Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [642]
He could have stopped her.
If he’d wanted to, he could have been on her faster than she could track him, physically preventing her from taking another step toward the vehicle. He could have tranced her with a simple brush of his hand over her face and forced her to wait out the pain that would probably wipe her out completely not long after they reached the lodge.
He could have held her back in any number of ways, but instead he circled around to the driver’s side of the black Humvee before she got there and blocked her entry with his body.
“I’ll drive,” he said, giving her no chance to argue. “You’re shotgun.”
Renata stared at him for a second, then walked over and climbed into the passenger seat.
They found their way back to the road and drove the short distance to Yakut’s wooded property in silence. Niko cut the lights as they approached at a slow roll. He was about to suggest they bail out and move in on the lodge by foot when he noticed something was off about the place.
“Is it always this quiet?”
“Never,” Renata said, shooting him a grave look. She reached behind the seats to pick up some of the Agency weapons. She looped the strap of an automatic rifle over her head, then handed Nikolai one for himself. “Lex only had two guards left, but it doesn’t look like anyone is here at all.”
And even from this distance, Niko detected the scent of spilled blood. Breed blood, coming from more than one source.
“Wait here while I go check things out.”
She gave him an insubordinate scoff that he might have predicted was coming.
They both climbed out of the vehicle and moved in tandem toward the dark main house. The front door was wide open. Fresh tire tracks were laid out in the gravel drive, wide, deep-set tracks like the kind an oversized SUV would leave behind.
Niko had a feeling the Enforcement Agency had been here too.
The lodge was utterly silent, reeking with the stench of recent vampire deaths. He didn’t need to turn on the lights to see the carnage. His keen vision spotted the two dead males just inside, both shot point-blank in the head with several rounds.
He guided Renata around the corpses, following his nose to the back of the place, to Yakut’s private quarters. He knew what he was going to find in here as well. Even still, he stepped into the room and let out a furious curse.
Lex was dead.
And with him, so was their best hope of locating Edgar Fabien tonight.
CHAPTER
Twenty-four
Renata’s breath seized up at the sound of Nikolai’s muttered curse. She reached for the light switch near the open door of Yakut’s bedroom. Slowly flipped it on.
She couldn’t speak as she stared down at Lex’s lifeless body, his eyes vacant and clouded over with death, three large bullet holes bored into the front of his head. She wanted to scream. God in heaven, she wanted to drop to her knees, fist her hands in her hair, and howl to the rafters—not with grief or shock, but complete and thorough rage.
But her lungs were constricted in her breast.
Her limbs were weighted down, arms and legs too heavy to move.
What hope she’d been harboring—as small as it was— that they might come here and get a solid lead on Mira’s location seeped out of her, as surely as Lex’s blood had seeped into the floorboards of his father’s room.
“Renata, we’ll find another way,” Nikolai said from somewhere near her. He bent down over the body and removed a cell phone from the pocket of Lex’s suit coat, flipped it open and pressed some of the keys. “We’ve got Lex’s call history now. One of these numbers might be Fabien’s. I’ll contact Gideon and have him chase them down. We’re gonna have something on Fabien very soon. We’ll get him, Renata.”
She couldn’t answer; she had no words. Turning slowly, she walked out of the room, hardly conscious that her feet were moving. She drifted through the dark lodge, past the bodies lying in the great room and down a hallway… unsure where she was heading, yet unsurprised when she found herself standing in the center of the tiny room where