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“Lucky dog,” Dante drawled. He sat down on the edge of the bed, watching as Tess’s chin got a thorough, enthusiastic washing. His expression was too carefully schooled, too grave when her eyes met his. “There are…things we need to talk about, Tess. I had hoped you might never really be part of it, but I keep dragging you further in. After tonight, you need to understand what happened, and why.”

Nodding in silence, she let go of Harvard and looked at Dante’s bleak gaze. Part of her already knew where the conversation was going—uncharted territory, for sure, but after what she’d seen tonight, Tess knew that things she had long taken for granted as normal and real were somehow thrown off kilter.

“What were they, Dante? Those men who attacked me—they weren’t normal men. Were they?”

His head shook vaguely. “No, they weren’t men. They were dangerous creatures, blood addicts. We call them Rogues.”

“Blood addicts,” she said, her stomach lurching at the very idea. She looked down at her wrist, where a bite mark glowed red, but healing, on her skin. “My God. That’s what they were doing, drinking my blood? I don’t believe this. There’s only one name for that kind of psychotic behavior, and it’s vampire.”

Dante’s piercing, unwavering stare wasn’t even close to a refutation.

“Vampires don’t exist,” she told him firmly. “This is reality we’re talking about, after all. They can’t really exist.”

“They do, Tess. Not the way you might have been brought up to believe. Not as undead, soulless demons, but as a separate, hybrid species. The ones who attacked you tonight are the worst kind. They have no conscience, no capacity for logic or control. They kill indiscriminately and will continue to do so if they aren’t brought under control soon. That’s what I and the others in this compound are here for—to see to it that the Rogues are wiped out of existence before they become a pestilence unlike anything modern humankind has ever seen.”

“Oh, come on!” Tess scoffed, wanting to disbelieve but finding it hard to reject Dante’s outrageous claim when he had never looked or sounded more sincere. Or more deadly rational. “Are you telling me that you’re some kind of vampire slayer?”

“I’m a warrior. This is war, Tess. Things have only gotten worse now that the Rogues have Crimson on their side.”

“Crimson? What’s that?”

“The drug Ben Sullivan has been peddling around town the past few months. It increases the desire for blood, reduces inhibition. It creates these killers.”

“What about Ben? Does he know this? Is that why you went to his apartment the other night?”

Dante nodded. “He says he was hired to make the drug by an anonymous corporation this past summer. We suspect that corporation was likely a front for the Rogues.”

“Where is Ben now?”

“I don’t know, but I intend to find out.”

A coldness edged Dante’s voice as he said it, and Tess couldn’t help feeling a note of worry for Ben. “The men who—the Rogues—who attacked me had been searching his apartment.”

“Yes. They might have been looking for him, but we’re not sure.”

“I think I may know something about what they wanted.”

Dante fixed her with a frown. “How so?”

“Where’s my jacket?” Tess glanced around the bedroom but didn’t see any of her clothes. She was wearing just a bra and panties under the sheets that draped her. “I found something at the clinic the other day. A computer flash drive. Ben hid it in one of my exam rooms.”

“What was on it?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t tried to open it yet. It’s in my jacket pocket—”

“Shit.” Dante leaped to his feet. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. Will you be all right here alone?”

Tess nodded, still trying to come to grips with everything that was happening, all the incredible, disturbing things she was learning about the world she thought she knew. “Dante?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you…for saving my life.”

Something dark flashed in his whiskey-colored eyes, softening his harshly handsome features. He came back to her on the bed and tunneled his fingers through the hair at her