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Yet he’d had a startlingly unprofessional response to the sight of Jenna’s unclothed body. It had been five days ago, but he remembered every exposed inch of her ivory skin as though he were looking at it again now, and his pulse kicked at the memory.

He recalled every smooth curve and sloping valley, every little mole, every scar—from the ghost of a c-section incision on her abdomen, to the smattering of healed puncture wounds and lacerations that peppered her torso and forearms, telling him she’d already come through hell and back at least once before.

And he’d been anything but clinical and detached when Jenna lapsed into a sudden convulsion of agony in the moments after Alex had finished searching in vain for a birthmark signifying that her friend was a Breedmate like the other women who lived at the Order’s compound. He’d placed his hands on both sides of her neck and drawn the pain away from her, all too aware of how soft and delicate her skin was beneath his fingertips. He fisted his hands at the thought as it rose up on him now.

He didn’t need to be thinking about the woman, naked or otherwise. Except now that he’d gone there, he could think of damned little else. And when she glanced up and caught his gaze through the glass of the little window in the door, an unbidden heat went through him like a flaming arrow.

Desire was bad enough, but it was the odd sense of protectiveness serving as a chaser that really threw him off kilter. The feeling had begun in Alaska, when he and the other warriors first found her. It hadn’t faded in the days she’d been at the compound. If anything, the feeling had only gotten stronger, watching her fight and struggle through the strange sleep that had kept her unconscious since she’d come out of her ordeal with the Ancient in Alaska.

Her frank gaze still held his from across the infirmary: cautious, almost suspicious. There was no weakness in her eyes, nor in the slight tilt of her chin. Jenna Darrow was clearly a strong female, despite all she’d been through, and he found himself wishing she’d been a mess of tears and hysteria instead of the cool, in-control woman whose unflinching stare refused to let him go.

She was calm and stoic, as brave as she was beautiful, and it sure as hell wasn’t making her less intriguing to him.

“When was the last time you ran blood work and DNA?” Lucan asked, the grave, low-voiced question giving Brock something else to focus on.

Gideon pushed back his shirtsleeve to check his watch. “I drew the last sample about seven hours ago.”

Lucan grunted as he pivoted away from the infirmary door. “Run everything again now. If the readings have changed so much as an iota from the last sample, I want to hear about it.”

Gideon’s blond head bobbed. “Given what Brock has told us, I’d also like to take some strength and endurance measurements. Any information we can gather from studying Jenna could be crucial to figuring out what exactly we’re dealing with here.”

“Whatever you need,” Lucan said grimly. “Just get it done, and fast. This situation is important, but we also can’t afford to lose momentum on our other missions.”

Brock inclined his head along with the other warriors, knowing as well as any of them that a human in the compound was a complication the Order didn’t need when they still had an enemy on the loose—namely Dragos, a corrupt Breed elder whom the Order had been pursuing for the better part of a year.

Dragos had been working in secret for many decades, under more than one assumed identity and within clandestine, powerful alliances. His operation had grown numerous and long-reaching tentacles, as the warriors were discovering, and every one of those grasping arms was working in concert toward a single objective: Dragos’s complete and total domination over both the Breed and humankind alike.

The Order’s primary goal was his destruction and the swift, permanent dismantling of his entire operation. The Order meant to take Dragos out at the roots. But there