Had he been hoping for a reassignment? One that would put a whole continent between him and Jordana Gates?
Fuck, he didn’t know what to think about that.
Chase studied him now. “You seem … unfocused, my man. Like you’re walking a dangerous edge. What’s going on with you? When’s the last time you fed?”
“I was with a blood Host last night,” he replied, the unwanted reminder of the brunette from La Notte’s BDSM club making his voice darken to a growl.
Chase seemed to consider for a long moment, his shrewd gaze lingering for longer than Nathan liked. But his commander didn’t challenge the lie, even if he suspected it.
“I’ll leave you to your work,” he said, and headed for the door. “Good job last night. If nothing bubbles up to the surface on Cassian Gray today, let’s hit him even harder again tonight.”
Nathan gave him a vague nod. Only after Chase was gone back up the corridor did Nathan release the curse that had been burning like acid on his tongue.
Although Chase seemed satisfied with his answer, Nathan knew the elder vampire had seen through him. Self-directed anger heated Nathan’s blood at the dishonor he’d shown the other Breed male just now. He had never been compelled to lie to his comrades, least of all his commander. His training as a Hunter would have deemed a breach like that suicidal.
And while Nathan was many years away from the brutality and punishments of his handlers, their lessons had never left him.
He didn’t expect they ever would.
No one knew what he had endured as part of his shaping into the killer he became for Dragos. Not even his mother, Corinne, who rescued him from that life, or her mate, Hunter, a Breed male brought up in the same program as Nathan decades earlier.
Not even Nathan’s closest friends and teammates in the Order knew what he went through—no, especially none of them. They would never see him the same way again if they knew how he’d been degraded, shamed.
He’d kept that corrupted, dirty part of him a secret all his life. Stuffed it down deep, the only way he was able to move on, move past it.
And he intended to keep it there forever.
As for Jordana, he would turn his deadly skills on himself before he would ever let her know his truth. Ironic that he’d pressed her so hard to open herself to him when he had no intention of truly letting her in.
It was a small mercy that he hadn’t been able to seduce her completely last night. He might have done things he could never take back.
Far better that he slake his carnal appetites elsewhere. That had been his thinking when he went with the female at La Notte. But his effort to purge his hunger for Jordana with another woman had only made him want her more.
He hadn’t taken the sex worker’s vein, as he’d implied to Chase. He hadn’t taken anything from the woman, in fact, but he’d paid her just the same.
And after he and his team left the club soon afterward to search the city for leads on Cass, Nathan had made sure his path took him past Jordana’s building. Just to assure himself she was safe, he’d told himself, but it had taken all of his increasingly questionable restraint to keep his feet from carrying him inside and back up the elevator to her penthouse.
But the apartment had been dark from the street.
He’d moved on but spent the rest of the night’s patrol trying—and failing—to keep her out of his thoughts. Recalling her orgasm with him was only slightly less tormenting than picturing her home in her dark apartment with Elliott Bentley-Squire.
Nathan didn’t like the violence that perked to life inside him at the thought of another male being with Jordana. Especially one with less obsession for her than him.
Not that Nathan was worthy of her. His background made him unfit for anyone, but particularly a woman as pure and clean as Jordana.
He had already brought her too close to his world. And he knew he would have taken things much further last night if not for running into her undeserving, would-be mate.
He had to be done with Jordana Gates.
Already she was starting to mean more to him than he cared to admit, and that, if nothing else, was cause enough for him to keep his distance.
Even if that meant watching her bind herself in blood and vow to a male she would never love.
By five o’clock that afternoon, Jordana had already put in an eleven-hour day at the museum.
She’d gone in alone, hours before anyone else had shown up for work. After everything that had happened the night before, the solitude of her workplace had been welcome, even more needed than sleep.
Jordana had eventually left La Notte around two in the morning, accompanied back to her apartment by Carys and Rune. Elliott had been long gone by then. He’d politely turned off the lights and locked up for her, apparently departing her life as ambivalently as he’d entered it.