Текст книги "Taken by Midnight"

Автор книги: Lara Adrian

Соавторы: Lara Adrian
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CHAPTER

Thirty

That’s about the tenth time you’ve checked that thing since we came down here.” Brock smirked at Dante as the warrior—the anxious, expectant father—broke away from the group in the weapons room to look at his PDA. “Damn, my man, you’re about as jumpy as a cat.”

“Tess is napping in our quarters,” Dante replied. “If she needs anything, I told her to text me.”

Apparently finding no messages since his last look about five minutes ago, he set the device back down on the table and returned to the firing range where Brock, Kade, Rio, and Niko waited to resume their target practice.

As Dante swaggered back to his place among his brethren, Niko peered at him with mock intensity, getting up close and staring at his face before finally giving an exaggerated shrug. “I’ll be damned. Nothing there, after all.”

“What?” Dante asked, his black brows crunched into a scowl. “What the hell are you doing?”

Niko grinned, baring his twin dimples. “Just looking for a nose ring or something. Figured Tess might have had one installed on you to go along with that short leash she’s got you attached to.”

“Piss off,” Dante said around a deep chuckle. He pointed a finger in Niko’s direction. “I’m gonna remind you of this when Renata’s the one who’s eight and a half months pregnant and it’s your turn to worry.”

“No need to wait on that,” Kade put in. “Renata’s already got him trained to jump on command. Probably got him on a leash of her own, too.”

“Yeah?” Niko reached for his belt and made a show of starting to unbuckle it. “Give me a second and I’ll show you.”

Brock shook his head at his brethren, not quite feeling part of the jokes and lighthearted smack-talk about Breedmates and babies soon to be on the way. He couldn’t help thinking about Jenna, and about how he might find a way to make a future for them together.

She wasn’t a Breedmate, and that troubled him. Not because of the fact they would never have offspring together. Not even because of the absence of a blood bond, which would connect them to each other inexorably for as long as both of them lived.

He didn’t need a blood link to strengthen what he felt for her. She was his mate already, in all the ways that mattered. He loved her, and although he wasn’t sure what their future would look like, he couldn’t begin to imagine living it without her.

He looked to the other warriors in the weapons room with him, and knew that he would die for Jenna if it came down to that—the same as any other blood-bonded Breed male.

As his gaze traveled past Kade and Niko and Dante, he realized that Rio had gone quiet in the past few minutes. The scarred, Spanish-born warrior leaned against the nearby wall, staring at nothing in particular as he idly rubbed his fist in a small circle at the center of his chest.

“You all right, Rio?”

He glanced over at Brock and gave him a vague shrug. His fist kept circling, directly over his heart. “What time is it?”

Brock checked the clock at the other end of the facility. “Almost three-thirty.”

“The women ought to be calling in any minute now,” Kade said. His gaze seemed preoccupied, as well, his silver eyes glinting with a note of unease.

Niko set down his weapon and grabbed his cell phone. “I’m going to call Renata. Something doesn’t feel right to me all of a sudden.”

“Yeah,” Kade agreed. “You don’t think anything is wrong, do you?”

Although Brock wasn’t liking the suddenly serious vibe that was coming over his brethren, he assured himself that everything was fine. The day trip Jenna and the other females were on was just a quick drive to the Cape. A visit to a seventy-year-old nun, for crissake.

Jenna had a weapon on her, and so did Renata, and both of them knew how to handle themselves. There was no reason at all to be concerned.

Dante walked over, frowning darkly, while Niko waited in prolonged silence for his mate to pick up his call. “Any answer?”

“No,” Niko replied quietly.

“Madre de Dios,” Rio blurted as he pushed away from the wall. “Something has Dylan frightened. I can feel her fear in my veins.”

Brock registered the alarm traveling through each of his brethren now. “The both of you, too?” he asked, shooting a grim look at Kade and Niko.

“My pulse just kicked into overdrive,” Kade said. “Ah, shit. Something bad is going down with Alex and the others.”

“It won’t be dark for another hour, minimum,” Dante reminded them, sober with the warning.

“We don’t have that long,” Niko said. “We’ve got to go after them now.”

With Dante looking on, Brock fell in alongside his three fellow warriors, feeling lost and adrift, dependent on their instincts to help guide him toward whatever threat was now facing Jenna and the other males’ Breedmates.

Holy hell. Jenna was in danger and he’d had no clue.

She could be dying that very moment, and he wouldn’t know until he was standing over her body.

The realization was as cold as death itself, reaching into his chest and seizing his heart in an icy fist.

“Let’s go,” he barked to his brethren.

Together the four of them raced out of the weapons room, gathering their guns and gear as they went.

At the same instant, Jenna and Renata both had their pistols drawn and leveled on the smiling nun—the Minion, whose dead eyes looked through them as though they weren’t there.

As though they were nothing, meant nothing.

Which to this woman, Jenna knew without question, they weren’t, and didn’t.

Behind Sister Grace, two bulky men now stood. They’d been lurking in the shadows of the hallway at her back, summoned forward even before Jenna and Renata had raised their guns to shoot. The men’s eyes held the same cold stare as the nun’s. Each of them held a large pistol—one aimed at Renata, the other leveled on Jenna.

The standoff played out in wary silence for a long moment, time that she used to calculate possible ways of disabling one or both of the men without putting either Alex or Dylan in harm’s way in the process. But damn, it didn’t seem viable. Even if she hoped to use the implant-enhanced speed her reflexes seemed to have now, the risk to her friends was too great to chance it.

And then, more bad news.

From somewhere to her left, another male Minion stepped up and rested the cold nose of a revolver against her head.

The nun smiled her false smile. “I’m going to have to ask you girls to put down your weapons now.”

Renata didn’t budge. Neither did Jenna, despite the metallic click of turning gears as the Minion at her side chambered a round.

“How long have you been working for Dragos?” Renata asked the female mind slave. “He’s your Master, am I right?”

Sister Grace blinked, unfazed. “One more time, dear. Put down your weapon. The rug you’re standing on has been in my family for more than two hundred years. It would be a pity to ruin it by having Arthur or Patrick here blast a fucking hole in your chest.”

Jenna’s own chest constricted with fear at the thought of any of her friends being hurt by these Minion assholes. She waited in tense, terrified silence, watching as Renata’s lean arm muscles lost some of their tautness. Jenna thought she was about to comply, but the subtle, sidelong glance Renata gave her seemed to indicate otherwise.

Jenna acknowledged that look with a barely discernible shift of her own gaze. There would be only one chance to make her move. A split second to either make it work or lose everything in an instant.

Renata exhaled a resigned-sounding sigh.

She started to lower her gun …

As she did so, Jenna seized on every bit of speed she could summon from the tendons and sinews of her human limbs. She pivoted with blinding swiftness and snapped the wrist of the Minion holding her at gunpoint. He screamed in pain, throwing the whole room into a state of chaos.

In what seemed like slow motion to Jenna but probably played out in fractions of seconds, she leveled her pistol on the fallen Minion and put two bullets in his head. Renata meanwhile had shot one of the others behind the nun. As the second Minion spurted a bloody fountain from his chest and dropped to the floor, Sister Grace turned to dash for the hallway.

Jenna was on her before she could take even two steps.

She leapt over the Minion, heading her off in an instant. She thrust her hands out at the woman and shoved her backward, sending the gray-haired monster airborne. She crashed down onto the parlor floor as Renata plugged the last of the male Minions and left the body twitching and bleeding on Sister Grace’s heirloom rug.

Jenna stalked over to the scrabbling Minion nun and hauled her up onto the delicate silk-covered settee near the window. “Start talking, bitch. How long have you been serving Dragos? Did you already belong to him when you were working in his shelter?”

The Minion grinned through bloodstained teeth and shook her head. “You won’t get anything out of me. You don’t scare me. Death doesn’t scare me.”

As she spoke, a pair of heavy footsteps thundered up from somewhere below the house. Two more Minions, racing up from the cellar. The door off the hallway crashed open as they stormed out. Renata swung around and nailed each one dead center in the head, stopping them in their tracks.

Dylan let out a little whoop of triumph as the house went silent once again.

And then … the faintest sounds of voices coming from the cellar deep below.

Female voices.

More than a dozen different voices, all of them screaming and shouting, calling out to whoever could hear them.

“Holy shit,” Alex murmured.

Dylan’s eyes went wide. “You don’t think—”

“Let’s go find out,” Renata said. She turned to Jenna. “Will you be all right up here?”

Jenna nodded. “Yeah, I’m good. I can hold her until you get back. Just go.”

In the momentary inattention, Sister Grace fidgeted on the little sofa, digging around in her sweater pocket. Jenna looked back at her, just in time to see her stuff something small into her mouth. She swallowed quickly, gulping the object down. The tendons in her throat constricted. Her mouth started spewing thick white foam.

“Oh, shit!” Jenna cried. “She’s poisoning herself!”

“She’s dead. Forget the bitch,” Renata said. “Down here with us, Jenna!”

She turned away from the Minion, letting the convulsing body fall to the floor. Together she and the other women raced down the old stone steps that led into the dimly lit, enormous cellar, which looked to be carved out of the craggy rocks of the peninsula itself.

Deeper and deeper they went, the cries for help growing louder.

“We hear you!” Dylan called back to the terrified women. “It’s okay, we’ve found you!”

Jenna was not prepared for what awaited them as the cellar widened out ahead of them. Hollowed into the stone was a large cell, covered by an iron grid. Inside were upward of twenty women—filthy, unkempt, dressed in tattered laboratory gowns. Some of them were heavy with child. Others were waif thin and wan. They looked like the worst prisoners of war, neglected and forgotten, most of their faces drawn and expressionless.

They stared at their rescuers, some of them mute, some weeping quietly, while others sobbed openly in great, chest-racking heaves.

“Oh, Jesus,” someone whispered, maybe even Jenna herself.

“Let’s get them out of here,” Renata said, her voice wooden. “Look for a key somewhere that fits this goddamned grate.”

Dylan and Alex began searching the dark space. Jenna walked toward the far corner, peering into the deep shadows that seemed to continue on forever into the cavelike hollows of the old cellar. In her peripheral vision, she caught the slight hand movements of one of the captives. She was trying to get Jenna’s attention, gesturing covertly toward the lightless tunnel that stretched farther into the darkness of the place.

Trying to warn her.

Jenna heard the nearly imperceptible scuff of a footstep coming out of the dark. She turned her head—just in time to see a flash of metal, a rushing movement. Then she felt the sudden body slam of another Minion, barreling out at her and knocking her nearly off her feet.

“Jenna!” Alex shouted. “Renata, help her!”

The gun blast echoed like cannon fire in the enclosed cellar. The captive females screamed and shrank back away from the sound.

“It’s all right,” Jenna called out. “He’s dead. Everything’s going to be fine.”

She shoved the lifeless heap off her and crawled out from beneath him. Something metallic jangled as the Minion rolled onto his back and expelled his last breath.

“I think I found the key,” she said, bending over him to remove the ring of several keys from his pants pocket.

She ran over to the cell and began searching for the one that would fit the padlock on the grate. The Minion’s blood soaked her coat and palms, but she didn’t care. All that mattered was getting the captive Breedmates out of this place.

The lock sprang loose on the second try.

“Oh, thank God,” Dylan gasped. “Come on, everyone. You’re safe now.”

Jenna swung open the large iron grid and watched with a sense of pride and relief as the first few captives began to shuffle out of their prison. One by one, woman by woman, the group of them stepped away, finally free.

CHAPTER

Thirty-one

The warriors had been only a few miles away from the location when Rio got a frantic cell phone call from Dylan, telling him everything that had happened. Even though they had been clued in, even though they knew that she and Alex and Renata and Jenna had somehow—miraculously—found and freed the captive females Dragos had imprisoned for so many years, Brock and his brethren seated in the Order’s SUV had not been prepared for the sight that greeted them as they roared up the shoreline road and saw the big yellow house on the rocks.

The sun had just begun to dip below the opposite horizon, casting its last, long shadows across the snow-covered yard of the tall Victorian. And in that yard, filing out of the front door wrapped in blankets, antique quilts, and crocheted afghans, were easily a dozen bedraggled, haggard young women.

Breedmates.

Several were already in the Rover parked in the driveway. Still others were being escorted out of the house by Alex and Dylan.

“Jesus Christ,” Brock whispered, awed by the enormity of what had occurred.

Renata was standing near the Rover, helping some of the former captives into the backseat.

Where the hell was Jenna?

Brock scanned the entire area in a quick glance, his heart climbing up his chest. God, what if she was hurt? Dylan surely would have said something if there’d been casualties, but that didn’t keep the rock from forming in the pit of his stomach. If anything had happened to her …

“Hang on,” Niko said, as he pulled in to the driveway, then steered the big SUV right up onto the lawn.

Brock leapt out even before the vehicle had come to a full stop.

He had to see his woman. Had to feel her warm and safe in his arms.

He ran across the frozen yard, his boots chewing up the distance in mere seconds.

Alex looked up at him as he tore toward her.

“Where is she?” he demanded. “Where’s Jenna? Did anything happen to her?”

“She’s fine, Brock.” Alex gestured toward the open front door of the house, where the bloodied corpse of at least one Minion lay visible and motionless inside. “Jenna’s making sure the rest of the women get out safely from the cellar where they were being held.”

He sagged at the news that she was okay, unable to hide his relief. “I have to see her.”

Alex gave him a warm smile as she led one of the shivering, wan Breedmates toward the pair of waiting vehicles. He stepped forward and was about to vault up onto the veranda porch.

“Brock?”

The small, feminine voice—so unexpected, so distantly familiar—stopped him dead in his tracks. Something clicked in his brain. A spark of disbelief.

A grinding jolt of recognition.

“Brock … is it really you?”

Slowly, he pivoted around to face a diminutive, dark-haired female who was paused in the driveway, just off the steps of the porch. He hadn’t noticed her when he’d passed her a moment ago. Good Christ, he wasn’t sure he would have recognized her if she’d come right up to him in the street.

But he knew her voice.

Beneath the grime of her captivity and the neglect that had made her cheeks sallow, her alabaster skin marred with dirt and scratches, he realized that he did, in fact, know her face, as well.

“Oh, my God.” He felt winded, as if someone had kicked all the air out of his lungs. “Corinne?”

“It is you,” she whispered. “I never thought I’d see you again.”

Her face crumpled, and then she was sobbing. She ran to him, throwing her thin arms around his waist and weeping hard into his chest.

He held her, unsure what to do.

Unsure what to even think.

“You were dead,” he murmured. “You vanished without a trace, and then they pulled your body from the river. I saw it. You were dead, Corinne.”

“No.” She vigorously shook her head, still sobbing, her small body heaving with soul-racking gasps. “They took me away.”

Fury flared in him, burning through the shock and disbelief. “Who took you?”

She hiccuped, drawing in a shaky breath. “I don’t know. They took me away and they kept me prisoner all this time. They did … things to me. They did horrible things, Brock.”

She buried herself in his embrace, clinging to him like she never wanted to let go. Brock held her, struck stupid by all he was hearing.

He didn’t know what to tell her. He had no idea how what she was saying could possibly be true.

But it was.

She was alive.

After many long years—decade after decade of blaming himself for her death—Corinne was suddenly living and breathing, wrapped in his arms.

Jenna climbed the cellar stairs behind the last of the captives. She could hardly believe it was over, that she and Renata, Dylan, and Alex had actually located the women and managed to set them free.

Her heart was still pounding hard in her chest, her pulse still racing with adrenaline and a profound sense of accomplishment—of relief, that the ordeal for these nearly twenty helpless women was finally ended. She guided her last charge around the slain Minions in the parlor and led her outside to the veranda. Dusk was gathering now, washing over the crowded yard in placid shades of blue.

Jenna breathed in the crisp, twilight air as she stepped onto the porch behind the shuffling Breedmate. She glanced over toward the driveway, where Renata and Niko were helping some of the females into the Rover. Rio and Dylan, Kade and Alex were busy on the snowy front lawn, walking still more released women into another of the Order’s SUVs.

But it was the sight of Brock that made her freeze in place where she stood.

Her feet simply stopped moving, her heart cracking open as she saw him locked in a tender embrace with a petite, dark-haired female.

Jenna didn’t need to see her face to know that it would match the sketch Claire had provided. Or that the fragile beauty wrapped so gently in Brock’s strong arms was the same young woman in the photograph he’d kept with him all the years after he’d thought her dead.

Corinne.

By some miracle of fate, Brock’s past love had been returned to him. Jenna choked back her bittersweet sob, realizing that he’d just been granted the impossible: the gift of love resurrected.

As much as it tore at her own heart to witness it, she couldn’t help but be moved by their tender reunion.

And she couldn’t bear to interrupt it, no matter how desperately she yearned to be the one in his sheltering arms at that moment.

Steeling herself, she took a quiet step off the porch and headed past them to continue the evacuation of the other freed captives.

CHAPTER

Thirty-two

Brock glanced up and saw Jenna walking away from him, toward the ongoing activity in the driveway.

She was safe.

Thank God.

His heart leapt in his chest, jolting with such relief to see her, he thought it might burst out of his rib cage.

“Jenna!”

She pivoted slowly toward him and the relief he’d felt a moment ago drained into his heels. Her face was stricken and pale. The front of her coat was torn in places and stained a garish, deep scarlet.

“Oh, Jesus.” He broke away from Corinne and raced over to where Jenna had now paused. Grabbing her by the shoulders, he took her in from head to toe, his Breed senses overwhelmed at the presence of so much coppery spilled blood. “Ah, Christ … Jenna, what happened to you?”

Her face pinched a bit as she shook her head and drew away from him. “I’m okay. The blood isn’t mine. One of the Minions came at me in the cellar. I shot him.”

Brock hissed, racked with worry even though she was standing in front of him now, assuring him that she wasn’t harmed. “When I heard something had gone wrong here—” His voice choked off on a dark curse. “Jenna, I was so damned scared that you might be hurt.”

She shook her head, her hazel eyes seeming sad but steady. “I’m fine.”

“And Corinne,” he blurted, glancing across the way to where she still stood, looking small and forlorn, a dim shadow of the vibrant girl who’d vanished from Detroit all those decades ago. “She’s alive, Jenna. She was being held here with the others.”

Jenna nodded. “I know.”

“You do?” He stared at her, confused now.

“One of the new sketches Claire Reichen had provided,” she explained. “I only saw it as we arrived here, but I recognized Corinne’s face from the picture you have of her back in your quarters.”

“I can’t believe it,” he murmured, still stunned as hell by all he’d just heard. “She told me someone took her that night. She doesn’t know who. I have no idea whose body I saw, or why it was staged to look like hers. My God … I’m not sure what to think about the whole thing now.”

Jenna listened to him ramble on, her expression patient and understanding. Far calmer than he was. True to form, she stayed in rock-steady control, the cool professional, even though she’d just been through a hell of an ordeal herself.

Emotion swamped him, his respect for her immeasurable in that moment.

As was his love for her.

“Do you realize what you’ve accomplished here?” he asked her, reaching out to smooth his fingers along her blood-splattered cheek. “My God, Jenna. I couldn’t be more proud of you.”

He kissed her and pulled her against him, ready to tell her right there and then how grateful he was to have her in his life. He wanted to shout his love for her, but the depth of his feelings had devoured his voice.

Then all too soon, Jenna withdrew from his arms, both of them alerted to the sound of footsteps approaching from nearby. Brock turned to face Nikolai and Renata. Dylan walked past them to retrieve Corinne and gently led her to the open passenger-side door of the Rover in the driveway.

Niko awkwardly cleared his throat. “Sorry to interrupt, man, but we need to get moving. The Rover is almost full, and Rio’s called the compound for a couple more vehicles to pick up the rest of the females. Chase and Hunter are already en route with additional transport.”

Brock nodded. “They’re going to need shelter somewhere.”

“Andreas and Claire have offered to open their house in Newport for all of the captives,” Renata replied. “Rio’s going to drive the other SUV down there now.”

“Right,” Niko added. “Kade and I will stay here with Renata and Alex to clean up the scene and wait for Chase and Hunter to arrive with an extra vehicle for the remaining women and one for our return to the compound.”

“We need someone to drive the Rover to Newport,” Renata said.

Brock was ready to volunteer, but he could hardly stand the thought of being taken away from Jenna, even for a few hours to make the run.

Torn, he glanced at her.

“Go on,” she said softly.

He wanted to drag her into his arms and never let her go again. “Will you be all right until I get back?”

“Yes. I’m going to be fine, Brock.” Her smile was somehow sorrowful. Her hands trembled as she reached out to take light hold of his. She kissed him, a fleeting graze of her lips across his. “You don’t have to worry about me now. Do what you need to do.”

“We have to get rolling,” Niko pressed. “This place needs to be cleared before any curious humans start sniffing around.”

Brock reluctantly agreed, stepping back from Jenna. She gave him a faint nod as he drew away another step.

He turned and strode toward the waiting Rover. As he got behind the wheel and started backing out to follow Rio in the other vehicle, part of him couldn’t help feeling as though the chaste kiss Jenna had given him was something more than good-bye.

It took Jenna and the others better than an hour to dispatch the dead Minions and clear the big old house of all traces of the battle that had occurred there. Hunter and Chase had since come and gone with the last of the rescued captives, leaving one of the Order’s SUVs for the cleanup team to drive back to the compound.

Jenna had worked in heavy silence, feeling tired and exhausted—emotionally drained—as she helped Alex roll up one of the bloodstained rugs and carry it out to the back of the Order’s vehicle.

She couldn’t stop thinking about Brock. Couldn’t stop dreading that she’d made a terrible mistake in letting him go to Newport with Corinne.

She wanted desperately to call him and urge him to come back.

But as much as she wanted to claim him for herself, she couldn’t be that unfair to him.

He had been granted a miracle tonight, and she would never dream of trying to take that away from him.

How often had she prayed for a second chance with Mitch and Libby after she’d lost them? How often had she wished their deaths had just been a cosmic mistake that could somehow be righted? How many times had she hoped beyond all hope for some impossible twist of fate that would bring back the love she’d lost?

She wondered now if she would still be able to make those prayers and wishes. She knew she couldn’t. To do so would be to negate all she felt for Brock, something that seemed even more impossible to her than a miraculous reversal of death.

But at the same time, she couldn’t ask Brock to make that kind of choice.

Even if it shattered her heart to let him go.

A wave of sadness rushed over her with the thought. She grabbed for the side of the Rover, her legs all but swept out from beneath her.

Alex was at her side in an instant. “Jen, are you okay?”

She nodded weakly, feeling suddenly more than empty inside. Her head spun, vision beginning to blur.

“Jenna?” Alex moved in front of her and sucked in a sharp breath. “Oh, my God. Jenna, you’re wounded.”

Dazed, she glanced down to where Alex was now unfastening her bloodstained coat. As the thick wool parted, she saw the terrible truth of what had her friend’s face turning white as a sheet.

Jenna’s mind flashed back to the Minion who’d crashed into her from out of the shadows in the cellar. She recalled the glint of something metallic in his hand. A knife, she guessed now, staring at the slick red blood that soaked her shirt and ran all the way down the side of her leg, dripping a dark pool in the snow beneath her feet.

“Kade, hurry!” Alex shouted, panic climbing into her voice. “Renata, Niko—somebody, please. Jenna’s been hurt!”

As the others rushed out of the house in response, Jenna’s world began to fade around her. She heard her friends speaking anxiously around her, but she couldn’t keep her eyes open. Couldn’t keep her legs from crumpling beneath her.

She let go of the vehicle and the heavy darkness pulled her under.