His answering grunt was sharp, caustic. “I can have any woman under the terms you just described. And I have.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
He didn’t answer, just started walking away from her. Brynne fell in behind him, hurrying to catch up as he sliced through the crowd. She didn’t reach him until they were through the bar and heading for the exit.
“Zael, wait. Please.”
He paused just inside the club’s vestibule.
“I shouldn’t have come.” He stared at her as if he was going to say something more, then changed his mind. He shook his head. “You want to go home, I’ll take you home. I’ll even put you to bed, Brynne. But I won’t fuck you. Not like this. No matter how much I want to.”
His toneless reply took her so aback, he might as well have slapped her.
She swallowed back her humiliation, but it sat at the back of her throat, bitter as acid.
“Come on,” he said tightly. “I’ll hail us a taxi.”
As they stepped outside the building, Brynne’s apology sat on the very tip of her tongue. All of the alcohol in her bloodstream seemed to dissolve under the weight of her embarrassment, leaving her feeling cold and foolish.
And never more alone.
“Zael, I—”
She didn’t know what she could say to fix things. She wasn’t even sure she knew how.
But then something bright in the starlit distance caught her eye—something disturbing, setting the skyline across the Thames aglow.
A fire.
No, it was more than a fire. It was a churning, massive plume of flames and roiling, thick gray smoke. Outside the club, a crowd was gathering to look at the spectacle.
As they all watched in silent horror, a low rumble sounded across the water…followed by the unspeakable crash and roar of crumbling metal, glass, and mortar.
“Oh, my God,” Brynne murmured. She glanced over at Zael, feeling all of the blood drain from her face. “That’s the government block at Vauxhall Cross. That building that just went down? Zael…It was JUSTIS headquarters.”
CHAPTER 4
Order Headquarters
Washington, D.C.
Lucan Thorne had been a warrior far too long and seen too damned much for anything to take him by surprise anymore. Yet as he stood in front of a wall of video monitors in the Order’s war room at headquarters, watching with most of his lieutenants and their mates as the heart of London’s government district burned, he couldn’t deny the cold sense of disbelief that gripped him.
The iconic white building that once housed the famed British MI6, and, for the past twenty years, the global operations headquarters for JUSTIS…gone.
Nothing but rubble. The highly secured, impenetrable modern fortress and all who’d been inside it tonight, consumed by the massive cloud of dark ash and searing fire that lit up the London skyline like a volcano.
“Opus Nostrum wasted no time claiming responsibility,” Gideon said grimly from beside Lucan. “It’s all over the Internet now.”
The Order’s technology expert had a tablet in hand, scanning underground sites where hackers and other society misfits liked to boast and preen for one another. Gideon was as much a warrior as any of his comrades, but he also had skills that would leave any black hat computer genius in his wake.