Midnight Rising (Midnight Breed 4)

Niko held her gaze for a moment, then he clapped his palm on the seatback. "Okay. See you below, my man."

"Tell Lucan I'm going to be bringing Dylan in on the meeting."

Both she and Niko threw looks of surprise in his direction. Outside the Rover, Kade exhaled a wry curse and started laughing under his breath like Rio had lost his mind.

"You want to bring a civilian into a meeting with Lucan," Niko said. "A civilian he fully expects that you scrubbed tonight, like he told you to do."

"Dylan saw something tonight," Rio said. "I think the Order ought to hear about firsthand."

Nikolai considered him in silence for a very long time. Then he nodded like he could see that Rio wasn't going to budge on this. Rio could tell that his old friend realized that Dylan was not merely a civilian, or a mission Rio had failed to execute. By the glint of the warrior's wintry blue eyes, Rio could see that Niko understood just how much Dylan had come to mean to him. He understood, and based on the crooked smile that tugged at the corner of his mouth, he approved.

"Shit, amigo. Yeah. I'll tell him what you said."

As Niko and Kade strode off to the compound's elevator together, Rio and Dylan got out of the Rover and headed in a couple of minutes behind them. Hands linked, they took the elevator down the three-hundred-foot descent to the Order's headquarters.

It felt strange to walk the labyrinth of secured corridors and not feel like he had for the long months following the explosion - like a lost beast left to roam its lair without place or purpose.

Now, he had both, the heart of which could be summed up in one word: Dylan.

"Will you be comfortable talking about what you saw in that hospital room tonight?" he asked her as they traveled the corridors. "Because if you'd rather not, I can do it for - "

"No, it's fine. I want to help, if you think I can."

He stopped her in the long stretch of white marble hallway, not far from the glass walls of the tech lab where his brethren would be waiting.

"Dylan, what you did for me tonight - giving me your blood, staying with me when you had every right to leave me there and never look back...Everything that happened between us tonight, I want you to know that it meant something to me. I am..."

He wanted to say that he was falling in love with her, but he hadn't said those words in so long - hadn't believed he would ever mean them again, let alone mean them as deeply and honestly as he did now. He stumbled over the admission, and the awkward pause made the chasm seem even wider.

"I am...grateful to you," he said, settling on the other emotion that was filling his heart when he looked at her. "I don't know that I can ever repay you for all that you gave me tonight.">They left their makeshift haven in the empty church and walked hand in hand back to the hospital complex. Visiting hours had ended some time ago, but the guard at the front desk seemed used to making exceptions for family members heading up to the cancer ward. He waved Dylan and Rio through, and they took the elevator up to the tenth floor.

Rio waited outside the room as Dylan put her gloves on and opened the door. Her mother was asleep, so Dylan took a seat in the chair beside the bed and just sat there quietly watching her breathe.

There was so much she wanted to tell her - not the least of which being the fact that she had met an extraordinary man. She wanted to tell her mother that she was falling in love. That she was excited and scared and filled with a desperate kind of hope for all that might await in her future with the man standing right outside the hospital room.

She wanted her mom to know that she was falling head over heels in love with Eleuterio de la Noche Atanacio...a man like no other she'd ever known before.

But Dylan couldn't say any of those things. They were secrets she had to keep, for now, certainly. Maybe forever.

She reached out and stroked her mom's hair, carefully pulled the thin blanket up under her delicate chin. How she wished her mother could have known one true, profound love in her lifetime. It seemed so unfair that she'd made so many bad choices, loved too many bad men, when she deserved someone decent and kind.

"Oh, Mommy," Dylan whispered quietly. "This is so damn unfair."

Tears welled up and flooded over. Maybe she'd saved a lifetime of crying in preparation of this moment, but there was no stopping them now. Dylan wiped at her tears but they kept coming, too many for her to sweep away with her latex-covered hands. She got up and went around to grab a tissue from the box on her mother's wheeled bed tray. As she dabbed at her eyes, she noticed a ribboned package sitting on a table at the other side of the small room. She walked over and saw that it was chocolates. The box was unopened, and from the look of it, expensive. Curious, Dylan picked up the tiny white card tucked under the silk grosgrain bow.

It read: To Sharon. Come back to me soon. Yours, G. F.

Dylan mulled over the initials and realized it had to be the runaway shelter's owner, Mr. Fasso. Gordon, her mother had called him. He must have come to visit her sometime after Dylan had left. And the message on the card sounded a bit more intimate than your basic boss-to-employee, get-well sentiment...

Good Lord, could this actually be something more than one of her mom's many disastrous infatuations?

Dylan didn't know whether to laugh or cry even harder at the idea that her mother might have found someone decent. Granted, she didn't know Gordon Fasso outside his general reputation as a wealthy, charitable, somewhat eccentric, businessman. But as far as her mother's taste in men ran, Dylan figured she could - and had - done a lot worse.

She can't hear me.

Dylan froze at the sudden sound of a female voice in the room.

It wasn't her mother's.