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The bald Gen One growled, his eyes flashing pure hatred. “Fuck you.”

“Get up,” Tegan commanded. “Careful. It’s real easy to lose your head in a situation like this.”

Grudgingly, radiating menace, the assassin rose to his feet. With Kade and the others holding their weapons on the vampire, Tegan slowly walked him into the nearby chamber. The room’s function was familiar enough to Kade since he and the Order had encountered a similar one when they’d raided Dragos’s headquarters in Connecticut just a few weeks ago. It was a holding cell, the cylindrical cage at its center, with its electronic restraints and computerized control panel designed for the containment of one particular captive.

“Where is the Ancient?” Tegan demanded as he guided the assassin over to the heavy-duty restraints that had been built to hold the otherworlder. Tegan glanced at Kade and Brock. “Lock this son of a bitch down.”

They each took a hand and slapped the shackles around the Gen One’s wrists. While they secured his arms, Chase walked over and fitted two more cuffs around his ankles.

“Where is the Ancient?” Tegan asked once more, his words tightly clipped. “Okay, how about this. Where’s Dragos? He’s obviously diversifying his operation now, moving his pieces around instead of keeping them all together in one place. So, he moves the Ancient into cold storage up here, but what about the rest of it? Where is he hiding now? Where are the Breedmates he’s holding prisoner?”

“He won’t know.” Hunter’s deep voice cut through the din of the alarms outside and the tension mounting inside the Ancient’s containment chamber. “Dragos tells us nothing. As his Hunters, we serve. That is all.”

Tegan snarled, looking like he wanted to snap the assassin’s collar then and there. Keeping one hand on the blade that pressed against the UV collar, he put his other hand on the assassin’s brow and pushed the big head backward. “Motherfucker. He knows something.”

The assassin’s mouth curved with private amusement.

“Start talking, you lab-spawned piece of shit, or you go up in smoke right here and now.”

The assassin’s gaze was glacial. “We are all about to go up in smoke,” he hissed through his teeth and fangs.

Kade glanced at the control panel on the opposite wall, only just that second realizing that there was a digital timer counting down on a five-minute clock. On top of the gnawing cold that was still chewing away at his chest, now a sick sense of déjà-vu gripped him as he watched what had to be the mine’s self-destruct mechanism ticking off seconds. “Shit. He’s already dropped the switch. This whole place is gonna blow.”

Tegan growled, low and deadly, as he withdrew the knife from under the assassin’s chin and left him standing in the Ancient’s holding cell. Kade and the others stepped back as he strode over to the control panel and punched the button that operated the ultraviolet light bars. The vertical beams of light went live, circling the Gen One assassin inside and imprisoning him more securely than any amount of metal could.

“Let’s get out of here,” Tegan said, stalking out the door. The rest of the warriors fell in behind him, Kade and Brock at the rear.

Brock paused to give the captive assassin a broad smile. “Don’t go anywhere now, you hear?”

Ordinarily, Kade would have gotten a good chuckle out of his partner’s grim humor, but it was damned hard to appreciate anything when his heart was hammering like he’d just run a hundred miles and his veins were lighting up with the same odd chill that had made a home in his chest.

He ran with the rest of the group, out of the mine’s building and into the main yard of the site, which looked like a war zone. The alarm sirens howled the loudest outside, screaming into the night. The snow was coming down at a furious pace now, blanketing the field of dead Minions and dropping visibility to next to nil.

“We need to adios these bodies, make sure there’s nothing left to identify once this place blows,” Tegan said. “Come on, let’s drag them inside one of the outbuildings