The group scattered, silent and afraid. As they fled the chamber, Dante came in from the back where Benson had escaped. "The director's dead, Lucan. Found him in the rear corridor just now. Shot three times, point blank in the head. No sign of the JUSTIS officers who followed him out."
"Son of a bitch." Lucan raked a hand over his scalp. Benson had known something about Ackmeyer's UV technology. He'd practically confessed as much in the seconds before Kellan leapt at him. Benson had apparently known enough about Morningstar, and whoever now had their hands on the tech, for someone to make sure he didn't get the opportunity to say anything more. But who, and why?
And just how far did this conspiracy reach?
Now there was another question that needed swift answers as well: Who, or what, was Opus Nostrum?
Lucan glanced back at Kellan, at the dozens of gunshot wounds that took the young male down. "It didn't have to go like this, goddamn it. He deserved better. He deserved a chance at something more - he and Mira both."
Dante nodded grimly. "Maybe there's a way to make it right."
The warrior sent a meaningful look to his Breedmate, Tess, who stood with the rest of the Order and their mates. Before either Lucan or Dante could say another word, Tess was in action, picking up on the thought and dropping down beside Kellan to run her healing hands over him. "His blood's still warm, but his heart is stopped."
"Can you jump it?" Lucan recalled an event Dante had described to him from Tess's life before she met her warrior mate. As a young woman, she'd once revived someone who'd passed suddenly from heart failure. Later, in her work as a veterinarian, she'd even cured a sickly little mutt of its cancer and other ailments using her extraordinary Breedmate talent.>Mira stared from her seat beside Niko and Renata, her eyes swimming with tears, fingers pressed to her lips. It killed him that she had to know this fear, this dread. This damned feeling of helplessness as they waited for the Council to begin delivering its verdict.
And then that moment arrived, and Kellan steeled himself to face the end of a path he'd been trying to avoid for the past eight years of his life.
Lucan soberly addressed the Council, instructing them to state their individual votes one at a time, calling for either incarceration for life or a sentence of death. "As chairman, my vote customarily would be heard last," he said. "However, as a condition of this private hearing - because it concerns a former warrior under my command as leader of the Order - the Council has required me to recuse myself from today's proceedings. I will not vote on sentencing, and the Council's decision will be final."
Kellan nodded his acknowledgment, then stood at attention as the voting began. There was little deliberation. Each Council member announced his vote, arriving at a surprisingly split tally across the GNC's human and Breed members.
Seven votes, representing both races, cast for his incarceration.
Eight others called for death.
One vote remaining.
The hearing would either end in a tie or a firm decision for Kellan's eventual execution.
It all came down to the councilman slumped at the end of the dais, Jeremy Ackmeyer's uncle. Kellan peered at Benson, sensing something more than simple grief or vengeance in the old man's troubled gaze. He'd been drinking, Kellan suspected now, noting the boneless sag of his shoulders, the glassy redness of his eyes.
"Director Benson," Lucan prompted, sending a glance over at him. "Are you prepared to state your decision?"
The old man grunted, lifted his head to glare in Kellan's direction. When he spoke, the word was blunt, final. "Death."
Kellan heard Mira's sharply inhaled breath. He felt her stricken reaction course through him, jolting his pulse like an electric shock as her worry shot into him through their blood bond.
"No." Her voice in the seated assembly behind him sounded broken, choked with tears. "No! He didn't kill your nephew, Director Benson. He had nothing to do with the fire at Jeremy's lab or his death. You have to believe that! Do the right thing here. You have to show him mercy - "
"Mira, don't." Kellan pivoted to look as she flew out of her seat and started to rush forward in his defense. Alongside him, the four Breed guards went tense. He felt their alarm roll off them, noted they were all readying to draw their weapons.
"No!" Mira cried. "Lucan, don't let this happen, please!"
Kellan saw Lucan's grim look. Understood that the Order's leader had already done all he could. There was nothing more that could be said or done to spare Kellan.
"No," Mira sobbed, dropping her face into her palms.
Her anguish twisted his heart in a stranglehold. He hated that he was putting her through this, just as he'd dreaded all the years he'd stayed away, hoping to avoid this very moment.
At the far end of the chamber, Benson was shaking his head, muttering under his breath. "It's all gone too far," he slurred, his head hung low, face drooping as he spoke. "Too far now. I finally see that, when it's too late to make things right."
Kellan listened, curiosity prickling to attention as Benson rambled, morose and cryptic. There was remorse in the old man's voice, that much was unmistakable. And there was something else, something that made Kellan's blood pound in his temples.
"Too late for Jeremy," Benson murmured, thoroughly swept up in his own private misery. "Such a brilliant life, cut short. He was a pure soul, that boy, incorruptible. A true light-bringer who could've changed the world."
Light-bringer.
An unusual phrase. The very one Ackmeyer had used to describe his unreleased UV technology project.