Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [219]
“It’s not a big deal,” he said. “Trust me, I’ll live.”
He peeled off the coat and Tess’s sympathy turned to ice.
Dante was armed like something out of an action-movie nightmare. A thick belt went around his hips, studded with several different kinds of blades, not the least of which were huge curved daggers sheathed on either side of him. Strapped across the chest of his black long-sleeved shirt was a gun holster sporting a deadly looking brushed-stainless monstrosity; she didn’t even want to imagine the size of hole that thing could blast into someone. He had another gun secured around his left thigh.
“What the hell…” Tess instinctively shrank away from him, holding the towels against her like a shield.
Dante met her stricken, uncertain gaze and frowned. “I won’t hurt you, Tess. These are just tools of my trade.”
“Your trade?” She was still inching backward, movement she wasn’t aware of until the backs of her calves came up against the coffee table in the center of the living room. “Dante, you’re dressed like an assassin.”
“Don’t be afraid, Tess.”
She wasn’t. She was confused, concerned for him, but not afraid. He began taking off his weapons, unfastening his leg holster and holding it like he didn’t know where to put it down. Tess gestured beside her, to the squat coffee table.
“May I have one of those towels, please?”
She handed him one, watching as he carefully placed his weapon on the table like he didn’t want to add another nick to the already well-worn wood. Even armed to the teeth and bleeding, he was still considerate. Polite, even. A real gentleman, if you could get past all the deadly hardware and the aura of danger that seemed to radiate in visible waves off his huge body.
He took in her apartment with a quick glance, including the little dog who was sitting near Tess in guarded silence.
Dante frowned. “That can’t be…?”
Tess nodded, her tension eroding as Harvard went up to Dante, shyly wagging his tail in greeting. “I hope you don’t mind that I brought him home with me. I wanted to keep a close watch on him, and I thought…”
Her excuse trailed off as Dante reached down to pet the animal, nothing but kindness in his touch and in his deep voice. “Hey, little guy,” he said, chuckling as Harvard licked his hand, then dropped down on the floor for a belly rub. “Someone sure took good care of you today. Yeah, looks like somebody gave you a whole new leash on life.”
He glanced up at Tess with a question in his eyes, but before he could ask her about the dog’s sudden turnaround, she took his wet towel and nodded in the direction of her bathroom down the hall. “Come on, let me have a look at you now.”
Idling at a red light on the other side of South Boston, Chase glanced over at his passenger in the SUV with barely concealed contempt. He personally had no use for the drug-dealing scum. Part of him enjoyed knowing that the human might have been heading for his own funeral if not for Dante and Chase showing up at his apartment tonight.
It didn’t seem fair, a lowlife like Ben Sullivan getting a lucky break while innocent youths like Camden and the others who were missing ended up dead or worse, lost to Crimson-induced Bloodlust and gone Rogue by the shit this human peddled to them.
Chase weathered a sudden, sickening recollection of Dante putting a blade to Jonas Redmond’s throat in the alley outside the club the other night. That good kid was dead, not because of the warrior but because of the human sitting just an arm’s length away from him now. The urge to reach over and blow him away with a bullet to the head came up on Chase like a tsunami, rage he was unused to feeling in himself.
He stared ahead out the tinted windshield, willing the temptation to pass. Killing Ben Sullivan wasn’t going to solve anything, and it sure wouldn’t bring Camden home any sooner.
And that, after all, was his primary objective.
“He’s sleeping with her, isn’t he—that other guy and Tess?” The human’s voice rattled Chase out of his contemplation, but he didn’t acknowledge the question. Ben Sullivan