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He stalked up the steps and scowled at the feeble door with its broken lock. Inside the vestibule a battered wooden staircase rose to the left, but Elise’s scent was coming from the door at the end of the first-floor hall. Tegan crept past another apartment door on his right, the thump of music vibrating the floor and walls. He could hear a television too, a barrage of background noise that seemed to swell as he neared Elise’s place. He rapped on the door and waited.

No response.

He knocked again, dropping his knuckles hard on the scarred metal. Nothing. Not that she could hear anything inside the place with all the racket going on in there.

Maybe he shouldn’t be there, shouldn’t get involved in whatever it was that brought the female to this place in her life. Tegan knew she’d had a rough time since the death of her son. Already widowed some five years, Elise had been devastated when her only child went missing and was later found to have gone Rogue. The Order had gotten word that Camden was dead, killed by Elise’s brother-in-law, Sterling Chase, when the kid showed up at the Darkhaven in full-on Bloodlust. The report stated that Camden had been about to attack Elise when Chase gunned him down with titanium rounds—right in front of her.

God only knew what witnessing her son’s death might have done to Elise. Not his concern, though. Yeah, not his fucking problem at all. So why was he standing in this rank tenement house with his dick in his hand, waiting for her to come around and let him in?

Tegan eyed the array of locks on the apartment door. At least these were in working order and she’d had the good sense to set them once she got inside. But for a Breed vampire of Tegan’s power and lineage, tripping the locks with his mind took all of two seconds.

He slipped inside and closed the door behind him. The decibel level in the small studio apartment was enough to make his head shatter. He glanced around the place with narrowed eyes, taking in the odd decor. The only furniture was a futon and a bookcase, which housed a quality stereo system and a small flat-panel television—both on, and blaring.

Next to the futon, in a space that might have held a table and chairs, were a treadmill and a resistance training machine. Elise’s blood-stained parka lay on the floor there, and on the sorry-looking yellow kitchen counter were a cell phone and an MP3 player. Elise’s decorating style left a lot to be desired, but it was her choice of wall covering that Tegan found most peculiar.

Crudely nailed to all four walls of the one-room living space were acoustic foam panels—soundproofing material. Yards of the stuff, covering every square inch of the walls and the back of the door, too. “What the fu—”

In the adjacent bathroom, there was a metallic squeak as the shower abruptly cut off. Tegan turned to face the door as it opened a moment later. Elise was pulling a white terrycloth robe around herself as she glanced up, met his gaze, and gasped.

“Tegan.” Her voice was barely audible over the din of the music and TV. She made no move to turn them down, just came out of the bathroom and stood as far away from him as possible. “What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing.” Tegan let his eyes drift around the meager living quarters, if only to quit looking at her in her state of near-undress. “Shitty place you have here. Who’s your decorator?”

She didn’t answer him. Her pale amethyst eyes stayed fixed on him as though she didn’t quite trust him, nervous to find herself alone with him. And who could blame her? Tegan knew he had the reputation of a stone cold killer. It was simply fact. But the last time he’d seen Elise, he’d shown her nothing but kindness, deference paid the Darkhaven female out of respect for what she was going through. It hadn’t hurt that she was a breathtaking beauty, as fragile as a frost flower.

Some of that fragility was gone now, Tegan noted, seeing the lines of muscle definition in her bare