Deeper Than Midnight (9 page)

“And what about me?” Corinne asked, her own outrage rising. It spilled out of her in a furious rush. “I must have been nothing to you too. You let him take me away, keep me all this time like an animal in a cage. Worse than that. Did you never wonder what was happening to me at his hands? Did you ever stop to think that he could have been torturing me, degrading me … destroying everything I was, bit by bit? Did you never imagine the kind of torture a sadistic lunatic like him might be capable of in the bowels of the prison where he held me and all the other captives he’d collected?”

Regina Bishop dissolved into a wracking fit of tears. Bishop said nothing, merely stared at Corinne and his mate in unaffected silence. “Let me up,” he growled to Hunter, whose fingers had gone tight once more around his throat. “I said unhand me. You must be satisfied now. You have the confession you came here to wring out of me.”

Hunter leaned over him. “Now you’re going to tell me everything you know about Gerard Starkn. I need to know where he is and when you last saw him. I need to know who his associates are, both inside the Agency and outside of it. You’ll tell me every detail, and you will tell me now.”

“I don’t know anything else,” Bishop sputtered sharply. “It’s been more than a decade since I’ve even thought of the man, let alone seen him. There is nothing more for me to tell, I swear to you.”

But Hunter didn’t look convinced. Nor did he seem inclined to release Bishop from his killing grasp, not even if he was given the answers he sought. Corinne could see the truth of Hunter’s lethal intent in the steady calm of his eyes.

Bishop realized it too. He started to squirm and struggle. He bucked on the surface of his desk, kicking his legs and sending a stack of leather-bound books toppling to the floor.

Corinne’s talent, humming more intensely in her veins now, latched out to grab hold of the percussion those falling books had caused. She couldn’t hold it back. The noise swelled swiftly, exploding into a prolonged roll of thunder that quaked the room and rattled everything in it.

“Corinne, stop!” her mother cried, covering her ears as the racket shook and rumbled, louder and louder now.

Under the rising din, Bishop’s lips peeled back from his teeth, baring the tips of his emerging fangs. Anger and fear transformed his eyes from their normal brown to the fiery amber of the Breed. His pupils thinned and stretched, becoming catlike slits.

Hunter, however, remained cool, utterly in control. He spared Corinne’s burst of kinetic power only the briefest acknowledgment before seeming to tune out the distraction completely. His eyes held their golden hue, his sharply angled face taut and lean, focused but not furious. He drew his fingers tighter around Bishop’s larynx.

Corinne parted her lips, panting and spent. She willed her talent to subside and was on the verge of screaming for all this madness to cease.

But it was Regina who spoke first.

“Henry Vachon,” she blurted. Victor snarled, and it was difficult to tell if his anger now was directed more at his punisher or his rattled Breedmate. Regina looked away from him, lifting her chin and speaking directly to Hunter. “I remember another Breed male, also from the Enforcement Agency. He was at Starkn’s side almost constantly whenever I saw him in public. His name was Henry Vachon. He was from the South somewhere … New Orleans, as I recall. If you want to find Gerard Starkn—or whatever he calls himself now—start with Henry Vachon.”

Hunter inclined his head in a vague nod of acknowledgment, but he still had his hand on Bishop’s throat.

“Release him,” Corinne murmured quietly. She was sickened by all she’d heard, but she had no vengeance in her heart. Not even for the father who had betrayed her so callously. “Please, Hunter … let him go.”

He gave her the same odd look he had earlier, the first time she’d asked him not to harm Victor Bishop. Corinne couldn’t read the strange flicker that dimmed the gold of his eyes. It was a question, a silent pause of uncertainty, or expectation.

“He’s not worth it,” she said. “Let him live with what he’s done. He no longer exists to me.”

As Hunter loosened his grasp, Bishop rolled away to the floor, coughing and sputtering. Regina’s kind face was stricken, red from crying. She started sobbing again now, apologizing to Corinne, begging forgiveness for what Victor had done. She tried to pull Corinne into her arms, but the thought of being touched—by anyone now—was too much for her to bear.

Corinne backed away. She felt trapped in the room, suffocating in the confines of the Darkhaven that was no longer her home and could never be again. The walls seemed to press inward on her, the floors shifting, making her stomach churn and her head spin.

She had to get out of there.

Mason held out his hand to brace her as she took an awkward step toward the study’s open doors. She dodged his reach, avoiding his comforting hand and pitying eyes.

“I need air,” she whispered, panting with the effort to form words. “I can’t … I need to get … out of here.”

And then she was running.

Through the foyer of the big house and out to the long driveway. Somewhere nearby, she heard the bright melody of Christmas music, joyous carols spilling out into the night. A soul-deep bereavement raked Corinne from within. She sucked in the cold air, rapid breaths sawing in and out of her lungs as she ran the length of the snow-edged drive.

C
orinne was all the way to the closed gate at the street when Hunter left Victor Bishop to the wreckage of his sins and stepped out of the Darkhaven, onto the frozen lawn. She looked very small, fragile somehow, despite the strength she’d shown inside the house. Now that she was out here, alone in the darkness, he realized just how wounded she truly was. Her body shuddered, weathering a pain he could only guess at as she clung to the black iron of the gate, shoulders slumped, head bowed low.

She wept softly as he approached. Her breath puffed in pale clouds into the darkness. Her sobs were quiet but seemed to come from a place very deep within her. He didn’t know what to say as he drew nearer to her. He didn’t have any words of comfort, wouldn’t have the first idea what she might want to hear.

He reached out his hand, intending to place it on her quivering shoulder the way he’d seen others do in shared moments of distress. Inexplicably, he felt an urge to acknowledge her pain. She looked so alone in that moment, he wanted to show her that he recognized she’d just lost something important to her back in that house: her trust.

She noticed his presence before he had the chance to touch her.

Sniffling, she lifted her head and looked at him over her shoulder. “Did you … do anything to him?”

Hunter gave a slow shake of his head. “He lives, although I don’t understand why you would find his death so unacceptable.”

Her fine brows bunched into a frown. “He loved me once. Until a few minutes ago, he was my father. How could he have done this to me?”

Hunter stared into her fierce eyes, understanding that she wasn’t looking for answers from him. She had to know, as he did, that Victor Bishop’s cowardice had proven stronger than his bond to the child he’d taken in and raised as his daughter.

Corinne glanced past him, into the darkness beyond his shoulder. “How could he have lived with himself all this time, knowing what he’d done—not only to me, but to the rest of the family through the lies he told? How could he have slept after murdering that girl and using her death as part of his deception?”

“He is not deserving of the mercy you gave him tonight,” Hunter replied, no malice in the statement, only a bleak truth. “I doubt he would have given you the same consideration.”

“I don’t want him dead,” she whispered. “I couldn’t do that to my mother—to Regina. He’ll have to find a way to answer to her, not me. And not you or the Order either.”

Hunter grunted low in his throat, less than convinced. The chief reason Victor Bishop was still breathing was the plea from his betrayed daughter. Hunter had been taken aback when she’d asked him to spare the man. He shouldn’t have been. Mira’s vision had predicted it, after all.

Yet not as flawlessly as he would have guessed. The situation had seemed different. Corinne had seemed different, pleading not with the impassioned desperation he’d witnessed in Mira’s vision but a defeated weariness.

And not just that, Hunter reflected. The outcome of the vision had been different than the child seer had shown him. He’d stayed his hand. The course had been altered, and that had never happened before.

It felt wrong, all of it.

Part of him was being drawn back toward the Darkhaven residence even as he stood there. He’d been trained never to leave loose ends that could unravel on him later. Hunter had witnessed a broken man, someone who’d been proven pliable and weak. Those things could be manipulated by someone stronger, as they had been by Dragos all those years ago. While tonight Victor Bishop had seemed an adversary of little consequence, despite his wealth and any remaining political connections, the experienced predator in Hunter twitched with the need to finish his job.

Knowing what he did of little Mira and her extraordinary gift, he wondered how it was even possible that he’d not defied Corinne’s pleas and delivered that final, preordained blow.

He saw her tremble in front of him as a chilling gust blew through the iron of the secured gate.

“I need to get out of here,” she murmured, pivoting toward the tall bars. “I don’t belong here. Not anymore.”

She grabbed hold of the gate in both hands and rattled it, harder and harder, a wordless cry erupting from deep within her throat. She threw her head back and railed at the star-pierced, black sky. “Let me out, goddamn it! I need to get away from this place right now!”

Hunter moved in behind her and placed his hands on top of hers. She stilled, every muscle within her going tense and motionless. Even though she had been shivering, her body felt warm against his chest. The heat was a living thing, an almost unbearable presence that made all of his senses fire up like awakened circuitry.

Corinne must have felt it too. She pulled her hands out from under his and folded her arms in front of her. He realized now how close they were, barely an inch to separate her spine from his chest and torso, her petite body caught before him in the cage of his arms.

She was so small and delicate, yet there was a defiant energy that radiated around her. It drew him closer, enticed him to breathe her in, to let his touch return to the impossibly soft tops of her small hands, and to test the silken warmth of her long dark hair against his stubbled cheek.

He wasn’t accustomed to acknowledging temptation, let alone giving in to it. And so he held himself still in that bewildering moment, ignoring the sudden quickening of his pulse and the heat that kindled in his veins.

When she withdrew and ducked away, Hunter felt a swift relief. Cold air filled the space between his arms. Corinne stood to his side as he moved in closer to the locked seam of the iron gate and wrenched it open wide enough for them to slip out.

Alarms immediately went off back at the house. Floodlights blinked on from all over, spilling illumination along the Darkhaven’s entrance and perimeter walls.

Corinne looked at him under the pale yellow wash of the security lights. “Get me out of here. I don’t care where we go, just get me away from this place, Hunter.”

He gave her a grim nod, then motioned for her to follow him to the car he’d left parked down the street when he’d returned to confront Bishop. They ran together, Corinne jumping into the passenger seat as Hunter went around to take the wheel.

He drove off, taking note of the fact that she didn’t look back even once as they left the Darkhaven behind them in the darkness. She sat rigidly in the seat next to him, her gaze distant, staring out the windshield but focused on nothing at all.

They rode in silence for more than twenty minutes, until he had navigated to a quiet part of the city and found a place to pull over. “I must report in to the compound,” he said, retrieving his cell phone from the pocket of his leather trench coat.

Corinne barely acknowledged him, her vacant eyes still fixed on the far horizon.

Hunter called in, expecting to hear Gideon’s typical rote greeting of “Talk to me.” Instead it was Lucan who answered. “Where are you?”

“Delayed in Detroit,” Hunter replied, detecting a note of urgency—of tense impatience—in the Order’s leader. “Something is wrong,” he guessed aloud. “Have there been developments concerning Dragos?”

Lucan muttered a dark curse. “Yeah, you could say that. We just found out he knows the compound’s location. We assume he knows, that is. A few hours ago, Kellan Archer upchucked a tracking device. Gideon’s analyzing it as we speak.”

“The kidnapping was a ploy,” Hunter said, putting the pieces together. It made logical sense now, the unprovoked attack on the civilians that had taken place over the course of the last week. “Dragos had to ensure the Order was sympathetic to the boy, so he killed his family and razed their Darkhaven. The youth needed to be isolated, leaving little choice but for the Order to take him into its protection.”

“We walked right into it,” Lucan remarked tightly. “I made the decision to break with protocol and bring the boy into the compound. Hell, I might as well have opened the goddamn door to Dragos and invited him inside.”

Hunter had never heard regret from Lucan. If the Gen One elder ever had doubts, he’d not aired them to Hunter before now. That he did so only emphasized the seriousness of the situation. “I know how Dragos operates,” Hunter said. “I’ve seen the way he thinks, how he strategizes. The Archer youth has been in the compound for more than a couple of days—”

“Seventy-two hours,” Lucan interjected.

Hunter had felt Corinne’s gaze on him with the mention of Dragos’s name. She listened quietly now, her pretty face stricken, bathed in greenish light from the dashboard of the idling sedan. Hunter could feel her dread like a chill as he continued speaking with Lucan. “Dragos had to know the device could not go undetected for very long. He will have already begun organizing for an attack, even before he put his ruse into motion. When he attacks, he will come at the compound in a way that will ensure the greatest damage to the Order.”

“He’s out for blood,” Lucan replied. “My blood.”

“Yes.” Hunter knew from his time serving the power-crazed Dragos that this battle between him and the Order had turned into something personal. Dragos would seek to annihilate the obstacle standing in the way of his goals, but his rage would compel him to do it in a way that would inflict the deepest pain on Lucan Thorne and those under his charge.

The Boston compound was safe for no one now, but there was no need for Hunter to say it. Lucan knew. His sober voice reverberated with the gravity of the situation, but his heavy silence was even more telling.

“There have been complications with my mission in Detroit,” Hunter told him, a report that was answered with a deep, ripe curse. He gave Lucan a rundown of what had happened at the Darkhaven with Corinne and her family, from the suspicion he had that Victor Bishop was hiding something, to the revelation that had left Corinne’s future in limbo but had netted the Order what could possibly be a lead on one of Dragos’s past associates.

“Henry Vachon,” Lucan said, testing the name Regina Bishop had given them. “I don’t know him, but I’m sure Gideon can track the bastard down. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you how important it is for us to exploit any lead on Dragos that we can.”

“Of course,” Hunter agreed.

“I’ll have Gideon run an IID search for Vachon and get back to you with what we find. You should have intel within the hour,” Lucan said. “What about Corinne? Is she still with you?”

“Yes,” Hunter replied, glancing at her as he spoke. “She is with me in the car right now.”

Lucan grunted. “Good. I want you to keep her close. As long as we’re in chaos here at the compound, it’s not a good idea for either one of you to come back right now.”

Hunter scowled, still looking at Corinne’s questioning face. “You’re putting the female in my custody?”

“For the time being, I can’t think of anywhere safer for her to be.”

Despite the bad news that had hit the Order earlier that night, Lucan hadn’t called off any of the assigned patrols. If anything, the mood around the compound had been stepped up a notch.

Or twenty.

To Dante, it seemed as though the countdown clock on a time bomb had been activated in that instant Kellan Archer had coughed up Dragos’s tracking device. Everyone understood what it meant, and the anticipation of trouble on the horizon—the expectation of it slamming into them at any moment—had left no one unscathed.

But dread and inaction wouldn’t stop the coming storm. They had to get more aggressive, plumb every corner, turn every stone, if it meant bringing them even one inch closer to getting their hands on Dragos. He had to be located, and he had to be stopped—now more than ever.

That rationale, and the fury that followed on its heels, was the only thing that had given Dante the strength to leave Tess’s side and go out on patrol with Kade that night.

His heart was back at the compound, but his head was fully in the game, looking for even the most remote leads on the escaped Agent, Murdock, the presence of Dragos’s assassins in the city … anything at all.

And all night, part of him had been keeping an eye out for leads of another sort too.

“Hold up,” he said to Kade, who’d just turned the Rover onto a seedy stretch of road down by the Mystic in Southie. “Did you see that guy over there?”

Kade slowed the black SUV and peered in the direction Dante was pointing. “I don’t see anyone, other than a couple of overaged streetwalkers with a fondness for Lucite heels and Forever Twenty-One fashion. Classy.”

Dante was unable to share the other warrior’s humor even though he had a valid point about the hookers trawling the corner at the other end of the block.

“I think it might have been Harvard,” he said, all but certain that the large shadowy figure that had disappeared around the other side of an old brick warehouse had been Breed. And by the way the male moved, the way he carried himself, even as he slunk into the gloom of the ratty industrial block, Dante was more than willing to bet it was Sterling Chase. “Stop the car.”

“Even if it was Harvard, I don’t think this is a good idea, man—”

“Fuck what you think,” Dante snapped, concern for his AWOL friend trumping everything else. “Pull over, Kade. I’m getting out.”