Crave The Night (Midnight Breed 12)

He inclined his head in acknowledgment. “Tell her I’ll be back tonight at sundown to look in on her again. We’ll talk more about Cassian Gray then.”

Carys shook her head. “She won’t be home. The exhibit opens this evening,” she reminded him. “We’ll both be at the museum reception tonight, along with a couple hundred invited guests and visitors.”

Shit. He didn’t want Jordana out of his sight tonight, let alone out of reach entirely and surrounded by a museum packed to the gills with the general public.

“You could always come as her date,” Carys suggested, a teasing glimmer in her eyes. “Might do you some good to take a night off for once. You might even have fun.”

Fun? He scoffed at the idea. Even if he did decide to attend the event, fun would be the last thing on his mind. He’d be there for the sole purpose of ensuring Jordana’s safety, making certain every person in the vicinity understood that if they intended harm toward her, they would have to come through him first.

Not that Jordana needed him showing up to disrupt everyone else’s good time. He’d already done that once this week with his team and Carys’s brother. None of the Darkhaven and human elite of Jordana’s social circle would appreciate having the Order present in the room—no doubt that sentiment would be doubled for the soulless killer Nathan’s past had branded him in the public’s eye.

Not gonna happen.

Jordana didn’t need him barging into every aspect of her life, least of all an event she’d obviously poured her heart into for weeks or months. It was her moment to shine; he owed it to her to let her have it without him distracting from her accomplishment.

“Keep your eye on her, Carys. Let me know if you have any cause for concern. Anything seems off, you call me at once. Agreed?”

She gave him a nod. “Yes, of course. But I still say you should come to the museum tonight and look after her yourself.”

Nathan dismissed the idea with a curse as he strode for the waiting elevator car.

At the Order’s global headquarters in Washington, D.C., Lucan Thorne leaned back in his chair in the war room, listening in displeased silence as Sterling Chase briefed him via video feed early that morning on the night’s patrol report out of Boston.

It wasn’t good news.

Then again, good news was something the Order had been coming up short on for too many months to count now. Years, in fact. Hell, more than a couple of decades, if he really wanted to do the math.

Lucan felt a dark rage building in him as he received the details of Cassian Gray’s slaying. A crucial lead lost. Possibly their only viable lead on the race of immortals reputed to be plotting war against the Order and the rest of the planet.

And now that lead had been severed on the edge of a hidden enemy’s blade. An enemy with unknown motives, and still at large.

Damn it all to bloody hell.

Before his fury had a chance to explode out of him in a roar that would bring his mate, Gabrielle, flying into the room in alarm, Lucan vaulted out of his seat.

He began an agitated pace behind the conference table where Gideon and two of the Order’s district commanders had assembled with Lucan to review current missions and organize further operations. Tegan, chief of the New York City operation, and Hunter, who oversaw the Order’s presence in New Orleans, had remained in D.C. with their mates since the Global Nations Council summit last week.

A peace summit that had nearly resulted in catastrophe.

“I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that this was not what I wanted to hear right now,” Lucan said, glancing at Chase’s grim expression on the screen. “We had slim prospects to begin with—just two potential sources of intel on this operation—and now we’re down one before we even get out of the gate. As for the other, the way things are going in Ireland with Mathias Rowan and his team, we may end up holding nothing but our dicks before this whole thing is over.”

“It could be worse,” Gideon said without looking up from the array of 3D touch-screen monitors laid out before him and illuminated with countless servers’ worth of data, which he swept through and resequenced like a deranged symphony composer. “A few nights ago at the summit, if we hadn’t stopped Reginald Crowe and Opus Nostrum’s Morningstar bomb, today we’d be engulfed in certain world war between the humans and the Breed.”

Lucan grunted. “Don’t think that’s off the table yet. If what Crowe promised—that Opus Nostrum and their plans are nothing compared to what the Atlanteans mean to do—then we stand on the brink of war every second of every day that we let Crowe’s kind elude us.”

On the video screen, Chase’s face remained sober. Lucan knew the serious warrior long enough to realize that failure didn’t sit well with him either. “Nothing to report out of Dublin yet, I take it?”

Lucan shook his head. “Rowan’s got a full squad on the ground in that city and outlying areas, searching for anything they can find on Crowe’s purported mistress. Without a name or physical description, they’re getting nowhere fast.” Lucan blew out a low curse. “It doesn’t help that Rowan’s had his hands full with JUSTIS in London recently as well.”

“How so?” Chase asked.

“They’ve been dealing with a rash of unsolved murders in that city recently. Human and Breed victims, a few of them high profile. Joint Urban Security finally got so desperate to make the killings stop, they extended an olive branch to the Order in exchange for an unofficial assist on the investigation.”

Tegan grunted. “ ‘Unofficial assist’ meaning handle it for them quietly and by any means necessary, so long as they don’t have to get their hands dirty.”

“It’s the old Enforcement Agency all over again,” Gideon said, his hands flying from one large display to another. “Except now it’s got a shiny new, politically correct name. Same old shit, but someone else is doing the shoveling.”

A onetime career Enforcement Agent himself, Chase arched a golden brow. “And there’s twice as much of it, now that the bureaucracy has been extended into both Breed and human law enforcement combined under the JUSTIS banner.”