Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [300]
“Jesus.” Tegan scowled, and now that Tess moved her fingers away from her neck he could see the fading outline of a bruising grip. “You sure you’re all right?”
She nodded. “He didn’t mean it, and he let go the instant he realized what he was doing. I’m fine, really. He will be too. You know that, right, Rio?”
Tess cautiously stepped forward, avoiding the shards at her feet yet keeping a healthy distance from Tegan like he was more of a threat to her general safety than the feral wreck that was Rio.
Tegan wasn’t offended. He preferred his solitary existence and worked hard to maintain it. He watched Tess move slowly toward Rio’s stiff stance at the sideboard.
She gently placed her hand on the warrior’s scarred shoulder. “Tomorrow will be better, I’m sure. Every day there are small improvements.”
“I’m not getting better,” Rio muttered, in what could have sounded like self-pity but seemed more a bleak understanding. He shook off Tess’s touch with a snarl. “I should be put down. It would be a blessing…to everyone, especially me. I am useless. This body—my mind—it’s all fucking useless!”
Rio slammed his fist down on the sideboard, rattling the broken mirror glass and putting a tremor in the two-hundred-year-old mahogany beneath it.
Tess flinched, but there was an unwavering resolve in her blue-green eyes. “You are not useless. Healing takes time, that’s all. You can’t give up.”
Rio growled something nasty under his breath, his hooded eyes throwing off amber light in warning. But not even a half-mad vampire’s ferocious bluster was going to dissuade Tess from helping him if she could. No doubt she’d seen this sort of snarling behavior before from Rio—and possibly even her own mate—and hadn’t run away in terror.
Tegan watched Tess stand firm, calm, steady, tenacious. It wasn’t hard to imagine why Dante adored her so much. But Tegan could see that Rio was in a particularly unstable, volatile state. He may not mean anyone harm—least of all, Tess, whose extraordinary healing skills had nursed him out of near psychosis—but rage and anguish made for one powerful emotional cocktail. Tegan knew that fact firsthand; he’d lived it once, long ago. Add to that the lingering aftereffects of a traumatic brain injury like Rio had suffered, and the warrior was a lit powder keg just waiting to go off.
“Let me,” Tegan said when Tess started to move toward Rio again. “I’ll take him down to the compound. I’m heading below anyway.”
She gave him a wary smile. “Okay, thanks.”
Tegan approached Rio with deliberate movements and carefully guided him away from the female and out of the field of debris around their feet. The big male’s steps were heavy, lacking the grace that used to come so naturally to him. Rio leaned heavily on Tegan’s shoulder and arm, his bare chest heaving with every deep breath he hauled into his lungs.
“That’s it, nice and easy,” Tegan coached him. “We good now, amigo?”
The dark head bobbed awkwardly.
Tegan glanced to Tess as she knelt down and began collecting the shattered glass and porcelain from the foyer tiles. “Have you seen Chase around tonight?”
“Not for a while,” she said. “He and Dante are still out on patrol.”
Tegan smirked. Four months ago, the two males had been ready to tear out each other’s throats. They’d been tossed together by Lucan as unwilling partners when Darkhaven agent Sterling Chase showed up at the compound with info about a dangerous club drug called Crimson and to solicit help from the Order in getting the shit off the streets. Now he and Dante were almost inseparable in the field, had been ever since Chase left the Darkhavens and came on board officially as a member of the Order. “The pair of them are a regular Mutt and Jeff, eh?”
Tess’s eyes held a trace of humor as she looked up from the mess in front of her. “More like Larry and Curly, if you ask me.”
Tegan exhaled a wry laugh as he steered Rio into the hallway. He brought him to the mansion’s elevator, walked him inside, then pushed the code to begin