Veil of Midnight (Midnight Breed 5)

"I don't think any of us realized that monsters truly existed until Yakut, Lex, and a few others came out to open the cage. They showed us the woods, told us to run." She swallowed past the bitterness rising in her throat. "The slaughter began as soon as the first of us broke for the forest."

In her mind, Renata relived the horror in excruciating detail. She could still hear the screams of the victims as they fled, and the terrible howls of the predators who hunted them with such savage zeal. She could still smell the summery tang of pine and loamy moss, nature's scents smothered all too soon by that of blood and death. She could still see the vast darkness surrounding her in the unfamiliar terrain, unseen branches that smacked her cheeks and tore at her clothes as she tried to navigate her escape.

"None of you stood a chance," Nikolai murmured. "They told you to run only to toy with you. To give themselves the illusion that blood clubs have anything to do with sport."

"I know that now." Renata could still taste the futility of all that running. Terror had taken shape out of the black night in the form of glowing amber eyes and bared, bloodied fangs like nothing she'd ever dreamed in her worst nightmare. "One of them caught up to me. He came out of nowhere and began to circle me, readying for the attack. I'd never been more afraid. I was scared and angry and something inside me just...snapped. I felt a power coursing through me, something stronger than the adrenaline that was flooding my body."

Nikolai nodded. "You didn't know about the ability you possessed."

"I didn't know about a lot of things until that night. Every thing had turned inside out. I just wanted to survive - the only thing I knew how to do. So when I felt that energy flowing through me, some visceral instinct told me to turn it loose on my attacker. I pushed it outward with my mind and the vampire staggered back as if I'd physically struck him. I threw more at him, and still more, until he was down on the ground screaming and his eyes were bleeding and his entire body was convulsing in pain." Renata paused, wondering if the Breed warrior staring at her in silence was judging her for her total lack of remorse over what she'd done. She wasn't about to apologize or make excuses. "I wanted him to suffer, Nikolai. I wanted to kill him, and I did."

"What other choice did you have?" he said, reaching out and very tenderly brushing his fingertips along the line of her cheek. "What about Yakut? Where was he during all of this?"

"Not far behind. I had started running again when he stepped into my path and headed me off. I tried to take him down too, but he withstood it. I sent everything I had at him, to the point of exhaustion, but it wasn't enough. He was too strong." "Because he was Gen One."

Renata gave an acknowledging tilt of her head. "He explained it to me later, after that initial bout of reverb had knocked me unconscious for three full days and I woke to find myself pressed into service as a personal bodyguard to a vampire." "You never tried to leave?"

"In the beginning, I tried. More than once. It never took him long to locate me." She tapped her index finger against the vein at the side of her neck. "Hard to get very far when your own blood is better than GPS for your pursuer. He used my blood as insurance of my loyalty. It was a shackle I couldn't break. I was never going to be free of it."

"You're free now, Renata."

"Yeah, I suppose I am," she said, the answer sounding as hollow as it felt. "But what about Mira?"

Nikolai stared at her for a long moment, saying nothing. She didn't want to see the doubt in his eyes, no more than she wanted empty assurances that there was anything either one of them could do for Mira now that she was in enemy hands. All the worse when she was currently weakened by her wound.

Nikolai pivoted to the claw-footed white tub and gave the twin handles a crank. As water rushed into the basin, he turned back to her where she sat. "A cool bath should bring your temperature down. Come on, I'll help you clean up."

"No, I can manage on my own - "

He gave her a no-arguments lift of his brow. "The shirt, Renata. Let me help you out of it so I can have a better look at what's going on with that wound."

Obviously, he wasn't about to give it up. Renata sat very still as Nikolai unfastened the last few buttons on the tent-sized oxford and gently eased it off her. The cotton fell in a soft crush on her lap and around her hips. Despite that she was wearing a bra, modesty ingrained in her from her early years in the church orphanage made her lift her hands up to shield her breasts from his eyes. But he wasn't looking at her in a sexual way just then. All his focus was on her shoulder right now. He was gentle, careful, his fingers probing lightly around the area. He followed the curve of her shoulder over and around to where the bullet had left her flesh. "Does it hurt when I touch you here?"

Even though his touch was barely a skimming contact, pain radiated through her. She winced, sucking in her breath.

"Sorry. There's a lot of redness and swelling near the exit wound," he said, his deep voice vibrating in her bones while his touch moved lightly on her. "It doesn't look great, but I think if we flush it out and..."

As his voice trailed off, she knew what he was seeing now. Not the raw gunshot wound, but two other blemishes on the otherwise smooth skin of her back. She felt those marks sear as hotly as they had the night they'd been put there.

"Holy hell." Nikolai's breath left him in a slow sigh. "What happened to you? Are these burn marks? Jesus...are they brands?"

Renata closed her eyes. Part of her wanted nothing more than to shrink away and vanish into the tile, but she forced herself to remain still, her spine rigidly erect. "They are nothing."

"Bullshit." He stood before her and lifted her chin on the edge of his hand. She let her gaze drift up to meet his and found his pale eyes sharp with intensity. There was no pity in those eyes, only a cold outrage that took her aback. "Tell me. Who did this to you - was it Yakut?"

She shrugged. "Just one of his more creative ways of reminding me that it's not a good idea to piss him off."

"That son of a bitch," Nikolai fumed. "He had his death coming. Just for this - for everything he did to you - the bastard damn well had it coming."

Renata blinked, surprised to hear such fury, such fierce protectiveness, coming from him. Particularly when Nikolai was one of the Breed and she was, as was made clear to her often enough the past two years, merely human. Existing only because she was useful. "You're not like him at all," she murmured. "I thought you would be, but you're nothing like him or Lex or the others. You're...I don't know...different."

"Different?" Although the intensity hadn't left his eyes, Nikolai's mouth quirked at the corner. "Was that almost a compliment, or just your fever talking?"

She smiled despite her state of general misery. "Both, I think."

"Well, different I can handle. Let's cool you down before you start throwing around the n-word."

"The n-word?" she asked, watching as he took the bottle of liquid hand soap from the sink and squirted some into the running bath.