When she tried to step past him again, he braced both arms up on the doorjambs, caging her inside the room with his body. "As soon as night falls, I'm going to take you somewhere safe. There are people I know who can help you make sense of everything. People far more suited to looking after you than I am."
"I don't need anyone looking after me. Least of all you or anyone you know."
He exhaled a scoff, dropped his arms, and started moving forward. Pushing her into a retreat with just his encroaching presence. "You don't trust me."
"No, I don't."
"That's probably smart, considering what nearly happened in here."
Nearly? She was concerned enough about what had happened. Tavia took a pace backward on her heels, less afraid of him than outraged. Her fury coiled in her belly, mingling with the remnants of the thrumming power that was still alive and racing through her veins. "I don't trust you because of everything you've done. Because of everything I've seen here. I'm not even sure I can trust myself anymore. None of this makes any sense to me."
"It does," he said evenly. "You just wish it didn't."
"Shut up." She shook her head vigorously, anger and fear pushing into her throat. "I don't want to hear any more. I just want to get the hell out of here."
"That's not going to happen, Tavia."
When he started to reach for her again, something exploded inside her. It was her fury and panic, erupting out of her in a physical reflex. Before she could think about it - before she was even aware that her arm was moving - she shoved him with all her might. He flew backward as if yanked on a tether, but a second later he had regained his footing.
In less than a blink he was back in her face, looming over her with nostrils flaring, eyes blazing. "Goddamn it, I'm not going to hurt you."
She didn't dare believe him. Nor did she wait to find out if she could. The instant she felt his fingers come to rest on her arm, she pulled back her other one and let her fist fly - connecting with a bone-jarring crack on the underside of his jaw.
To her complete amazement, he went down with the impact. His harsh curse as he staggered onto his knees rattled the broken glass of the crudely barred window behind them.
Tavia didn't hang around to go another round with him. As he tried to shake off the blow, she leapt around him. She tore out of the bedroom and through the large brownstone, across the inlaid marble foyer and out the front door to the morning bustle of the Back Bay residential area. She heard him bellow behind her, but only dared a fleeting glance in his direction as her feet flew over the snow-dusted sidewalk. He stood in the open doorway, his arm raised up to shield his eyes.
He stayed there, hanging back, watching her from within the shadowed shelter as she dashed into the street and frantically hailed a passing taxi. The yellow cab slowed to a halt and she climbed in, giving the driver her address in a breathless rush.
The car lurched back into traffic, belching a cloud of opaque steam and exhaust that billowed up like a veil, blotting out the brownstone and the man Tavia hoped to never see again.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SENATOR BOBBY CLARENCE had been a good Catholic apparently, but an even better politician. The church he'd shrewdly joined fresh off the bus from Bangor as a first-year law student at Harvard was only the largest, most prestigious in Boston. Some fifty years ago, this same church had mourned a parishioner who was more famously a beloved fallen human president, a fact that Dragos guessed had played a role in the ambitious young Clarence's decision to join its flock. Although the bachelor senator had no immediate family, outside the Cathedral of the Holy Cross that cold early afternoon, police were directing traffic to accommodate the crowd of funeral attendees waiting to get one of the two thousand seats at his service. The line of mourners stretched from the pair of red double doors at the entrance, out to the bricked sidewalk and around the large corner lot on which the massive neo-Gothic cathedral sat.
Dragos sat inside his idling, chauffeured sedan about a block down the street, impatient for the service to begin. He was risking a great deal, venturing out during daylight hours. Even with the precautions he'd taken - UV-blocking wraparound sunglasses, a brimmed hat made of dense, boiled wool, and a generous length of knit scarf to shield his neck and head - his nearly pure Breed genes were a liability here. Being second generation of his kind, he could withstand less than a half hour in direct sunlight before his solarsensitive skin began to cook.
But some risks were to be expected.
Some things, he supposed, were worth a little pain.
He'd endured his share already, thanks to the Order. The killing of his Minion senator so soon after Dragos had turned him had been inconvenient to say the least. It still grated to have lost the human before his full potential could have been realized. But then again, Dragos's plans wouldn't have waited the handful of years it might have taken Bobby Clarence's political star to complete its natural, some might say inevitable, ascent to the White House.>The pressure mounted, building toward something immense and glorious. Tavia rode it with him, awash in amazement and the sudden, swelling bloom of yet another shattering release. He dropped his head beside hers, breath gusting over her enlivened skin and the exposed column of her neck. For the smallest moment, his mouth brushed against the sensitive curve of her shoulder. She waited to feel his lips close over her flesh. Held her breath as her pleasure began to crest its banks and the need to feel his fangs sink into her flesh became a deafening pound in her veins. "No," he rasped sharply. "Goddamn it. No."
And with a dark curse huffed against her ear, everything ended.
He withdrew, rolling away from her so abruptly she felt his absence strike her like a slap. His broad back flexed and rippled as he pivoted to his feet, unmistakable anger in his haste. He pulled up his pants in one ungentle tug and stalked away from where she lay, breathless and confused, oddly bereft. Not to mention humiliated.
Her cheeks flushed with a new kind of heat as she watched him enter the adjacent bathroom without so much as a backward glance. As though he couldn't get away from her fast enough. The door banged closed in his wake, not loud enough to muffle the low roar that erupted from behind the shut panel.
Tavia rose up from the floor in a mute, dazed silence.
Her body was still thrumming with sensation, slower to react to the rejection than the rest of her. Her veins still throbbed, her pulse hammering in a steady, strong beat that was now beginning to make her temples ache. And deep inside her, the power that had awakened within her had yet to ebb.
The burn scars that had covered her for as long as she could remember were pulsing and vibrant. Not the dusky color she was accustomed to seeing but the florid, changeable hues that defied all logic of what she'd been raised to believe about herself. They weren't scars. They couldn't be. Nothing about them - nothing about her body and this power coursing through her - was normal. She knew that now.
She herself wasn't normal.
A miserable groan leaked from between her lips when she felt the sharp pressure of her teeth resting against her tongue. No, she corrected herself. Not her teeth - her fangs.