Kiss of Midnight_ A Midnight Breed Novel - Lara Adrian [817]
Besides that, he was tired of looking at the asshole.
He reached down to lift the dogs’ chins in his palms, glancing into the intense brown eyes of one, then the other. The silent command was acknowledged with a faint twitch of sinew. The pit bulls jumped up onto the desk and sat in front of their former master, their eyes unblinking, sharp-toothed maws open and dripping saliva.
“Good boys,” Kade said. He pivoted to leave.
“Wait, so … that’s it?” Homeboy asked hesitantly from around the pair of slavering gargoyles that were now perched before him. “I wanna be sure we’re cool for now. I mean, I told you everything I know. That’s all you want from me, right?”
“Not exactly,” Kade said without looking back at the skin trader. He put his hand on the doorknob. “There is one more thing I want.”
As he walked out of the office and closed the door, he heard the pair of pit bulls launch into their attack. Kade paused there, closing his eyes and letting himself enjoy the violence of the moment through his talent’s visceral connection to the animals. He felt every breaking crunch of bone, every tear of the skin trader’s flesh as the dogs ripped into him. Inside the room, the vampire screamed and wailed, his pain a pleasant punctuation to the music and moaning still carrying on in the other part of the building.
Brock came striding up the hallway as Kade was stepping around the corpse of the driver.
“You take care of the females?” he asked as he and his patrol partner met up halfway.
“I scrubbed the memories of their whole captivity and sent them home,” Brock said. The big male spared only the briefest glance at the body before arching a brow at Kade. “How about you? Did you manage to get anything out of Homeboy?”
“Turns out he wasn’t actually much of a dog person,” Kade said around the continued shrieks coming from the direction of the office.
Brock’s mouth quirked at the corner. “So I hear. Anything else?”
“Yeah, unfortunately. Asshole’s been trafficking Breedmates, just as our intel suggested. His client was a Minion, but he didn’t know anything more than that. Never saw the mind slave up close and couldn’t describe him at all.”
“Shit,” Brock said, running a big hand over the top of his head. “So I guess Homeboy was a dead end, huh?”
Kade cocked his head as the last of the howls cut short behind him. “He is now.”
Brock exhaled a rueful chuckle. “Let’s get this place cleaned up and shut down. Got a text from Gideon, asking us to call in when we can. Something about a situation up north.”
“Up north, as in upstate?”
“No, man. Farther north than that.” Brock met his gaze and held it for longer than was comfortable. “Something’s evidently gone down in Alaska. He didn’t say what exactly, just said that Lucan wants you to report in to headquarters ASAP.”
CHAPTER
Three
Kade understood even before he and Brock arrived at the Order’s compound that the news he was about to get couldn’t be good. As the founder and leader of the warriors, not to mention a first-generation Breed somewhere in the vicinity of nine hundred years old, Lucan was hardly an alarmist by nature. So the fact that he saw fit to call Kade in specifically was a major clue that whatever the so-called situation was in Alaska, it was something seriously fucked up.
Speculation swirled in Kade’s gut, one disturbing scenario after another, awful things that were far too easy for him to imagine and burned like bitter bile in the back of his throat. He kept his dread to himself as he and Brock parked the Rover in the fleet garage behind the heavily secured estate at ground level, then took the hangar’s elevator down some three hundred feet to the subterranean nerve center of the Order’s operations.
“You cool, my man?” Brock asked as he and Kade stepped out of the elevator and into the white marble corridor that connected the labyrinthine compound’s many chambers like a central artery. “You know if this had anything to do with your kin back home, Lucan would have said so. I’m