Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [590]
It had been a massacre.
An apparent junkie lay in a supine sprawl amid discarded syringes and other trash that littered the blood-soaked floor and a fouled mattress. The body was so ruined it was hardly recognizable as human, let alone a distinguishable gender. The other two bodies were savaged as well, but definitely Breed—without question, both of them Rogues judging by the size and stench of them alone.
Nikolai could guess what might have happened here: a lethal struggle over prey. This fight was fresh, maybe only minutes old. And the two dead suckheads wouldn’t have been able to shred each other so thoroughly before one or the other went down.
There had been at least one more Rogue involved in this scuffle.
If Niko was lucky the victor might still be in the area, licking his wounds. He hoped so, because he’d love to give the diseased bastard a taste of his 9mm’s custom rounds. Nothing said “Have a nice day” like a Rogue’s corrupted blood system going into allergic meltdown from a dose of poisonous titanium.
Nikolai went to the boarded-up window and tossed the crudely nailed panels aside. If he was looking for action, he’d just found it in spades. Below, on the street, stood an enormous Rogue. He was bloodied and battered, looking like ten kinds of hell.
But holy shit… he wasn’t alone.
Alexei Yakut was with him.
Incredibly, Lex and the Rogue walked toward a waiting sedan and got in.
“What the fuck are you up to?” Niko murmured under his breath as the car roared up the street.
He was about to leap out the open window and follow on foot when a shrill scream sounded behind him. A woman had wandered into the carnage and now gaped at him in terror, an accusing, shaky finger pointed in his direction. She screamed again, loud enough to wake every crackhead and dealer in the neighborhood.
Nikolai eyed the witness and the bloody evidence of a struggle that looked anything but human.
“Damn it,” he growled, glancing over his shoulder in time to see Lex’s car disappear around the corner. “It’s all right,” he told the shrieking banshee as he left the window and approached her. “You didn’t see a thing.”
He wiped her memory and shoved her out of the room. Then he took out a titanium blade and stuck it into the remains of one of the dead Rogues.
As the body began to sizzle and dissolve, Niko set about cleaning up the rest of the mess that Lex and his unlikely associate had left behind.
CHAPTER
Twelve
Renata stood at the counter of the lodge’s galley kitchen, a knife gripped loosely in her hand. “What kind of jelly do you want tonight—grape or strawberry?”
“Grape,” Mira replied. “No, wait—I want strawberry this time.”
She was perched on the edge of the wood countertop next to Renata, her legs swinging idly. Dressed in a purple T-shirt, faded blue jeans, and scuffed sneakers, Mira might have seemed like any other normal suburban little girl waiting on her dinner. But normal little girls weren’t made to eat the same thing, practically day in and day out. Normal little girls had families to love and care for them. They lived in nice houses on pretty, tree-lined streets, with bright kitchens and stocked pantries and mothers who knew how to cook endless wonderful meals.
At least, that’s what Renata imagined when she thought of the ideal picture of normal. She didn’t know from any kind of personal experience. As a child of the streets before Yakut found her and brought her to the lodge, Mira didn’t know what normal was either. But it was that wholesome, normal kind of life that Renata wished for the child, as futile a wish as it seemed, standing in Sergei Yakut’s dingy kitchen, next to a beat-up range that probably wouldn’t work even if it did have a gas line running to it.
Since Renata and Mira were the only ones at the lodge who ate food, Yakut had left it up to Renata to see that she and the child were regularly fed. Renata didn