Mira swallowed past the anger in her throat as she looked at the unmarked, spent round and pictured the horror of what the woman who loved that Darkhaven male must have felt, seeing him killed before her eyes.
"She didn't know who to trust or where to go," Kellan said. "So she came to us."
"Who is she?"
"You saw her in the other room a few minutes ago - Nina. She's a friend of Candice's, now one of my team."
Mira shook her head, trying to absorb everything she was hearing. "Are you trying to tell me that Jeremy Ackmeyer is responsible for this somehow?"
Kellan took the bullet casing from her and slipped it back into his pocket. "It's his technology. It took all this time, but we finally traced the tech back to Ackmeyer. We'd been planning to raid his lab, but the place is a fortress - even more so than his home. But then word arrived that Ackmeyer would be on the move. He was expecting a security escort at his house.">Doomed, to be sure.
Because in that moment, Kellan understood that scrubbing Mira was only going to postpone greater problems now that Ackmeyer was in his custody. What she'd said earlier tonight was the truth: If human law enforcement didn't catch up to him soon enough, the Order certainly would.
He should have known.
It wasn't like he hadn't seen it coming a long time ago.
Kellan broke away from her kiss with a savage, inhuman growl. When he spoke, his voice was gravel in his throat, rough from wanting and the sharp-edged reality of just how badly he'd screwed both their lives. "Come with me."
Mira rubbed her damp, reddened lips. Her eyes looked equally bruised, impossibly large, regarding him with a mix of longing and regret. "Time to be rid of me already again, is it?"
"Change of plans," he snarled. He took a firmer hold on her hand and led her back to the Jeep. "You won't be going anywhere after all."
Chapter Seven
AN HOUR LATER, MIRA'S LIPS WERE STILL TINGLING AND alive from Kellan's uninvited kiss. Her blood was still thrumming in her veins, hot from anger and something equally heated that she refused to acknowledge. She tried to rub away the lingering memory of his mouth on hers as Kellan drove her south of Boston, through the city of New Bedford, continuing toward a flat, lightless promontory that jutted into the Atlantic on three sides.
"I know this place," she murmured as the Jeep rolled over the cracked, untended asphalt.
The road led to the entrance of what had once been a park in the days before First Dawn and the wars that followed. Long before that, during another war, the broad expanse of overgrown land and the squatty, elongated D-shape structure at the far end of it had served as a human military facility. Mira peered at the battered, bullet-scarred sign that had once welcomed visitors to historic Fort Taber.
Now the site was weed choked, dense with thickets and bramble. Up ahead, the concrete-block building was a forbidding stronghold, all but obscured by dark foliage and tangled vines. Kellan drove up on it and circled around the side, killing the headlights as they approached the yawning black maw of the fortress's entrance. He rolled into the darkness. Small lights came on deep inside, illuminating what appeared to be the interior of an old, unused gun battery. Up ahead was the black van that had been used to abduct Jeremy Ackmeyer and her.
"Not much of a fleet garage," Mira remarked, turning a sardonic look on Kellan.
"We don't have the Order's deep pockets." He came to a stop near the van and threw the Jeep's brake. "We have to scrape and work for what we have - meager as it is."
He said it not with accusation or complaint, merely fact. But there was the barest note of humility in his voice, and it left her to wonder if he was embarrassed in some way, if he had felt compelled to make excuses to her for the way he and his followers lived.
Kellan swung out of the vehicle and walked around to instruct her to do the same. Given little choice, Mira followed him into the gloom of the place. "Maybe it would be easier for you to find patrons if you did nobler work."
He scoffed, wheeling around on her. "You think we couldn't find people willing to fund our missions if we wanted to? We don't answer to anyone. We see things that shouldn't be going on, and we stop them. We don't dance on command or worry about stepping on delicate political toes. Not even the Order can say that anymore."
"Missions?" Mira tossed back at him. "The Order doesn't go around abducting civilians or disrupting diplomatic assemblies. The Order doesn't sabotage peace talks or appoint themselves the world's judge and jury whenever it suits them."
"Maybe they should." Kellan's eyes blazed with embers of outrage in the dim light of the bunker. "We do what needs to be done, because it must be done."
He started to stalk ahead, away from the parked vehicles and into a wide-mouthed tunnel.
"So self-righteous," she called after him. "I hope you're willing to die for your convictions."
He pivoted now and stormed back to her, his expression dark, thoughtful, even as his irises radiated with amber fire. "Yeah, I guess I am willing to die for what I believe in. Don't tell me you wouldn't be too."
She stood there, unable to argue. He knew her too well to believe any denial she tried to fling at him. Nor did he give her the chance. His fingers clamped down around her wrist and he hauled her after him, through the black tunnel and up a gradual incline, into another bunker. She recognized this one as the rebel base's living quarters.
Kellan's crew was in the sparsely furnished, cavernous main room of the place. Candice was cleaning firearms with the man called Vince and the other one they'd called Chaz. Doc was seated at a weathered metal table, eating from a tin that looked to be old MRE military rations. Straddling a backward-facing chair beside him was a blueberry-haired waif with multiple facial and ear piercings. Her fingers were flying over the touchpad of a tablet computer, not skipping even the smallest beat, when she and the rest of the rebels turned their heads to gape at Kellan and his obviously unexpected companion.
Candice was the first to find her voice. "Um . . . everything okay, boss?"