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It was what Hunter had been trained to do. Born and bred to be a weapon wielded by the merciless hand of the Order’s chief adversary, he was long accustomed to viewing the world in logical, unemotional terms.

He no longer served the villain called Dragos, but his deadly skills remained at the core of who, and what, he was. Hunter was lethal—unfailingly so—and in that instantaneous connection of his gaze and Taggart’s, he saw that grim understanding reflected in the other male’s eyes.

Agent Taggart blinked, then took a step back, removing himself from Hunter’s stare and clearing the path to the door of the club.

“I thought you might be willing to reconsider,” Chase said, as he and Hunter strode to the iron grate and entered the Enforcement Agency establishment.

The door must have been soundproof. Inside the dark club, loud music thumped in time with multicolored, spinning lights that lit a central stage made of mirrored glass. The only dancers were a trio of half-naked humans gyrating together in front of an audience of leering, hot-eyed vampires seated in booths and tables on the floor below the stage.

Hunter watched the long-haired blond in the center wind herself around a metal pole that climbed up from the floor of the stage to the ceiling. Swiveling her hips, she lifted one of her enormous, unnaturally round breasts up to meet her snakelike tongue. As she toyed with the pierced nipple, the other dancers, a tattooed woman with spiked purple hair and a dark-eyed young man who barely fit inside the shiny red vinyl pouch slung around his hips, moved to opposite sides of the mirrored stage and began their own solo routines.

The club reeked of stale perfume and sweat, but the musty tang couldn’t mask the trace scent of fresh human blood. Hunter followed the olfactory trail with his gaze. It led to a far corner booth, where a vampire in the standard-issue Enforcement Agency dark suit and white shirt fed judiciously from the pale throat of a naked, moaning woman sprawled across his lap. Still more Breed males drank from other human blood Hosts, while some in the vampire-run establishment seemed intent on satisfying more carnal needs.

Beside him near the door, Chase had gone as still as stone. A low, rumbling growl leaked from the back of his throat. Hunter spared the feeding and on-stage spectacle inside the place little more than an assessing glance, but Chase’s gaze was fixed and hungry, as openly riveted as any of the other Breed males gathered there. Perhaps more so.

Hunter was far more interested in the handful of heads that were now turning their way within the crowd of Enforcement Agents. Their arrival had been noticed, and the simmering looks from every pair of eyes that landed on them now said the situation could get ugly very quickly.

No sooner had he registered the possibility than one of the glaring vampires reclining on a nearby sofa got up to confront them. The male was large, as were his two companions who rose to join him as he cut a clean path through the crowd. All three were visibly armed beneath their finely cut, dark suits.

“Well, well. Look what the cat dragged in,” drawled the agent in the lead, a trace of the South in his slowly measured words and in his refined, almost delicate, features. “How many decades of service with the Agency, yet you never would have deigned to join any of us in a place like this.”

Chase’s mouth curved, barely concealing his elongated fangs. “You sound disappointed, Murdock. This shit was never my speed.”

“No, you always held yourself above temptation,” the vampire replied, his gaze as shrewd as his answering smile. “So careful. So rigidly disciplined, even in your appetites. But things change. People change, don’t they, Chase? If you see something you like in here, you need only say so. For old times’ sake, if nothing else, hmm?”

“We’ve come for information about an agent named Freyne,” Hunter interjected when Chase’s reply seemed to take longer than necessary. “As soon as we have what we need,