Forbidden Embers (28 page)

T
he compound was a mess.

The civilians were half-starving.

The security was a joke.

The infighting between the few soldiers he
had
run across was a nightmare.

And he was really beginning to think that all he had to do was sit back and watch as the whole thing self-destructed. Which he might have been okay with if the lab wasn’t the one place on the compound that was guarded like Fort Knox. And if Cecily wasn’t working herself into the ground trying to get the
factionnaires
to man the fuck up.

God, this was a fucking nightmare of epic proportions. He’d been a sentry for nearly a hundred years. He’d spent the other two hundred years since he’d left Ireland making money by helping other clans figure out their security woes. He could do what he’d promised Cecily he would. He could help her fix things.

That was the whole problem. Walking around here for twelve hours, seeing the people suffering—part of him
wanted
to help her fix things, not because he gave a shit about the future of the Wyvernmoon clan, but because somewhere up on that fucking mountain, Cecily had slipped under his defenses. She’d gone from being a means to an end to being his lover, and every instinct he possessed screamed for him to take care of her. For him to help her any and every way he could.

Except helping her was the exact opposite of what he’d come here to do.

Jesus, he was so fucked.

The beast inside him didn’t care. Though it had been completely loyal to Dylan for a hundred years, somewhere in the past seventy-two hours, it had switched allegiances. Now, besides watching Cecily with sharp talons and hungry eyes that had him walking around hard all the time, it also wanted to take care of her.

To comfort her.

To hold her and whisper sweet things to her until she believed that everything was going to be all right.

But it couldn’t do that—
he
couldn’t do that. Because the sad fact was, in Cecily’s world, nothing was ever going to be okay again. Not if he did his job right.

And he always did his job right.

Oh, the
factionnaires
had watched him with blood in their eyes when Cecily had introduced him as her new bodyguard at the Dracon Club the first morning. But he was relatively free to walk the compound, and no one had stepped forward publicly to demand that he be fully and properly vetted—a fact that truly surprised him. He had spent a day and a half on his laptop, making sure his background check would pass muster before he even met Cecily. If they had a security expert as good with computers as he was, Logan knew he might run into difficulty, but he had gambled on the fact that a clan as archaic as the Wyvernmoons wouldn’t have anyone like that.

He’d been right. But the triumph he’d expected to feel never materialized, only this omnipresent guilt that was eating him alive.

Logan slammed a door on it, knowing there was no way he could function if he let himself dwell on the absolute despicableness of what he was doing. Cecily had asked him to come back with her because she’d thought he would make a powerful ally. Instead, he was the most competent of enemies.

He didn’t have time for this. He needed to get his head in the game, or even the most incompetent
factionnaires
might actually be able to pull one over on him.

For the second time in the past ten minutes, he scanned the area directly around him. And smiled grimly as he realized a third
factionnaire
had joined the two who had been following him. The sniveling Thierren had finally decided to join the party. He’d wondered how long it would take.

He did a light scan of the other two men’s brains, picked out their names as easily as he would red jellybeans out of the jar on Dylan’s desk. Remy and Acel. And, fuck, were they pieces of work. He’d thought Thierren was bad, but ten seconds inside their brains had him desperately craving a shower.

These were Cecily’s
factionnaires
? These amoral bastards whose only allegiance was to themselves? This was who she was counting on to help her get her clan back on track? No wonder she’d offered him a job qualifications unseen. A baboon would be better than these assholes.

He shook his head. Since she was keeping them, either she was a lot more naive than he’d thought—which was saying something—or she had a plan that he had not yet been able to piece together.

He was leaning toward the latter option, simply because he had trouble imagining her thinking—even for a second—that these guys were trustworthy. They would slit her throat in a second if it would get them what they wanted, princess be damned. It was her good luck that they felt they needed her—as a figurehead and as a means to ascend to the throne.

Of course, his arrival had put a neat monkey wrench in their plans, which was why three of them were trailing him right now. Not to stop him from messing with the compound or its people—the sad fact was, they couldn’t give a shit about anything but their own power—but to eliminate him as a threat.

His hands went to two of the daggers he carried close to his body, even as he wondered if he should end this now. The only one doing any kind of shielding was that asshole who had tried to hit on Cecily the night before. The other two were ripe for the picking—he could rip their brains apart in ten seconds flat. Which might be a viable option if it wouldn’t tip his hand.

No, it was better for him to stick to the game plan. To do what he’d come here to do. Even if it would give him an incredible amount of satisfaction to turn Remy’s brains into pudding, especially with what he was thinking. Though a part of the asshole’s brain was focused on bringing down Logan, another part was wrapped up in thoughts of Cecily. He wanted her naked, tied up and at his mercy, and fantasized about keeping her that way until she figured out who was boss.

Logan’s dragon’s talons punched through his fingertips and he could feel himself on the brink of losing control. Though he could definitely see the pleasure to be had from keeping Cecily bound and naked, he would never do anything to hurt her if he had her that way. This asshole wanted to rape and beat and threaten her into submission.

He had a particularly blatant fantasy that involved Cecily and a whip, one that flayed the skin off her tender back until she bled and begged him to stop. Only he wouldn’t until she was a bleeding, quivering, humble mess.

The beast inside Logan roared in outrage at the image, and his human side wasn’t far behind. He wanted to crush the bastard, to rip him apart for even daring to think that he had the right to imagine touching Cecily, let alone hurting her.

Infuriated, he struck without thinking, ripping through Remy’s mind with the finesse of a jackhammer. Over his dead body was this motherfucker going to get his hands on Cecily.
Over my dead fucking body.

Remy screamed, his hands clutching his head as Logan tore through his brain like a conquering army. By the time the man had fallen to his knees, Logan had shredded his nucleus accumbens—the pleasure center in his brain, responsible for sexual arousal—and done a damn good job of messing with parts of his cerebellum, namely the areas responsible for coordination and making the muscles work together. Let the sadistic motherfucker try coming at Cecily—or any other woman—now.

Acel and Thierren stopped to help their friend, but he could feel the suspicion rolling off them in waves. He’d been a good half mile in front of them, and while they’d thought he was unaware of their bumbling attempts to follow him, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t put two and two together sometime soon. Which was the last thing he needed right now.

Figuring he should beat it from the vicinity before he blew whatever semblance of a cover he had, he sped up a little bit. Swerved onto a side street, then swerved onto another one, until he was all but buried in the maze that made up the area of the compound that housed civilians.

As he walked down the streets, he felt his skin crawl, especially when he glanced in the lit window of one of the houses and saw a man walking the floor, his infant daughter curled up on his shoulder. There was a look of such love on the man’s face that Logan had to turn away.

A few doors down another light was on, and a couple sat snuggled on the couch, drinking wine and watching something on TV. They looked really happy together, completely content.

He started to walk even faster then, made sure to keep his eyes on the road directly in front of him. He didn’t scan the area around him while he walked—even though not doing so was a rookie mistake. But he couldn’t stand the idea of getting inside these dragons’ heads, not when he knew he was on the brink of shredding their nice, normal, little lives for good. And why? Because they’d had the bad misfortune of being born Wyvernmoons.

Pissed off at himself and the whole fucking world, he didn’t let himself think or relax—hell, he barely let himself breathe—until he was out of the neighborhood and back on the main road that worked its way through the compound. He had to stop doing this, had to stop second-guessing himself. Had to stop feeling guilty. He’d lay a hundred-to-one odds that not one of the bastards he was up against had ever felt guilty when they sent that damn virus over to the Dragonstars and murdered hundreds of his people in the most horribly gruesome way he could imagine.

Logan glanced at his watch. It was close to one now, and he knew Cecily was expecting him. His dick hardened at the thought of her, warm and willing and waiting for him. Not that his reaction was unusual. From the second he’d met her, he’d been aroused most of the time.

He found himself speeding up even more, anticipation beating through him with every footfall. He felt like a total pansy, but there was something inside him that wanted to see her.

He’d almost made it to Cecily’s street when he heard them. Two dragons. Their words were spoken aloud at a distance, undetectable to a human ear, but manifesting as a steady, consistent buzzing in the back of his mind. He’d ignored it, tuned it out, because he was so caught up in thoughts of Cecily, but his dragon obviously thought it was important, because it kept dragging his attention back to the sound.

“Your plan isn’t working. She isn’t backing down. And now she’s brought that mutt into the equation,” the first man said.

“He’s nothing to worry about. In fact, he could be good for us. If she’s distracted by sex, she’ll be less likely to clue in to what we’re doing,” the other said.

Logan closed his eyes, blocked out all the other background noise, and focused on trying to pinpoint the voices. It took a minute, because the two men had thrown a few stumbling blocks in his way. But like everyone else out here in this compound, they were too complacent, too sure of their own power and superiority to really worry about whether they were being overheard.

“But if she didn’t end up with you, I wanted her to be mine,” the first voice said. “I don’t want her being fucked by that rogue. God knows where he’s been!”

Anger helped him arrow in.
Eriq.
A face rose in front of him, smarmy and rodentlike, and his first impression of the
factionnaire
came back to him in a rush. Pretentious. Spoiled. Weak. Easily led. Not much of a threat, in the grand scheme of things.

But he must have misjudged the little weasel if he was out here in the dead of night, plotting against Cecily. But who was he plotting with? Logan waited for the other man to speak, to give away his location. When he did, Logan slipped inside his brain with the most delicate of touches.

“Can you stop thinking with your cock for two seconds?” the second man asked. “This is serious. We’ve finally got the chance to make our move, and you’re worried about who the ice princess has taken into her bed?”

Julian.
The second man was Julian. The realization sent ice slamming down Logan’s back. He hadn’t liked the man on sight—hadn’t liked any of them, obviously—but not liking Julian didn’t mean he was blind to the fact that he was one of the most accomplished
factionnaires
the Wyvernmoons had. The plot against Cecily, whatever it was, suddenly got a whole hell of a lot more concerning.

Eriq made a sound of discontent and Logan ran with it, filling his head with thoughts of how idiotic Julian was being, of how he thought he was entitled to so much more than anyone else. Truthfully, it didn’t take much of a push from him. Eriq was weak enough that the accusations were right there on the tip of his tongue, anyway. He’d just needed the extra push to get them out.

“You want me to be the one to do this because you think you’re so much smarter than I am!” Eriq whispered fiercely. “You’re just going to sit back and watch them crucify me, and then you’re going to get Cecily, the crown, everything.”

“Don’t be absurd.” Julian’s voice was bored, but there was an underlying tension to it that hadn’t been there before. Maybe Eriq’s paranoia wasn’t misplaced after all. “What would I want with the crown, anyway? I’m quite happy working behind the scenes.”