Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [787]
It was awesome in its power, and Roth could not keep himself from staring, struck dumb with wonder and fear, as Reichen stalked toward him. The concrete floor scorched black beneath Reichen’s boots. The fluorescent lights overhead popped and smoked as he passed under them, moving inch by inch across the viewing room. Roth retreated, feeling his hair and skin singe from the intensity of the heat rolling off Reichen.
“You think you can accomplish anything by killing me?” he asked the glowing form that stalked him with obvious deadly intent. “You’ve seen this place, Reichen. You can figure out what it’s been used for all these years. Dragos has bred his own army down here. He’s done much more than that, and he cannot be stopped now. Do you actually think my death will make a difference in the grand scheme of things?”
“It will make a difference to Claire,” came the deep, heat-warped reply. “It will make a difference to me.”
Roth kept moving backward, until the gauges and switches of the UV cage’s control panel behind him bit into his spine. “Let me go, and maybe your friends down there in that cell will live.”
“You can’t harm anyone. Not anymore.” Reichen’s glance bounced from point to point on the control panel. Circuits crackled, shooting off sparks and bitter, electronic smoke. Roth had to duck out of the way of the small explosions, the fallout of Reichen’s searing gaze driving him deep into the corner of the room in a cower. Roth snarled, infuriated to have been sent to his knees, particularly by this male, whose death he had craved and sought for far too long.
As Reichen stepped closer, murder blazing from every pore of his body, Roth made an abrupt lunge for one of the gauges on the control panel. He understood the fact that he wasn’t going to walk away from this fight now, but damn if he would accept defeat alone.
With a grunt of determination, Roth smashed his fist onto the panic switch that would activate the lab’s emergency detonation sequence. Sirens immediately began to wail overhead. The alarms sounded from every direction, signaling the start of an irreversible countdown.
Roth chuckled. “My God. It’s almost worth it—knowing that I am about to die down here alongside you and the bulk of the Order. Seeing that look on your face right now… your defeat is palpable, Reichen. So is the horror and outrage—the raw, emotional pain—it’s all there, in your eyes.” He sighed, knowingly dramatic. “I only wish I could take Claire along with us when this whole goddamned place blows to kingdom come in the next five—ah, make that four minutes and forty-nine seconds.”
CHAPTER
Thirty-one
Claire wanted it to all be a dream. A terrible nightmare that she could simply wake from and the world would go back to normal. She wanted to go back to three nights ago, when she and Andreas had been alone at the house in Newport, making love, walking along the wharfs, embracing under the moonlight.
But the sound of Wilhelm Roth’s cruelly animated voice—the realization of what he had just done to Andreas, to the warriors inside the abandoned lair with him… to the women who would be mourning their mates in mere minutes—sank into Claire’s soul like a poison.
“I can’t stay in here another second,” she murmured, meeting Dylan’s ashen look.
“We can’t leave, Claire. Can’t you hear the gunfire out there by the entrance?”
Claire heard it. Rio had been gone for only a few minutes. He and Renata and Hunter were still engaged with the Gen One assassins who’d come up to ground level. It was dangerous outside the vehicle; Claire knew that. But as she stared anxiously out the tinted windshield at the forest that surrounded her, she knew a deeper sense of dread.
“Oh, my God… no. This cannot be Mira’s vision.”
She opened the door and slid out of the Rover, realizing just now that the premonition she’d seen in the little girl’s eyes