Ashes of Midnight (13 page)

 

Oh, God. He was right
.

 

If the violence Andreas had orchestrated the past few weeks was not reason enough, in drinking from her, a blood-bonded Breedmate, he had just written his own death warrant.

 

Claire swallowed the lump of dread that crawled into her throat. “You’ve never loved me, Wilhelm. Have you? Why did you want me for your mate? Why do you care
what I do now, when I have never truly been a part of your life? Our bond has never been anything but a farce—”

 

“If you are looking for a way to justify your actions, Claire, you are sorely mistaken. The fact is, you are my mate. If and when I get my hands on Andreas Reichen, I will demand the full rights due me. You may count on that.”

 

She could hear the danger in his tone and knew from the sharp way he’d cut her off that she would find no mercy in him whatsoever. She had never been one to cower, but the thought of him sending more of his death dealers into the city after Andre made her heart squeeze like it was in a vise. “Wilhelm, please …”

 

“Don’t beg me, Claire. Not for him,” he snapped, full of venom. “Put the agent back on the phone now. You’re going to go with the Enforcement Agents to their headquarters and help them in their pursuit of this … animal.”

 

“Wilhelm, no—”

 

“Put the agent on the phone, goddamn you!”

 

She didn’t have to get the armed guards’ attention. Both of them gaped at her as Wilhelm’s furious outburst ricocheted across the room. One of the agents came over to her and extracted the phone from her reluctant grasp. He listened for only a moment before he motioned the other guard over to Claire and instructed him not to let her leave their custody.

 

Claire’s heart banged in her chest as the agent wrapped up the private conversation. She could see the confusion and sympathy in the Breed male’s eyes as he hung up and came toward her with the steady calm of a soldier accustomed to handling difficult situations.

 

“You need to come with us now,” he told her gently but firmly “We have orders, Frau Roth. I’m sorry.”

 

“No.” He reached for her and Claire’s panic spiked. “I won’t go with you. Take your hands off me!”

 

The second agent moved in, his expression grave. “Let’s not make this difficult, all right?”

 

Claire wrenched her arm out of the bruising grasp. She took two lunging steps away from them, fully prepared to bolt if she could just reach the door. She didn’t even come close. One guard was there before she had a chance to blink. The other came up behind her and shoved something hard and cold against the small of her back.

 

She felt the searing bite of the taser for only an instant before the shock took her legs out from under her. She crashed to the floor on a broken scream, pain rippling through her.

 

“Pick her up,” she heard one of them say from above her. “I’ll go open the vehicle.”

 

Claire felt large, hard hands hoist her to her feet. She heard the apartment door open, felt the incoming chill of night air skate across the floor from outside. Then a low grunt and a sick, sodden sound of someone choking, gasping, sputtering for breath.

 

The agent holding on to Claire let go as he faced whatever it was that now stood on the threshold of the open door. “What the fuck!”

 

Claire lifted her head and couldn’t hold back her cry of stunned relief.

 

Andreas
.

 

Oh, God… he came back for her
.

 

His big body blocked the doorway, his eyes blazing, fangs glistening white with menace. At his feet lay the bleeding corpse of the agent who’d tasered her, his throat brutally skewered and all but severed by a length of twisted black wrought iron. As the second agent drew his weapon
and prepared to fire, Andreas stalked inside and fired on him with his companion’s gun, killing him with the swift, deadly aim of a sniper.

 

Then he was at her side as if nothing else existed.

 

“Claire…Jesus Christ,” he said, his voice gruff, his expression as grave as she’d ever seen it. He smoothed his hands over her face, touching every inch of her as if he feared she was broken. His strong fingers trembled against her skin. For one moment she thought—desperately hoped—he might kiss her again. “Are you hurt?”

 

She shook her head, feeling wobbly and unstable until Andreas wrapped his arm around her shoulders and guided her away from the blood and death on the floor. “We’re not safe in the city now,” she told him. “I just talked to Wilhelm. He knows that I’m with you. He knows that you drank from me tonight.”

 

Andreas’s mouth compressed tightly. Something dark flashed in his eyes. Remorse, perhaps? Was it regret?

 

“I don’t think either one of us is safe from him now,” she said.

 

He stared at her for a long moment, an intense, searching look. Then he gave her a curt nod. “You’re coming with me, Claire. No matter what happens, I will keep you safe.”

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER
Ten

 

 

S
tripped of their weapons, keys, cell phones, and cash, Reichen left the dead Enforcement Agents where they lay, then motioned for Claire to follow him to the SUV parked on the street outside.

 

“Where will we go?” she asked him as they leapt into the vehicle and Reichen hauled ass away from the curb. “It won’t take Wilhelm long to have half the Agency on our heels.”

 

Reichen acknowledged that fact with a grim nod. “We can’t stay in Hamburg. It would probably be wise if we left Germany altogether.”

 

“And go where? He has contacts all over Europe. We can’t trust anyone in the Darkhavens or the Enforcement Agency not to turn us in to him the first chance they get.”

 

“We can trust the Order.”

 

In his periphery, Reichen saw Claire’s doubtful reaction. “The Order? From what I’ve heard about them, they don’t exactly have an open-door policy. Why would a dangerous group of vigilantes from the States be willing to help us?”

 

Reichen resisted the urge to correct her opinion of the Order, one that had been unfairly yet widely accepted among the general Breed population for generations. He slid a glance at her. “I’ve been working with Lucan, Tegan, and the other warriors for close to a year now. The night my Darkhaven was attacked, I was away from Berlin, following up on a mission for the Order. We’d been gathering intel concerning a spate of Gen One assassinations and looking into possible links to blood clubs around Europe.”

 

“You and the Order… working together?” She got quiet then, considering him in studied silence as he turned the SUV onto a busy boulevard that led out of Hamburg. “There’s so much I don’t know about you anymore, Andre. Everything about you seems so different now.”

 

Not everything, he thought, recalling all too easily how familiar she’d felt pressed against him, her mouth on his in a heated kiss. He felt possessive around her. Fiercely protective. All the things he’d felt with her in the beginning. Time had diffused none of it, though that hardly gave him cause to celebrate.

 

The need to hold her close right here and now was nearly overwhelming. He knew she was basically all right, but just the idea of her being shoved around by the agents—tasered by them, for God’s sake—made his blood boil with fury. The taste of her fear, her pain, still echoed in his veins.

 

Here was one thing that was different about him now:
the bond he’d stolen from her with his uninvited bite. Even though Claire had yet to condemn him for it, he would carry the guilt of his actions forever. Especially once he left her widowed and alone, after he crushed the life out of Wilhelm Roth.

 

Some mercenary part of him found the prospect of Roth’s imminent death even more attractive when it would free Claire to take another mate. Particularly if that new mate might be him. But regardless of the fact that he had already bound himself to her by blood, Claire deserved something more than what he could ever give her. She always had.

 

“Are you hungry?” he asked her, eager to turn his mind away from all the things he’d done wrong by her, now and before. “You haven’t eaten all day. You must be starving.”

 

She gave him a noncommittal shrug. “If it’s not a good idea to stop anywhere yet, I’ll understand—”

 

“You need food,” he said, more sharply than intended. “We’ll stop.”

 

As a Breedmate, Claire’s perfect health and ageless longevity depended on the regular intake of a Breed male’s blood, but her body still required food to function. It was a hell of a lot more palatable for Reichen to risk the time it would take to get her a sandwich than it was for him to think about Wilhelm Roth nourishing Claire as only her true mate could do. He wondered how long it had been since she’d fed from Roth’s vein. Not long, he was guessing, based on how youthful and strong she looked. He wondered how long it had been since she’d lain with Roth. Had she ever loved him?

 

The questions were bitter on his tongue, but he choked them back. He didn’t want to know all of the ways that Wilhelm Roth had been with Claire, or how recently. She
wasn’t his, and he had better put all thoughts of her aside to maintain his focus on the thing that truly mattered to him now—upholding his promise to avenge the innocent souls whom Roth destroyed. If he couldn’t do that, then he was no good to himself or anyone else.

 

Reichen drove for a while without speaking, working hard to ignore the fact that only a small space of leather and plastic separated him from Claire. At least he hadn’t gone pyro back at Roth’s office. Claire’s blood was likely to thank for that small blessing. He’d felt the fires leap to life inside him when he sensed her distress a few blocks away from the place, but somehow, by the time he’d returned to face the agents who were hurting her, he’d managed to keep the flames from erupting.

 

Barely.

 

For all his reassurances that he would keep her safe, he knew that his destructive power posed a very real danger to her. The more he used it, the more slippery his hold on it became. He didn’t know how long it might be before the fire trapped within him burned out of his control completely.

 

He couldn’t care less what happened to him, but if the heat should snap its tether while Claire was nearby…

 

Reichen looked at her pretty profile in the milky light of the dashboard. Her head was tipped down as she tried to smooth a nasty snag in her sweater. She concentrated on the imperfection, worrying the loose thread between her graceful, pianist’s fingers, her loose ebony hair stirring in the low draft of the heat blowing out of the vent.

 

“What is he afraid of?” she murmured. She glanced over, frowning now. “What is it that Wilhelm feels he needs to protect from you?”

 

Reichen shook his head. “I don’t know, and frankly, I
can’t say that it matters to me now. I don’t care why he did what he did. All that’s left is the fact that he must pay.”

 

She pivoted in her seat, her dark eyes shining, stubbornly suspicious. “He’s threatened by you, Andreas. Not because of anything that happened these past two nights, but before that. Why else would he take such a drastic step and order an attack on your Darkhaven?”

 

“I suppose he didn’t appreciate me digging around in his affairs. He felt he needed to send a strong message to me.”

 

Claire nodded grimly. “And just what did he think you might find? I can’t believe it had anything to do with that missing girl from the club. Not to warrant the kind of retaliation you described.”

 

“So, you believe me now?” he asked.

 

She gave him a frank, unflinching look. “I don’t want to, but after talking with Wilhelm tonight… it’s harder for me to doubt you than it is to trust anything he says. You scared him, Andre. He’s still afraid of what you might know or what you could do to him. The question is, why? What is he protecting… or whom?”

 

A knot of coldness formed in Reichen’s gut as Claire spoke. He’d never asked himself why Roth came after him. He’d assumed it was due to a mix of old animosity and new opportunity when Reichen had unwittingly sent Helene into Roth’s crosshairs. The why of it really hadn’t seemed important. Not when rage and grief had been the only things Reichen had known in the aftermath of the slaughter.

 

He’d been blinded by his fury. By the need for vengeance. He’d never stopped to consider the simple truth that Claire had just laid out for him so plainly.

 

Roth had something very significant to hide. Something
that went much deeper than his whispered gangster alliances with the crooks and politicians who tended to gravitate toward the Enforcement Agency. He was protecting a monumental secret. Something worth spilling the lives of more than a dozen people without a moment’s hesitation. Worth even more than that, Reichen was certain now.

 

As he stared ahead at the dark ribbon of road, a name crept into his mind like a serpent:
Dragos
.

 

Good Christ. Could the two of them be connected in some way? Had he gotten too close to uncovering some kind of alliance between Dragos and Roth?