Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [734]
“Shit, Lucan. You serious?” Gideon gave a shake of his head. “There’s a little girl living here at the compound who’s going to have her heart torn up if anything happens to Hunter. He might not be winning any personality contests, but Mira adores him. Odd as this is going to sound, I think the feeling is mutual. You’ve seen how careful he is with that kid. He knows that if it wasn’t for Mira pleading for his life after the raid on Dragos’s gathering, Niko would have put a bullet in his skull. Hunter would do anything for that kid.”
“That doesn’t diminish the fact of what he is,” Lucan reminded Gideon and the others. “I want to believe he’s on our side as much as anyone else—hell, the way things are going lately, we need him on our side. But let’s not forget that until three months ago he was just another weapon in Dragos’s arsenal. A stone-cold, deadly weapon.”
Gideon gave an accepting nod. “Maybe Tegan ought to have a talk with him, see what kind of a reading he gets off soldier-boy now,” he said, referring to Tegan’s ability to discern someone’s emotions with a touch. An ability that had given Hunter a green light when he’d pledged his arm in service to the Order the past summer in Montreal.
“Tegan’s running a pickup at the airport,” Lucan said. “Anyone know when Hunter was due back from his patrols tonight?”
At the round of shrugs that circled the room, Lucan blew out a sigh. “We’ve got enough on our plates right now without dealing with shit like this. I want it contained, and I want Hunter pulled in ASAP so we can get some fucking answers.”
Kade, Brock, and Chase all murmured their agreement, then headed out of the tech lab together. When they were gone, Lucan turned his attention back to Gideon.
“If you’ve got any good news out of those missing persons’ reports that Dylan and Savannah have been working on with the area Darkhavens, I’ll be glad to hear it.”
From the look that Gideon gave him, Lucan got the feeling his night was going to go from grim to worse.
Reichen sat in the Rover with Tegan and Elise, growing more anxious by the minute. Claire had been gone for a while now. Seventeen minutes and counting.
She’d all but run away immediately after he and Tegan had been discussing what to do about Wilhelm Roth. It had been callous of him to speak so insensitively while she was present; he realized that now. Regardless of the hatred he felt for Roth, the male was still Claire’s mate of many years, and that did count for something. He owed her an apology, which he would give her as soon as she came back to the vehicle.
He’d sensed Claire’s quiet discomfiture during the flight, too, and knew he was also to blame for that. He felt like an ass after what happened when she’d walked into his dream at Danika’s place. The sex, while incredible, hadn’t been planned. He had wanted her so badly, and once she was standing there in front of him—her dream self or not—he’d been incapable of pushing her away.
It was the other part of the dream that he regretted.
Equally impossible to curb, he’d had no intention of bringing Claire into the center of the carnage at his Darkhaven. Nor had he meant to expose her to the other bit of nightmarish truth that had haunted him for a long time, and always would.
No one needed to witness that kind of horror, least of all her. She wasn’t to blame for any of it, but that hadn’t stopped his mind from projecting her into the carnage and, worse, into the role of Helene. His guilt over everything that had happened to his kin and to Helene was still a raw ache in his soul.
And yes, perhaps in some paranoid corner of his heart he worried that, like Helene, Claire could be used against him—that her blood bond might betray him in some way to Roth. There was little more Roth could do to hurt him; he’d already taken everything Reichen had.
But he could hurt Claire.
Reichen had endured and survived more than he’d thought himself capable of. If any harm were to come to Claire,