"Does it ever bother you, the things you have to do?" She spoke the question before she'd had a chance to decide if it was her place to ask it or not. Before she'd had the time to worry whether or not she wanted to know the answer. "Does life truly mean so little to you?"
Hunter's harsh, handsome face didn't flinch. The angles of his high cheekbones and square-cut jaw were rigid, as unforgiving as sharp-edged steel. Only his mouth seemed soft, full lips held with neither a scowl nor a smirk, only placid, maddening neutrality. But it was his eyes that held her the most transfixed. Beneath the crown of his closecropped blond hair, his eyes were penetrating, probing. As sharply as they bore into her, however, they seemed even more determined to reveal nothing of themselves no matter how deeply she searched.
"I deal in death," he answered then, no apology or excuse. "It is a role I was born into, one I was trained to do very well."
"And you never doubt?" She couldn't help pressing, needing to know. Wanting to understand this formidable Breed male who seemed so solitary and alone. "You never question what you do - not ever?"
Something dark flashed across his face in that instant. There was a flicker of evasion in his eyes, she thought. Brief but impossible to miss, and shuttered a second later by the downward sweep of his lashes as he palmed the car keys and dropped them into the center console of the vehicle.
"No," he answered finally. "I don't question anything my duties require me to do. Not ever."
He opened the driver-side door and began to step out of the vehicle. "The plane is ready for us. We must go now, while the night is still on our side."
"They're on the way to New Orleans now."
Lucan glanced up as Gideon ended his call with Hunter and came back to the tech lab's conference table where Tegan and he stood, poring over a set of unrolled blueprints. "No further issues with Corinne Bishop or her kin in Detroit?"
"Hunter didn't seem to be concerned," Gideon replied. "Said he had the situation under control."
Lucan grunted, wry despite the weight of the discussion previously under way. "Where've I heard that line before? Famous last words from more than one of us over the course of the past year and a half."
"Yup." Gideon cocked a brow over the rims of his pale blue shades. "Usually followed not long afterward by a call from the field that the situation so assuredly under control has gone suddenly and totally FUBAR."
Lucan himself wasn't above blame on that score, nor was Tegan or Gideon, for that matter. Still, this was Hunter they were talking about.
Tegan seemed to pick up on his line of thinking. "If I hadn't seen that male come back bleeding on occasion from some of his nastier missions, I'd say he was made of steel and cables, not muscle and bone. He's a machine, that one. He doesn't fuck up - it's not in his DNA. There won't be any surprises from Hunter."
"There better not be," Lucan replied. "We've sure as hell got our hands full enough as it is."
With that, the three of them turned their attention back to the plans Lucan had spread out on the table. The blueprints were something he'd been working on privately for the past few months, soon after he began to realize how vulnerable the compound was becoming the longer Dragos eluded the Order's grasp.
It was the design for an all-new headquarters.
He'd already procured the land - a two-hundred-acre tract in Vermont's Green Mountains - and the plans were nearly complete for a sprawling, high-security, state-of-the-art bunker that could house a small town in its many underground chambers and specially designed facilities. It was immense, incredible, exactly the kind of place the Order needed now that Dragos knew the compound's location.
The only problem was, a facility of that size and scope was easily a year or more out of reach.
They needed something today, not down the road.
"Maybe we need to think about splitting up," Gideon suggested after a while. "None of us is without money or holdings of our own. I mean, none of our properties are as secure as this compound is - rather, as secure as it was. But we're not without options. Maybe the smartest, fastest thing would be for each of us to take our mate and move to other locations."
Tegan's green eyes glittered darkly as he slid a grave look at Lucan. There was no need to ask what the other Gen One warrior was thinking. Lucan and he, although historically not always on the best of terms, were the last of the Order's founding members. For some seven centuries -
since the Order's inception - they'd fought side by side, lived through numerous personal hells and triumphs. They had killed for each other, bled for each other ... sometimes even wept for each other. Only to arrive at this place together.
Together, not divided.
Lucan saw a raw, medieval ferocity in Tegan's gaze now. He understood it. He felt it too.
"The Order will not splinter," Lucan replied, terse with fury for what Dragos was forcing them to consider. "We are warriors. Brethren. We are kin. We will not let anyone scatter us in terror."
Gideon nodded, solemn and silent. "Yeah," he said, meeting their gazes. "Fuck me, right?
Total crap idea. I don't know what the hell I was thinking."
They shared a tense chuckle, all of them acutely aware that the rest of the compound had entrusted them to decide the fate of everyone. And their choices were damned few. Dragos had them trapped like fish in a barrel now, and at any given moment he might start shooting.
"Reichen and Claire have properties in Europe," Gideon pointed out. "I mean, not that it would be ideal in terms of vacating the compound here and relocating abroad, let alone at a moment's notice."