Darion scoffed. “Call it whatever you want. Just know that you’re never going to have another crystal. You’ll never be trusted with that kind of power.”
“I suppose you think the Order can stand in my way?” she countered, zeroing all of her outrage on Dare again. “The Breed is hardly more than mortal, as far as I’m concerned. You are practically human, and just as offensive to me.”
Dare smirked, too bold for his own good. “Are you forgetting, Selene? There’s Atlantean in our blood too.”
“Only the foulest blood from our most faithless,” she shot back. “I could erase you all from the face of the Earth. Don’t think I’m not tempted to do it right now.”
“But you can’t,” Dare said, speaking despite Lucan’s low growl of warning that he tread carefully with this volatile new opponent. “The biggest fool is the one who thinks that he—or she—has no weaknesses.”
Selene’s glower should have withered Darion, but he didn’t as much as flinch. Lucan agreed with everything his son said, but there was no mistaking that the young warrior was making a very dangerous and personal enemy here today.
The Atlantean queen’s eyes flashed as she glared at Darion. “You wish to test me? Do it at your own peril. I warn you, you do not want to stand against me.”
Lucan moved closer to the monitor. “There’s not a man or woman among the Order who will bow to you either. I promise you that.”
She smiled as if he had just invited her out for tea. “I don’t intend to make the Order bow, Lucan. I mean to make you break. And that is my promise to you.” Her gaze slid to Darion. “To all of you.”
The monitors abruptly went black.
Selene was gone.
As if no interruption had occurred, all of Gideon’s machines came back online, programs churning data as they had been before, screens filled with scrolling code and images.
Gideon ran a hand over his scalp. “Holy. Fucking. Hell.”
Lucan cursed roundly, his pulse hammering in his temples and behind his sternum.
“How the fuck did she do that?” Darion demanded. “What the hell happened that she would choose to confront us now?”
“It’s my fault.” Zael’s deep voice was contrite, coming from where he now stood in the open entryway of the tech lab. “I opened the door. I led her to you tonight.”
CHAPTER 25
Zael could not have been more stunned than when he approached the command center’s tech lab just in time to see Selene deliver her threat to the Order before vanishing off the monitors.
Although it had been hard to leave Brynne sleeping naked and peaceful in her guest room upstairs, he had been interested to meet with the warriors and discuss the outcome of the night’s patrols.
Now, as he stepped inside the tech lab, the three warriors in the room all stared at him expectantly.
“What do you mean this is your fault, Zael?” Lucan’s brow was deeply furrowed, his tone guarded. “How did you open the door to Selene? What the fuck is going on here?”
“Tonight, in Georgetown,” he explained, sober with remorse. “After I left here to look for Brynne, I found her in an alleyway. She’d been in an…altercation with a Rogue.” He kept his disclosure purposely vague, still mindful of Brynne’s trust and confidence in him. “I used my powers—the light in my palms—to calm her, to help her. An Atlantean’s light is a powerful thing. None of us can discharge it without the rest of our kind feeling the ripple of energy. I’m sorry. I understood the risk, and I made the choice anyway.”
Gideon studied him. “Are you saying Selene triangulated your location based on that?”
Zael nodded. “She knows I’m here.”
“No shit, she knows you’re here,” Darion interjected. “She just demanded we turn you over to her to stand trial as a traitor.”
Fuck. He’d had a bounty on his head for too long to register any kind of surprise at that news, but he never meant to pull the Order into his problems.
Zael swore under his breath. “Now that she knows I’m in D.C., don’t think she’ll hesitate to send her guards to try to collect me. They could be on their way even as we speak.”