Darker After Midnight (Midnight Breed 10)

The Minion inclined his head in a servile bow.

Tavia tried to get up, desperate with the hope that something - anything - would thwart the evil Dragos still intended. She no sooner lifted her head than a heavy boot came down on the back of her neck, pinning her there.

The Hunter's boot heel promised to crush her throat if she even thought of rising up against his commander.

She sagged back down and felt a new agony bloom to life inside her. It was Chase. Her blood surged with the power of his fury - his fear for her. It shook her to her core, how deeply he longed to be near her now.

And he was coming. She could feel that too. She felt every mile that shrank between them - could almost feel him urging her to hold on, to stay alive, until he could reach her. It was only then that her tears started to fall.

Chase was coming for her, and Dragos and his army of killers would be waiting for him.

"YOU'RE SURE THIS IS IT?" Nikolai asked from behind the wheel as they sped toward the sprawling United States Naval Observatory compound.

Chase's blood thrummed hard with the answer. "I'm sure. She's in there somewhere." "The vice president's house is on these grounds," Dante said from next to him in the Rover's backseat. "This place should be swarming with military."

"Not if Dragos is here too." Lucan's reply was an ominous mix of foreboding and thinly leashed menace. "Good God. Tavia's brought us right to the son of a bitch."

Lucan's cell phone hummed with an incoming call and he pressed the button to put it on speaker. It was Gideon again. He'd been keeping a pulse on the situation since they'd set out a few minutes ago. Now his voice was tight with an eager intensity.

"We got pay dirt on those collar signals at last," he reported. "I've got a map online and I'm seeing a whole lot of signals coming out of the D.C. area right now."

"Where at?" Lucan asked as Niko took a fast corner and gunned it onto the circle, Brock keeping close behind.

"I've got literally dozens of blips a couple miles northwest of the White House. The area's lit up like a goddamn Christmas tree."

Lucan glanced to Chase and the other warriors, dark brows low over his steely gray eyes. "We know exactly where that is. We're rolling up to it now."

"Holy shit, this can't be good," Gideon murmured, running his hand over his disheveled blond hair as he slumped back in his seat in the tech lab. "It could be a trap, guys. You could be walking right into Dragos's hands."

A muscle ticked in Lucan's jaw as he met Chase's determined gaze. "Guess we're gonna find that out soon enough. Chase's female is inside. We're not leaving without her." A look to Niko dropped the warrior's foot hard on the gas.

With a screeching wail of rubber on asphalt, both of the Order's Rovers surged up onto the parklike lawn of the vice president's compound.

Chase leapt out halfway up the yard and raced toward the mansion with all the preternatural speed he possessed.

DRAGOS HEARD the sudden shriek of tires on the grounds outside the house. He wheeled toward the noise, knowing that the president and his security detail would not come barreling into the place hell-bent for leather.

It was the Order.

He threw a glance at Tavia, recalling her admission that she'd taken blood from Sterling Chase. He might have guessed the half-Rogue former Agent might've also sampled her blood. They were bonded, and when Dragos saw the tears streaking the female's contorted face, he understood that Chase and she were bonded by more than blood. She loved him.

And Dragos was betting by the cacophony of gunfire and combat rising up in the yard outside that Sterling Chase loved her too.

"You led them here." He let his laughter boom out of him as he clapped his hands in mock applause. "Congratulations, Tavia. You've done what I've been unable to accomplish all this time. You brought the Order to me, right to their certain deaths."

He swung a hard look on one of the Hunters who stood nearby in the living room. "No survivors. Understand me? Tell the others to do whatever they must to see it done. I want Lucan and his warriors dead right now, goddamn it!"

As the assassin pivoted to carry out the command, a window at the front of the residence shattered. Rapid gunfire and a massive bulk of roaring fury crashed inside, taking the Gen One down to the floor in a blurred confusion of motion and savagery.

Dragos gaped at the unexpected invasion. He dived for a weapon as his Hunter took the brunt of a punishing assault by Sterling Chase. The warrior was crazed with violence, purely animal. Almost magnificent in his lethality.

Another warrior vaulted in behind Chase, then another, the mad exchange of incoming gunfire and deadly force taking on two more assassins by what seemed to be sheer bloody-mindedness alone. The battle was brutal, and Dragos knew a pang of uncertainty when he saw his highly trained killing machines taking a beating from Chase, Dante, and Rio of the Order.

Behind him, Dragos saw Tavia using the moment of inattention to push herself up from the floor. The bitch was in bad shape, but she wasn't about to go down without a fight. Her amber eyes skewered him from across the room. Her fangs were sharp white daggers, dripping with the red foam of Crimson that would eventually consume her sanity and her life.

But not soon enough.

She came out of her crouch and sprang off her toes toward him. Dragos went down beneath her, his pistol skittering out of his grasp as the seething female vampire perched on his chest like a she-dragon about to eviscerate him.