"What do you mean?"
"A woman saw the whole thing. She watched it from her apartment window over the alley where the murder occurred." Kellan's expression was grim. "There was no body because it was ashed on the spot, Mira. The rounds these human bastards shot him with were made of superconcentrated UV light, converted to liquid form. They were bullets made for the express purpose of killing vampires."
Mira considered for a moment, then gave an incredulous laugh. "Come on, Kellan. You can do better than this. Government assassins using liquid UV rounds? That kind of technology is pure science fiction. It doesn't exist."
"Doesn't it?"
"No," she insisted. "For one thing, it breaches the ban on potentially catastrophic armaments. It would never get past the GNC for approval. For another, the Order would personally never permit that kind of weaponry to be developed. They would destroy it before they'd let something as potentially devastating as UV bullets come into existence."
He shrugged, unconvinced. "And yet it has been, obviously."
"Then prove it."
He said nothing, merely dug into the pocket of his dark jeans and withdrew a spent bullet casing. "The woman recovered this from the ashes of the dead vampire. He was her lover. She said he didn't have any enemies, was just walking home before sunrise when the humans accosted him, started provoking him with anti-Breed slurs, then shot him dead like an animal. Worse than that."
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."
"Me," Mira said, feeling like a pawn.
"We had to act quickly," Kellan explained. "I didn't know Ackmeyer was expecting an escort detail from the Order. It was a daytime op, and with roughly ninety-nine percent of the Order's warriors being strictly night patrol - "
"Who gave you the intel?"
Kellan stared at her. "We have our sources around the city."
"Rooster," she guessed, then barked out a humorless laugh when he didn't deny it.
"The guy is garbage," Kellan admitted, "but he serves his purpose."
"Did you know he was the reason I was assigned to escort duty with Ackmeyer?" She pursed her lips, gave a vague shake of her head. "It was punishment from Lucan, for skewering the little redheaded bastard down in the cage arena at La Notte. I should've aimed for his heart."
Kellan arched a brow. "You really hate him."
"I hate every rebel," she said sharply. "I hate them for what they took from me."
Kellan met and held her simmering stare. When he finally spoke, his voice was sober, deep with regret but not apology. "And now you count me in that number too."
"I never wanted us to be enemies, Kellan. You've done that, not me. You're making certain of it right now, and only you can change that fact."
She watched him, waited for him to tell her it was all a terrible mistake and he would fix it. That he loved her, still, and somehow, together, they would find a way through this dark trap that was closing in on them with sharp, lethal teeth.
But he didn't say any of those things.
"I'll ask you to remember what I said about trying to escape or attempting to interfere with my operation. I don't want this to be any harder on you than it already is, Mira."
She steeled herself to the remorse in his voice, focusing instead on the fact that nothing she'd said had convinced him to change his mind. He was lost to her, as much now as he had been eight years ago.
"Spare me your pity, Bowman. I don't need it. I don't need anything from you."