Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [660]
Dragos’s blood was lava scorching his veins. He should kill the idiot here and now, just because of this insult. “You obviously misread what you saw.”
“No!” Fabien cried, grabbing hold of the girl and wheeling her around. He gave her a hard shake. “Show me again! Prove to him that I am not mistaken, damn you!”
Dragos watched as still as stone while Fabien peered into her eyes. The Darkhaven leader’s horrified gasp told him all he needed to know. He reeled back, as white as a sheet. As stricken as if he’d just witnessed his own murder.
“I don’t understand,” Fabien muttered. “It’s all changed. You have to believe me, sire! I don’t know how she’s changed the vision, but the little witch is lying now. She has to be!”
“Get her out of my sight,” Dragos growled to the Enforcement Agency guard who held her. “I’ll take her with me when I leave, but until then, I don’t want to see hide nor hair of her.”
The guard gave a nod and removed the child, practically dragging her up to the house.
“Sire, I beg you,” Fabien pleaded. “Forgive me for this … unfortunate mistake.”
“I will deal with you later,” Dragos said, not bothering to couch the threat that rode undercurrent of his words.
He resumed his progress toward the gathering, more determined than ever to make his authority—his unmatched power—understood to all.
CHAPTER
Twenty-nine
It was fully dark when Niko and Renata arrived at the coordinates Gideon had supplied for Edgar Fabien’s property up north. The Darkhaven leader evidently owned a sizable chunk of wooded land, far enough out of Montreal that the surrounding area remained widely undeveloped: acre after acre of huge conifers and evergreens, not a living soul in sight except for the occasional deer or moose that bolted at the first scent of the heavily armed vampire creeping through their unspoiled sanctuary.
Nikolai had been running solo reconaissance on the area for the past few minutes. A two-story house made of logs and stone was tucked into a thick corner of the forest. A narrow, unpaved drive, barely wide enough for one vehicle, cut a meandering path through the trees to the front of the house. Niko skirted that driveway from the cover of the woods, taking note of the two SWAT-garbed Enforcement Agents posted near the halfway mark and the three large black Humvees parked in single-file formation just outside the front door of the place. Three more vampire guards, M16 rifles at the ready, covered the entrance. The east and west sides were each also under watch by an armed sentry.
Although he didn’t figure they’d leave the back of the place vulnerable to infiltration, Niko moved around that way to get the lay of the land. He heard the soft lap of water even before he saw the quiet lake and the empty dock at the shore some three hundred yards behind the house. Off the rear of the place another Enforcement Agency duo stood guard.
Damn it.
Getting into the site to nab Fabien wasn’t going to be easy. Unless he and the Order dropped in from above, if they wanted to pull Dragos’s associate out of there, they were going to have to mow down a few Agency guards in the process. And that wasn’t even factoring in the unknown group of Breed males who had accompanied the Montreal Darkhaven leader here last night. Yanking Fabien tonight without a lot of civilian casualties might be verging on the impossible. Double that estimate when the problem of rescuing Mira was added to the mix. So, basically the net of his recon was that shit was likely to get very messy in here, no two ways about it.
And then there was the situation with Renata.
One of the hardest things Nikolai had ever done was spend the entire day with her, knowing that he had deceived her. He wanted to tell her—after they’d made love, after she’d honored him with the gift of her blood and the completed bond that now joined them eternally. He’d wanted to tell her a dozen times over, in