Midnight Rising (Midnight Breed 4)

"You want...the pictures? I don't understand - "

"You don't need to. Just give them to me." When she didn't move to comply, Rio trained a piercing look on her. "Get them. Now."

"O-okay," she stammered, and hurried over to a large backpack that stood in the corner of the room. She dug through it and pulled out the slim digital camera.

When she started to open it up to pop out the image disk, Rio said, "I'll do that. Give it to me."

She held the camera out to him with shaking fingers. "You followed me all the way to Prague for this? What's so important about those pictures? And just how did you find me anyway?"

Rio ignored her questions. In a few minutes, none of this would matter. He'd have the images and then he'd scrub the female's memory of the entire chain of events.

"Is this all of them?" he asked her as he turned the camera on and scrolled through the contents of the disk. "Have you downloaded them to any other devices?"

"That's it," she replied quickly. "That's everything, I swear."

He reviewed the handful of shots from the cave, the ones of himself in partial transformation, and the ones that showed the Ancient's hibernation chamber and the glyphs painted in human blood on the walls. "Have you shown these to anyone?"

She swallowed, then shook her head. "I still don't understand what this is about."

"And that's how we're going to keep it," Rio said.

He walked toward her, only three steps between them. She backed away, but came up against the window on the far wall of the room. "Oh, my God. You said you weren't going to hurt me..."

"Be calm," he instructed her. "It will be over soon."

"Oh, shit." A strangled moan curled audibly in the back of her throat. "Oh, my God...you're really going to kill me..."

"No," Rio said grimly. "But I need your silence."

He reached out for her. All it would take was a brief settling of his hand on her forehead to erase her knowledge of the mountain cave and him from her mind.

But as his hand descended toward her, she drew in her breath, then let it out on a string of words that made him freeze in place where he stood.

"I'm not the only one who knows!" She panted with fear. Words tumbled out of her mouth in a rush. "Other people know where I am. They know where I've been, what I've been doing. So, whatever you think those pictures mean, killing me won't protect you because I'm not the only one who's seen them."

She lied to him. Rio's anger spiked at the deception. "You said no one else knew."

"And you said you weren't going to hurt me."

"Jesus." He saw little point in arguing with her, or in defending his intentions. "You need to tell me who you've shown the pictures to. I need names and locations."as feeling pretty street-savvy when she noticed a uniformed security guard walk up to the guys and show them the door. They loped off, and Dylan reached for the push bar on the glass door in front of her.

In the reflection coming back at her from the glass, she saw a familiar face - one that made her heart seize up in her chest.

Behind her, almost close enough to touch her, was a very large man barreling at her from the direction of the train platforms. Fierce eyes seemed to burn like coals under the fall of his dark hair.

And his mouth...

Good God, she'd never seen a more terrifying sneer in her life. A row of perfect white teeth were clamped tightly behind the lips that were peeled back in a feral snarl, pulling the muscles of his lean face into a stark, deadly mask.

It was him - the man she'd found in the mountain cave outside Jicin.

He'd followed her all this way? Evidently so. She'd thought he might be crazy when she saw him earlier that day, but now she was certain. The way he looked at her now, he had to be an utter psychopath.

And he was gunning for her like he meant to tear her apart with his bare hands.

Dylan shrieked; she couldn't hold back her sharp gasp of fear. She ducked away from the exit, pulling a hard left and running, hopefully out of his path. A quick glance backward only made her pulse slam harder.

"Oh, Jesus," she murmured, fright arrowing through her.