Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [470]
“Yesterday’s test results, Master.”
One of the humans who served him handed him a file of reports. They didn’t call him by name; no one did. There were none around who knew who he truly was.
He’d been born the son of Dragos, his sire a first generation Breed male fathered by the very creature contained within the UV prison cell built in this underground lair. Birthed in secret and sent away to be raised by strangers, it had taken him many long years to finally understand his purpose.
Longer still to get his hands on the prize that would lift him to greatness.
“Did you have a pleasant rest?” he idly asked his prisoner, as he closed the file of test results and readings.
The creature didn’t answer, just peeled its lips back and breathed in slowly, air hissing through the large, elongated fangs.
He’d stopped speaking about a decade ago, whether from madness, anger, or defeat, his keeper didn’t know. Nor did he particularly care. There was no love between them. The Ancient, despite being close kin, was primarily a means to an end.
“We’ll begin now,” the keeper told his prisoner.
He entered a code into the computer that would command the robotics in the cell to commence with the extractions. The tests were painful, plentiful, and prolonged…but all necessary. Body fluids were collected, tissue samples harvested. So far, the experiments had yielded only minor successes. But there was promise, and that was enough.
By the time the last specimen was retrieved and catalogued, the Ancient slumped with exhaustion in the cell. Its huge body quivered and spasmed as its advanced physiology worked to heal the damage inflicted by the procedure.
“Just one more process left to complete,” the keeper said.
It was this last one that was most crucial—and most primal—for the vampire recuperating behind the UV light bars of his cell.
Locked within another, more rudimentary prison, was a heavily sedated human female, recently captured off the streets. She too was naked, her dyed black goth-styled hair cut away entirely to better expose her neck. Her eyes were unfocused, pupils dilated from the drugs injected into her system a short while ago.
She didn’t scream or struggle as she was led out of her confinement by two Minions and into the main holding area of the laboratory. Her small breasts jiggled with each shuffling step she took, and her head lolled back on her shoulders, revealing the little teardrop-and-crescent-moon birthmark she bore underneath her chin. Her bare feet moved listlessly as she was placed into stirrups on an automated seat that would carry her past the UV barrier and directly into the center of the Ancient’s cell.
She hardly flinched as the chair tipped back, positioning her for what was to come. Inside the cell, the restraints on the huge male loosened slightly, freeing him to move in on her like the predator he was.
“You will feed now,” the keeper told him. “And then you will breed on her.”
CHAPTER
Fourteen
It felt goddamn strange to be in the compound again. But as strange as it was, Rio found it even more surreal to be entering his private apartments within the Order’s subterranean headquarters just outside Boston proper.
Dante and Chase had gone off to the tech lab as soon as they arrived, leaving Rio to contend with Dylan on his own. He supposed the warriors were also giving him a chance to reacquaint himself privately with his old life—the one Eva had stolen from him a year ago with her betrayal. He hadn’t been in his quarters at the compound for a long time, but the place looked exactly as he remembered it. Exactly as he’d left it, following the warehouse explosion that had sent him into the compound’s infirmary for several months of hard recuperation.
The apartments he’d once shared with Eva were like a time capsule. Everything was frozen in its place from that hellish night, when he and his brethren had gone topside to take out a lair of Rogue vampires only to walk headlong into a deadly ambush.
An ambush orchestrated by the female who’d been his