Tavia stared at it and felt some of the blood rush out of her head ...
It was her captor.
The deranged menace - the man whom her instincts warned was something more than human. He stood behind a pricey-looking sofa, his muscled arms spread along its back to form a protective arch around the slender shoulders of a petite blond woman and the young boy from the birthday party picture. The boy had gotten older, no longer the towheaded, grinning child holding a giant box with a bow on top of it but a handsome teen wearing a Harvard University sweatshirt and a cocky smile that seemed to say he had the world by the tail.
The woman was stunning. Delicate and beautiful, her perfect oval face was as flawless as the ivory silk on the walls that surrounded her, her long blond hair the color of corn silk, her wide lavender eyes fringed in dark lashes. She beamed at the young man like a proud mother, even though she looked to be only a few years older than he.
Tavia's abductor was smiling too, a subtle, practiced curve of his broad mouth that made him look at once charming and devastating. Attractive didn't even come close to describing the lean angles of his face and the determined, square cut of his jaw.
But where his smile seemed rehearsed and posed, his gaze was disarmingly naked. It smoldered with a pained kind of desire.
All of it aimed at the pretty young woman held loosely in the shelter of his arm.
Tavia sifted back through the rest of the photos once more. He was in most of them, attending important-looking gatherings, dressed in his impeccable suits, surrounded by wealth and privilege and gentility.
My God.
Whoever he was - whatever he had become - this was the life he'd come from. This was his family.
This place he'd brought her to?
It had once been his home.
CHASE AWOKE TO a fierce banging in his head.
He came to on a guttural snarl, blood thirst shredding him with sharp talons that had barely loosened their grip from the night before. His skull was throbbing, mouth as dry as cotton. Every particle of his being felt raw, strung out. Starving for a fix.
Without opening his eyes, he pushed himself up from the floor where he'd slumped a few hours ago, weakened from exertion and injury, in desperate need of a feeding. A feeding he could not afford to take, when his addiction would only crave it more and more the next time. He sensed it was dawn outside. Hours had passed since he'd arrived in this place with the woman from the hotel.
Tavia Fairchild.
Her name seemed less like a stranger's now than a puzzle that needed solving. She was a mystery that didn't make sense to him but was one he could not ignore.
That was why he'd brought her here, to this place he'd never expected to return to again. He'd needed time to think, time to observe her. In the urgent moments following his breach of her cop-secured hotel suite and the precious time he'd wasted driving around Boston in search of viable shelter, he'd finally come to accept there was only one place he could go now. His former Darkhaven, where he'd been leader of his family's enclave following the death of his older brother in service to the Breed's Enforcement Agency.
Chase had walked away from it when he'd joined up with the Order a year and a half ago, never looking back. The near-dozen kin he'd been responsible for then, the young cousins, family friends, and distant relations, had since moved on to other Darkhavens in the area. Now his former home was nothing but a vacant tomb housing the memories of his past sins and failures.
This brownstone mansion in Boston's Back Bay was the last place he wanted to be, but he could think of nowhere else that would be safe enough for Tavia and far enough off-grid for him. As far as human law enforcement knew, his sole place of residence had been the Order's mansion. They didn't know anything about him except what he'd been willing to give them. All of it amounting to little more than lies and half-truths.
Chase groaned, unwilling to drag his eyelids open as another bout of hammering crashed behind his temples. His whole body recoiled under the relentless bang! ... bang! ... bang! ... that seemed to echo from all around him and within him.
Then, the sudden crash of breaking glass.
Chase was on his feet and at the locked door of his bedroom in an instant.
He threw it open and found Tavia standing in her white hotel robe in front of the shuttered window, breath sawing as she paused to lift his heavy desk chair and slam it against the glass again. A piercingly bright nimbus of sunlight arrowed in through the splintered glass, blinding him as soon as he entered.
Chase hissed at the solar onslaught, his fangs punching out of his gums in his rage. He raised his arm to his forehead to shield his eyes and charged in to take hold of her arm before she could level another blow. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"Let go of me!" She shrieked as he ripped the chair out of her hands. "I'm getting out of here!" Chase grabbed her by the arm and pulled her out of the room with him, slamming the door closed behind them. He pushed her into the adjacent study where he'd spent the night. "Are you out of your goddamn mind?"
He thrust her away from him none too gently, barely able to control the feral part of him that was snapping at its tether, looking for any reason to get loose. She was half down on the floor near the fireplace, her robe gaping enough to bare the better part of one perfect breast. Chase swore. His vision was bathed in fiery amber, his skin prickling with the churning of his livid dermaglyphs.
Normally, he would have tried to glance away, attempted to hide himself from curious human eyes, but she stared at him unblinking, unflinching, her intelligent gaze locked unerringly on his transformation from man to monster.
"What are you? What's wrong with your eyes? I saw your teeth last night in the hotel. You have - " She choked a bit on the word. "I saw your fangs. I can see them now too. So tell me the truth. What the hell are you?"
"I think you know, Tavia," he answered flatly.