Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [189]
He hadn’t set out to be a drug dealer. In the beginning, after he was released from the cosmetics company where he’d been working as a chemical engineer and research–development manager, Ben would never have considered operating on the other side of the law. But his staunch opposition to animal abuse—the very thing that got him fired in the first place, after witnessing years of torture in the makeup company’s testing labs—put a fire in Ben’s belly to take a stand.
He started rescuing abandoned and neglected animals. Then he started stealing them when regular, legal channels proved too sluggish to be effective. From there, it was a short fall into other questionable activities, club drugs being an easy, relatively low-risk venture. After all, what was the crime in dealing fairly harmless recreational drugs to consenting adults? The way Ben saw it, his rescue operation needed funding and he had something of value to offer to the clubbers and candykids of the rave crowds—something they were going to get anyway from someone, somewhere, so why not him?
Unfortunately, Tess hadn’t seen things from his perspective at all. Once she learned what he was doing, she broke it off with him. Ben had sworn up and down he would quit dealing—just for her—and he truly had, until his current patron came knocking last summer with a fat wad of cash in hand.
At the time, Ben hadn’t understood the focused interest in Crimson. If he’d been paid to step up production and distribution of Ecstasy or GHB, maybe it would have made more sense, but Crimson—Ben’s own private recipe—had been one of the milder products he had produced. In Ben’s trials, conducted primarily on himself, he found that the drug generated a slightly more intense buzz than a caffeinated energy drink, with an increase in appetite and a lessening of inhibitions.
Crimson was a fast-hitting high, but fast-fading too. Its effects vanished after about an hour. In fact, the narcotic had seemed so innocuous, Ben could hardly justify the generous payment he’d been collecting for its manufacture and sale.
After what had happened tonight, he imagined those generous payments were about to come to an abrupt—and understandable—end.
He had to get in contact with his benefactor and report the terrible incident he’d witnessed at the nightclub. His patron needed to know about the apparent problems with the drug. Certainly he would have to agree that Crimson had to be taken out of circulation immediately.
CHAPTER Twelve
Dante followed the soft rumble of conversation coming from the formal dining room of the compound’s mansion at street level. He and Chase had arrived at the Order’s headquarters a few minutes before, after securing the scene at the nightclub and doing a further comb of the area for signs of trouble. Now Chase was in the tech lab below, logged on to the Darkhaven computers, making his report of the night’s events.
Dante had his own report to make as well, one that definitely wasn’t going to win him any attaboys with the formidable leader of the warriors.
He found Lucan seated at the head of the long, elegantly set table in the candlelit dining room. The warrior was dressed for combat, as though he had only recently returned from patrol himself. From beneath his black leather jacket, an array of weapons glinted, giving the impressive Gen One male an even greater aura of danger and command than what normally shrouded him.
His Breedmate didn’t seem to mind his hard edges. Gabrielle sat across Lucan’s lap, her head resting lovingly on his shoulder while she spoke across the table to Gideon and his mate, Savannah. Whatever she’d said made the others laugh, including Lucan, whose humor had been rare to nonexistent before the arrival of the beautiful human female at the compound. The warrior smiled, stroking her ginger-hued hair as gently as he might a kitten, a gesture that seemed to have become automatic in the short few months since the pair had been blood-bonded and mated.
Lucan had it bad for his woman, and he didn’t