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“Tegan comes with me.” Elise removed her jacket and draped it over her arm. She smiled politely, but her gaze was as unwavering as her tone. “I’m afraid I must insist, Director Kuhn.”

Elise’s handling of the self-important facility director was impressive. She knew Darkhaven and Enforcement Agency protocol and understood just how far she could bend both. Her station as Quentin Chase’s widow brought her a lot of pull, which she didn’t hesitate to put to use.

The fact that she’d sided with Tegan when she could have just as well left him to fight his way inside to interrogate the Odolf Rogue—and would have been within her rights to do just that, after how things ended between them last night—impressed him even more. Elise was cool under pressure, a consummate lady and a levelheaded tactician.

She was, he had to admit if only to himself, a damn valuable asset.

The fact that he could hardly take his eyes off her in the sexy, all-business navy trousers and crisp white blouse she wore only amplified his appreciation of her. The evidence of that rousing appreciation was a hard, heavy presence behind the zipper of his black fatigues as he left Reichen to wait behind with the driver and followed the graceful sway of Elise’s hips through the second set of gates, toward the containment facility ahead.

Tegan ignored the gaping of the clinic employees he passed. He vaguely registered the hasty scrambling of civilian feet all around him—both the ones getting the hell out of his way and those few daring souls who came out from behind their monitoring stations or meeting-room doors to have a look at the dark, dangerous stranger stalking through their midst.

The facility director led Tegan and Elise deeper into the place, through one after another set of secured doors. Finally, they turned down a long concrete hallway and stopped in front of a heavy steel door marked Treatment Center. The director punched a code into a wall-mounted keypad, then put his face in front of a scanner and waited as a light took a quick read of his retinas.

“This way,” he said, sniffing almost imperceptibly down the length of his nose as he held the door open for Elise and Tegan to enter yet another hallway.

The space inside was dimly lit and quiet except for intermittent moans and feral-sounding growls not quite masked by the soft classical music piped in through overhead speakers. Closed doors lined either side of the hallway, some with small windows that looked in over the room’s occupant. A few of the rooms were empty, but others held Rogues in various stages of consciousness, all of them strapped into full body restraints. Heavy steel bars equipped with electronic locks held the doors closed, sealing the patients inside their rooms.

Tegan glanced into one of the windows as he passed, taking in the pathetic sight of a drooling, blood-addicted Breed vampire, its limp body stuffed into a soiled white jumpsuit, head shaved bald and still sporting tiny contact pads from a recent bout of electroshock therapy. The Rogue’s fiery amber eyes were at half-mast, rolled back into its skull from whatever sedative it had been given.

“So, this is the Darkhavens’ version of Betty Ford, eh?” Tegan gave a humorless chuckle. “And you people have the balls to say the Order has no mercy.”

Elise shot him a quelling look, but Kuhn ignored the jab completely. He walked them toward the last of the holding cells, pausing to enter an access code. As the admittance light blinked green above the door, the director said, “Since the feeding is still under way, we will have to wait in the observation room until they finish. It should only be another few minutes.”

Tegan followed Elise inside the vestibule, and was there to hold her steady as she physically recoiled the instant she got her first glimpse of the procedure taking place on the other side of the shaded one-way glass.

“Good Lord,” she gasped, one hand coming up to her mouth.

In the adjacent room, the Rogue named Petrov Odolf was strapped down on a custom-rigged examination table like a specimen under a scope. He was