Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [102]
But something was up with him—something was seriously wrong—and she needed to know what it was.
Swallowing past her own prickling of fear, she followed after him.
“Lucan?” There was no light at all in the space beyond the door. Only blackness, and the steady clip of Lucan’s boot heels. “God, it’s so dark in here. Lucan, wait a second. Talk to me.”
There was no change in his brisk pace ahead of her. He seemed more than eager to ditch her. Desperate to get away from her.
Gabrielle navigated the lightless path as best she could, hands extended out at her sides to help her follow the snaking corridor.
“Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“What for?”
“I told you.” A latch clicked open from where his voice now sounded. “I’ve got a job to do. Been lax as hell about doing it lately.”
Because of her.
He didn’t say it, but there was no mistaking his meaning.
“I need to get out of here,” he tossed back at her curtly. “High time I add a few more suckheads to my tally.”
“The night’s already half over. Maybe you should get some rest instead. You don’t seem well to me, Lucan.”
“I need to fight.”
She heard his footsteps stop, heard a shift of fabric somewhere ahead of her in the dark, as if he’d paused and was stripping out of his clothes. Gabrielle kept moving toward the sound of him, her hands searching, trying to get her bearings in what was an endless pitch blackness. They were in another chamber now; there was a wall to her right. She used it as a guide, sidling along with careful steps.
“In the other room, your face looked flushed. And your voice is…strange.”
“I need to feed.” The words were low and deadly, an unmistakable threat.
Did he sense that she shrank back as he said it? He must have, because he chuckled, brittle with wry humor, as though amused by her unease.
“But you did feed,” she reminded him. “Just last night, in fact. Didn’t you take enough blood when you killed that Minion? I thought you said you only needed to feed every few days?”
“An expert on the subject already, are you? I’m impressed.”
Boots hit the floor with a careless thump, one, then the other.
“Can we turn on some lights in here? I can’t see you—”
“No lights,” he snapped. “I can see you just fine. I can smell your fear.”
She was afraid, not so much for herself right now, but for him. He was worse than on edge. The air around him seemed to pulse with raw fury. It came at her through the dark, an unseen force pushing her back.
“Have I done something wrong, Lucan? Should I not be here at the compound? Because if you’ve changed your mind about that, I have to tell you that I’m not sure it was a good idea for me to come here, either.”
“There is no other place for you right now.”
“I want to go back home to my apartment.”
She felt a blast of heat skating up her arms as if he had just turned a deadly look on her. “You just got here. And you can’t go back there. You’ll stay until I decide otherwise.”
“That sounds an awfully lot like a command.”
“It is.”
Okay, now he wasn’t the only one bristling with anger. “I want my cell phone, Lucan. I need to call my friends and make sure they’re okay. Then I’m going to call a cab, and I’m going to go home, where I can try to make sense out of the mess my life has become.”
“It’s out of the question.” She heard the metallic clink of weaponry, the rough scrape of a drawer opening. “You’re in my world now, Gabrielle. I am law here. And you are under my protection until I deem it is safe to release you from it.”
She sucked in the curse that raced to the tip of her tongue. Barely. “Look, the benevolent overlord attitude might have gone a lot further for you back in the day, but don’t even think you can use it on me.”
The livid snarl that lashed out of him made the hairs on the back of her neck rise. “You won’t survive a night out there without me, do you understand? If not for me, you wouldn’t have survived your first goddamned year!”
Standing there in the dark, Gabrielle went