, Hunter. Yours forever.”

With a growl, he pulled her into another, deeper kiss. “I want you to belong to me,” he murmured against her mouth. “I want to know my blood lives inside you, as a part of you.”

“Yes,” she gasped, thrilling to the idea of binding herself to him now and for always.

Their eyes locked together, he raised his wrist to his mouth and sank his long fangs into the flesh. He brought it to her, the most precious gift he could give her. Corinne put her lips to his opened vein and drew the first taste of him into her mouth.

His blood hit her tongue like wildfire.

Thick and strong and roaring with power, it was the very essence of all Hunter was. And now that vitality was feeding her, enriching her cells, filling her senses … weaving into every fiber of her being. She felt the bond take hold, a radiant, glorious connection. She grabbed on to it and let it wrap around her, reveling in the total saturation of joy that engulfed her as she continued to drink from Hunter.

His blood obliterated the horror of all she’d been through. The torture was swept away, the degradation lifted, all of it scattering like dust under the power of the bond that was now growing, intensifying between them.

As she drew from Hunter’s vein, she watched her magnificent mate’s eyes blaze with passion and possession … with a love so intense it stole her breath. She was on fire for him now, her own need amplified by the intoxicating power of his blood.

She could hardly stand the wait as he carefully withdrew his wrist and sealed the wounds closed with his tongue. She was trembling as he undressed her, his own clothes gone in the next instant.

He covered her with his body and made love to her, sweetly, thoroughly … an ecstasy that burned as brightly as their love.

And while this moment of commitment and completion filled her beyond measure, there was still a corner of her heart that she knew would ache as long as her son was gone. But Hunter’s promise to stand by her until they found him gave her faith. Perhaps he wasn’t lost to her forever. Not yet.

With Hunter’s love, and the blood bond that flowed through her, stronger than any storm, everything seemed possible.

A heavy rain had swept into the area by the time dusk finally settled.

Hunter shrugged into his leather trench coat, preparing to head back out to search for Nathan one last time before pushing on to New England. Based on his quick check-in with the Order a short while ago, things were going from bad to worse at the compound. As much as he hated to leave without Corinne’s son, Hunter also could not ignore his duty to his fellow warriors.

More than even that, he needed to ensure that Corinne was somewhere safe and protected while he carried out all of his duties, not left to wait for him in the back of an unsecured delivery truck.

“I will be fine,” she told him, reading his concern with an ease that should have unsettled him.

It didn’t unsettle, however. It was reassuring how well she’d come to know him.

Incredible how visceral their bond was now, solidified by their mingling blood.

He caressed her beautiful, brave face. “I’ll be gone only for a couple of hours. I can cover the entire area near the river and the state park around it in that time.”

“Thank you,” she said, turning a kiss into his palm. “Whatever happens—whether you find him out there tonight or not, just know that I’m grateful you’re willing to try.”

“Nathan is your family. That means he’s my family too.”

She gave a wobbly nod as he gathered her close. As Hunter gazed into her trusting eyes, he knew a deep wish to build a larger family with her—to give her more sons to love, once Nathan was safe.

Together they walked to the doors of the truck. Hunter opened them into the hiss of the steadily pouring rain.

Nathan stood outside in the deluge.

He was drenched, barefoot and half dressed in just the gray sweatpants he’d been wearing when he’d bolted earlier that day. Water sluiced off his shaved head and down the lean muscled plates of his
dermaglyph-
covered chest. His hands hung loosely at his sides, fingers dripping water into the mud beneath his feet.

Corinne went very quiet next to Hunter, as though not trusting her own eyes and afraid the boy was just an illusion that could shatter if she so much as breathed.

Nathan stared at them. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”

“Yes, you do,” Hunter replied.

He held out his hand.

It took a long moment before the boy made any move whatsoever. Then, with a faint nod, he reached up and clasped Hunter’s hand, stepping up into the truck.

Beside him now, Hunter heard Corinne’s lungs expel a soft, shaky sigh. Her pulse was pounding, beating as hard as a drum, her blood racing so hard he could feel her excitement—her hope—in his own veins. But she held herself back, doing everything in her power to resist throwing her arms around her child in relief and elation.

She stood unmoving, waiting, watching her beloved son slowly make his way over to her first.

“Is everything you said true?” he asked her.

She nodded, tears overflowing her eyes. “Everything.”

Hunter removed his coat and draped it over the boy’s soaked shoulders. Nathan glanced over at him, still not entirely certain of them. “If I go with you, where will you take me?”

“Home,” Hunter answered.

He glanced at Corinne then, understanding in just that moment how powerful the word truly was.

Home
.

It struck him with the same staggering force as a weapon hammered out of steel, as unbreakable as a diamond, as steady as a mountain.

Home
.

It was something neither he nor this lethal teenage assassin had ever known. Something they both had found in the beautiful woman who had somehow, miraculously, opened her gentle, stalwart heart to both of them.

Hunter put his arm around her slender shoulders, gazing at her with all the love that was overflowing in his own heart. He leaned in close to her and whispered for her ears alone: “Thank you for bringing me home.”

A
re you going to pace all morning, Lucan? Some rest would do you good, you know.”

Gabrielle patted the empty spot beside her on the massive bed in their quarters at the compound. It was midmorning according to the clock on the nightstand, but he had been on his feet nonstop since the day before.

Too many fires to put out. Too many lives resting in his hands—not the least of which being the infant son newly born to Dante and Tess.

And then there was Sterling Chase, currently cooling his heels under lockdown in the infirmary. Lucan and the rest of the Order had been on high alert since he’d shown up on the estate grounds more than twenty-four hours ago, bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds and sporting a rather massive target on his ass.

The news stations were still having a field day with the eyewitness sketch they’d obtained of him. It was being played on every broadcast—local, national, and cable—and had been a permanent fixture on the various Internet news sites since the incident at the senator’s party took place. Lucan wondered just how long it would take for the heat on Chase from human law enforcement to subside.

Not good, that the Order was harboring an individual wanted by several local police entities and the goddamned feds as well.

As pissed as he was at Chase not only for letting Dragos get away but also for getting himself shot and ID’d in the process, he had to admit it had been a good thing—a bloody admirable hunch—that had put Chase at the senator’s party. Regardless of his personal issues of late, Chase’s instincts had been solid, and royal fuck-up on the execution notwithstanding, his public disruption had managed to thwart whatever Dragos had up his sleeve.

And there had been something going on, Lucan was certain of that. The conniving son of a bitch sure hadn’t been there for the canapés and conversation.

He hated to consider what Dragos might have intended, considering the fact that some of the United States’s top government officials had been in attendance.

Lucan walked another hard track in the rug. “Something big is about to blow. I can feel it in my bones, Gabrielle. Some shit is about to go down, and unless I get my hands around it quick, it’s going to explode not just in my face, but in everyone else’s too.”

“Come here,” she said, frowning now as she threw back the sheet and comforter to make room beside her naked body on the bed. She was gorgeous, and too tempting to resist, despite the gravity of his thoughts. “You’re doing all you can,” she told him as he settled in next to her. “We’ll figure this out. All of us, together. You are not alone in this, Lucan.”

He felt himself relax as she spoke, his troubles seeming to ease just by the fact that she was near. It was a power she had over him that never ceased to amaze him. “How did I ever manage to convince you to be my mate?”

Her soft laugh vibrated against his ear where it rested on her breast. “There was kissing involved, if I recall. Maybe even some kicking and screaming. On your part, primarily.”

He pulled back and stared darkly into her eyes. “I don’t kick, and I most definitely never scream.”

“Maybe not,” she conceded, a wry smile tugging at her full lips. “But you didn’t go down easy, you have to at least admit that much.”

“I’m thick-headed, according to rumor,” he said. “Half the time, I don’t know what’s good for me.”

Her auburn brows quirked. “Fortunately for you, I
do
know what’s good for you.”

She pulled him up for her kiss, sealing her mouth over his in a slow, penetrating claiming that had him going stiff as granite in his fatigues. With a snarl of pure masculine approval, he caught her around her tender nape and plunged his tongue between her teeth.

He already had her pressed beneath him when the phone line from the tech lab started ringing.

Lucan’s warning bells went off like sirens as he tore himself away from Gabrielle’s warm body and put the receiver to his ear. “What’s going on, Gideon?”

“You don’t, by chance, have the television on, do you?”

“No.”

Gideon’s voice didn’t have its usual levity. Not even close. “All hell’s breaking loose downtown, Lucan. You’d better come quick. You need to see this.”

Chase brought his head up from the pillow of his bed in the infirmary, straining to get a better look at the television screen mounted in the corner of the room. It had been parked on one of those pointless morning chatter shows, where a pair of hosts kibitzed and chuckled over vapid news items while sipping tall cups of coffee and flashing a lot of veneered white teeth at the camera. Even on mute, the thing had annoyed him, but he’d left it on just to give his eyes something to focus on, other than the four clinical walls that caged him inside the compound.

It had been either that, or let himself go mad and give in to the hunger that was still clawing at him from the inside out. The addict in him had wanted out of there in a bad way—needed it more than anything—but he knew if he stood even a rat’s ass chance of breaking his dangerous slide, he was going to have to starve the blood thirst out of himself. He could think of no better place for him to try than back here, in the compound, among the only friends he had.

Friends he’d given every right to desert him.

And yet they’d taken him in.

Strapped him down and locked him up inside the infirmary, but what the hell, he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

But now, as he peered up at the monitor, his stomach sank as he watched the show being interrupted by a live news report. He reached for the remote on the wheeled tray beside him, only to be reminded of his restraints as the shackles rattled but held fast. He could have yanked them loose, but fuck it. He could handle the sound without it.

Willing the volume up, he listened in abject dread as real-time footage of a massive explosion somewhere in Boston filled the screen. A female news reporter’s voice described what they were broadcasting.

“—at the UN building downtown. Police are just arriving on scene, and Channel 5 has news crews en route now. Initial reports seem to indicate this was a bomb situation of some sort. We’re getting reports of significant damage to the building, and all surrounding streets in a ten-block radius have been sealed off by law enforcement.”

Holy shit. Chase watched the roiling cloud of smoke and dust and flame billowing up toward the camera of the news helicopter that circled the area overhead. Although it seemed impossible—completely lacking in sense, except for the purpose of creating terror—his gut was telling him this too had Dragos’s name all over it.

“Further reports from sources on the scene tell us there is a vehicle pursuit under way by law enforcement at this time. It is believed the alleged suspect or suspects in this possible terror act are in that vehicle and were spotted by eyewitnesses leaving the scene in the moments before this explosion took place. Channel 5’s news copter is reporting to the scene of this pursuit, and we will update you live as we have more information.”

Chase put his head back down and muttered a ripe curse at the ceiling. If Dragos was involved in this stunt, what the hell was he up to?

Chase wanted to rip loose from his forced recuperation and head down to the tech lab, where he was certain all the rest of the Order would be watching the same troubling report by now. Gideon constantly monitored human news outlets, and shit like this—terror acts in the middle of the week, rolling toward the holidays—tended to make a big splash.

But he didn’t belong around that long table in the lab anymore. He’d walked out on the Order, and he didn’t deserve to ask them to take him back until he was sure he had his shit together.

As he kicked himself for the string of failures and fuck-ups that had been the bulk of his recent missions for the Order, the news reporter came back onscreen.

“We’re breaking now to Channel 5’s eye-in-the-sky, which is bringing you the latest from just outside the city, where police are currently in pursuit of the vehicle they believe is linked to this terrible incident at the UN building this morning. Again, if you’re just tuning in, Channel 5 was first on the scene, bringing you news of a large explosion, a bomb of some type, that was set off downtown just moments ago …”

While she spoke, Chase watched in astonishment—then in mounting suspicion and abject dread—as a fleet of police cruisers and SWAT vans pursued a late-model red pickup truck from out of the city, toward an area of large, tree-filled estates and sprawling private properties.

Right toward the Order’s domain.

Chase tried to sit up and felt his restraints bite into his wrists and ankles. The steel-reinforced leather band around his torso groaned as he strained to get a better look at what was happening on the monitor.

It wasn’t good.

The pursuit turned the last bend, heading right up the sunlit street toward the outer perimeter of the Order’s estate. To his horror, not an instant later, the red pickup roared up toward the front gates of the mansion.

Ah, Christ.

Mother of fucking God …

Sparks erupted as the vehicle hit the electrified gate and crashed through. Several men poured out of the truck and started pounding up the snow-filled lawn on foot. Running toward the mansion with a dozen or more cops hot on their heels.

Dragos sent them here.

He knew it.

He knew it the same way he knew now that this was an act of retaliation, not merely some bizarre coincidence. This was Dragos taking his revenge for what Chase had done the other night.

He brought this on the Order … on his friends.

With an anguished roar, Chase ripped loose from his restraints and fled the infirmary using every ounce of preternatural speed at his command.

Lucan stood with the rest of the Order, all of them gathered in the tech lab watching the news report incredulously.

Their disbelief had been nothing compared to the sick sense of dread—the first true sense of fear that Lucan had experienced in a long time—when the red pickup truck carrying the suspected bombers rammed the mansion’s gate.

A silence filled the tech lab in that terrible instant.

It was full daylight outside. No chance for escape. They were trapped now, with no choice but to watch the skirmish take place above the compound and hope law enforcement left without deciding to nose around the property or question the owners.

And in the pit of his heavy heart, Lucan understood that this was Dragos’s intention all along. This was why he’d planted the tracking device in Kellan Archer. This was how he meant for the Order to go down.

Not by his hand, but by the humans.

“Seal all portals to the compound and lock them down,” he told Gideon. “If any of those criminal fucks or the cops do something stupid like bring this thing inside the mansion, we don’t want them getting curious about what might lie below the house.”

If they did, the Order would have no choice but to kill them all on sight.

And that would be damned hard to sweep under the rug, especially since the whole bloody chase was being captured on live news coverage.

“Shut it down now,” he said, slamming his fist onto the table and sending a big crack running down its center. “This is Dragos’s doing. He sent them here. Right to our goddamn doorstep.”

“Compound portals are sealed,” Gideon reported. Then he hissed a curse, something Lucan did not want to hear at that moment. “Ah, Christ. I don’t believe this.”

He pivoted his head toward Lucan and gestured to one of the interior surveillance feeds from inside the mansion.

“Holy fuck,” Nikolai breathed from his place among the others. “It’s Harvard. What the hell is he doing up there?”

“He’s saving us,” Dante answered, no inflection in the warrior’s voice at all.

They watched in dumbstruck silence as Chase strode calmly toward the front door of the mansion. He opened it on to the yard full of uniformed cops, SWAT members, and Secret Service agents. As he lifted his hands to his head in a show of surrender, sunlight streamed in all around him, a nimbus that lit him up in silhouette like an avenging angel.

The humans rushed up to intercept him, more than one speaking quickly into his radio as they got a good look at Chase, no doubt every man out there recognizing him from the sketch that was circulating in every station and precinct house between Boston and D.C.

Lucan watched, humbled and grateful. If not for Chase’s sacrifice, those men likely would have torn the estate apart. They might still, but the Order had just been granted a stay from that particular execution. Instead of a potential daylight raid, the Order might have a chance to collect themselves and clear out at nightfall instead.

All thanks to Sterling Chase.

“Man, this is fucked up,” Brock murmured from beside Lucan. “We can’t just let them take him away like this. We have to do something.”

Lucan gave a grim shake of his head, wishing there was a way to help. “Harvard just took that option out of our hands. He is truly on his own now.”