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“What the hell are you doing?” Dylan dug in her heels, her eyes wide with fear. “Are you insane? You’re going to break both our necks if you—”

He didn’t give her a chance to finish the thought, let alone speak it.

Before Dylan realized what was happening, she was lifted out the window and over the solid bulk of his shoulder. She heard his boots clanking on the rattling iron of the fire escape. Then she felt her whole world shift as he incredibly—impossibly—vaulted over the railing with her.

They hit the dark pavement three stories below.

It wasn’t the bone-breaking crash she anticipated, but a soft, almost graceful connection between his feet and the ground. She was still trying to process how that could be when suddenly she was pushed into the back of an open delivery truck that idled near the place they’d touched down.

Dylan tumbled in with her abductor right behind her. Disoriented and thoroughly confused, she was too stunned to form a single word as he brought the heavy trailer door down with a hard thump and enclosed them in darkness.

The truck’s engine roared to life, and with a sharp squeal of tires, the vehicle took off with its cargo.

Back in Boston, it was nearly five A.M. and the last of the Order’s warriors were heading in from their night patrols. Lucan, Tegan, and Dante—the mated ones, like Gideon, with females awaiting their return to the compound—had been in for about an hour already. Sterling Chase, the ex–Darkhaven Enforcement Agent who’d joined up with the Order last year and had proven to be a formidable—enthusiastically lethal—addition to the group, was present and accounted for too.

Now, as the three remaining members of the Order filed in, Gideon wasn’t surprised to find Nikolai bringing up the rear. Although he was the youngest of the warriors, Niko was also the most relentless fighter Gideon had ever seen. An adrenaline junkie and vicious combatant, the Russian-born vampire never called it a night until dawn was creeping over the horizon, forcing him off the streets.

And when it came to high-octane weaponry, Niko was an absolute demon.

Tonight, as the black-clad warrior with the golden-blond hair and glacial blue eyes sauntered in behind the two newest members of the cadre, Kade and Brock, Gideon noted that he was armed with some of his latest creations. A nasty-looking 9mm semiauto with a clip full of titanium hollowpoint rounds rode at Niko’s hip, and a laser-sighted sniper rifle tricked out with the same custom ammo was slung from a strap over his shoulder.

Even from behind the glass enclosure of the compound’s tech lab, Gideon could smell fresh death on the warrior. Not human, as the Breed in general tried to maintain as peaceful a cohabitation as possible with their Homo sapiens cousins. They fed from humans in order to survive, but it was rare that a vampire killed his Host. It was a matter of simple logic after all. No sense wiping out your sole food source, or, for that matter, exposing yourself as a mortal threat to that food source and encouraging them to wipe you out instead.

But there was a small, splintered percentage of the vampire nation that didn’t give a damn for solid logic. Rogues—vampires who’d become addicted to blood and gone feral, living only to feed that addiction—were the ones who found themselves in the crosshairs of the Order’s lethal brand of justice.

The Order had been combating the problematic minority within the Breed since the Middle Ages, a task that had given the warriors a reputation as merciless killers among the vampire nation at large. Not that Gideon or any of his brethren were looking for accolades or public adoration. They had a grim job to do, and they did it very well.

Gideon met the three returning warriors in the corridor outside the lab, wrinkling his nose at the Rogue stench that Nikolai carried in with him.

“I take it the hunting was decent tonight.”

Niko grinned. “It ended on a good note at any rate. Tracked and smoked a suckhead out of the city after he attacked a woman walking her dog