Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [661]
Yeah, he was going to keep telling himself that, because he didn’t want to consider any other alternatives.
Shaking off the regret that dogged his steps and the dread that kept threatening to crawl up the back of his neck, Nikolai moved to a better vantage point in the cover of the woods. He peered through the brushy pine branches, watching several of the house’s occupants as they passed a window on the ground floor. He took a quick headcount of the hooded Breed males as they strode as a group toward another area of the place. Five, six, seven… and then another, this one without the black head covering.
Oh, Christ.
Nikolai knew him. He’d seen the son of a bitch up close and personal only a few weeks prior, when a mission for the Order had sent Niko to meet with one of the highest-ranking officials in the Enforcement Agency. At the time, the male was going by a long-standing alias—one of two false names the Order had uncovered not long afterward. Now they knew the bastard by his true name, the one his traitorous Gen One father before him had carried as well.
Dragos.
Holy… skit.
For weeks the Order had been searching exhaustively for even the most minute lead on Dragos, all without success. Now here he was, plunked down right in front of them like a fish in a barrel. Motherfucker was here. And goddamn it, he was going down—tonight.
Niko eased back into the thicket, then hauled ass in a southerly direction, where he’d left Renata with their purloined Agency SUV He couldn’t wait to call Tegan and Rio and give them this good news.
Edgar Fabien’s confusion and distress over the debacle of his botched gift for Dragos haunted him like a wraith as he and the others followed their newly arrived leader into the conference room of the northern retreat. He knew it was dangerous, generally deadly, to displease Dragos, something he’d avoided very well until recently. But he also knew—as he assumed the rest of the Breed males gathered here for this meeting did—that Dragos had brought them all together tonight for a specific purpose. This was to be a historic night. A reward, Dragos had promised, for their years of covert partnership and loyalty toward a common goal.
After so much time and effort spent currying Dragos’s favor these past decades, Fabien only prayed he hadn’t thrown it away in that one unfortunate instant down near the dock.
“Be seated,” Dragos instructed them as they filed in and he took his place at the front of the meeting room. He watched as Fabien and the six others, all still concealed behind their black hoods, filled the chairs that were gathered around the slab of polished granite that served as the conference table. “Each of us assembled here in this room shares a common interest—that being the current and future state of our race.”
Fabien nodded in agreement beneath his hood, as did several others at the table.
“We share a common resentment for the corruption of our bloodlines by the stain of humanity and for the craven way those in power within the Breed have chosen to govern us with regard to the inferior mankind. Since the first seeds of the race were sown on this planet, vampirekind has degenerated into a fat, complacent disgrace. With each new generation born, our bloodlines grow more and more diluted with humanity. Our leaders prefer us to skulk in hiding from the Homo sapiens world, all of them fearful of being found out, and masking that cowardice with laws and policies put in place supposedly to protect the secret of our very existence. We have been weakened by fear and secrecy. It is high time that changed, and a new, powerful leadership is required.”
Now the nods became more vigorous, the murmured agreements more fervent.
Dragos began a leisurely pace at the front