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He hissed a curse through his teeth as she grazed him. "Ah, God--yes. Do it harder," he growled. "I want to feel your little bite, Tess.">He took in her apartment with a quick glance, including the little dog who was sitting near Tess in guarded silence.
Dante frowned. "That can't be... ?"
Tess nodded, her tension eroding as Harvard went up to Dante, shyly wagging his tail in greeting. "I hope you don't mind that I brought him home with me. I wanted to keep a close watch on him, and I thought... "
Her excuse trailed off as Dante reached down to pet the animal, nothing but kindness in his touch and in his deep voice. "Hey, little guy," he said, chuckling as Harvard licked his hand, then dropped down on the floor for a belly rub. "Someone sure took good care of you today. Yeah, looks like somebody gave you a whole new leash on life."
He glanced up at Tess with a question in his eyes, but before he could ask her about the dog's sudden turnaround, she took his wet towel and nodded in the direction of her bathroom down the hall. "Come on, let me have a look at you now."
Idling at a red light on the other side of South Boston, Chase glanced over at his passenger in the SUV with barely concealed contempt. He personally had no use for the drug-dealing scum. Part of him enjoyed knowing that the human might have been heading for his own funeral if not for Dante and Chase showing up at his apartment tonight.
It didn't seem fair, a lowlife like Ben Sullivan getting a lucky break while innocent youths like Camden and the others who were missing ended up dead or worse, lost to Crimson-induced Bloodlust and gone Rogue by the shit this human peddled to them.
Chase weathered a sudden, sickening recollection of Dante putting a blade to Jonas Redmond's throat in the alley outside the club the other night. That good kid was dead, not because of the warrior but because of the human sitting just an arm's length away from him now. The urge to reach over and blow him away with a bullet to the head came up on Chase like a tsunami, rage he was unused to feeling in himself. He stared ahead out the tinted windshield, willing the temptation to pass. Killing Ben Sullivan wasn't going to solve anything, and it sure wouldn't bring Camden home any sooner.
And that, after all, was his primary objective.
"He's sleeping with her, isn't he--that other guy and Tess?" The human's voice rattled Chase out of his contemplation, but he didn't acknowledge the question. Ben Sullivan cursed, his head turned to stare out the passenger-side window. "When I saw them together outside her place last night, the son of a bitch had his hands all over her. What's that all about--is he just using her to get to me?"
Chase remained silent. He'd been wondering about that revelation since it had first come up at Sullivan 's apartment. Dante had said he'd used his own methods to find the Crimson dealer, and hearing that he' d been with a woman whom Sullivan had apparently been close to, Chase had initially assumed she'd been a means to an end for Dante.
But the warrior's face had taken on an odd cast at the mention of the female, something that seemed to go beyond simple duty to his mission. Did he care for her?
"Shit. I guess it doesn't really matter," Sullivan muttered. "Where are you taking me, anyway?"
Chase didn't feel compelled to answer. The Order's compound was just outside the city proper, a short drive northeast from where they were now. In a few hours, after he was interrogated by Dante and the others, Ben Sullivan would be sleeping in a dry, warm bed--a prisoner for all intents and purposes, but nevertheless protected behind the secured gates of the warriors' headquarters. Meanwhile, dozens of Darkhaven youths were out in the elements topside, exposed to the dangers of the street and the terrible effects of Sullivan's corrosive, deadly drug.
It wasn't right, not just at all.
Chase flicked his eyes up at the light as it turned green, but his foot hovered over the gas. Behind him, someone laid on their horn. He tuned it out, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel for a second as he thought about Camden and Elise, about his promise to bring the boy home.
He didn't have a lot of options here. And time was running out, he could feel it.
When a second horn blast sounded from the rear, Chase brought his foot down on the accelerator and hung a left at the light. In grim silence, he put the SUV on a southbound path, heading back into the city, toward the old industrial area near the river.
Chapter Twenty-one
"Good Lord," Tess gasped, feeling a little queasy as she knelt down in front of Dante to inspect his wound. He was sitting on the edge of the white porcelain bathtub, wearing only his shredded black fatigues. The cut on his thigh seemed better than it had on initial glance in her living room, but in the bright lights of the bathroom, the sight of so much blood--Dante's blood--made her stomach dip sharply and her head spin. She had to reach out for the lip of the tub to keep from swaying on her heels. "Sorry. I'm not usually affected like this. I mean, I see a lot of ugly injuries at the clinic, but--"
"You don't have to help with this, Tess. I'm used to taking care of myself."
She gave him a dubious look. "From the amount of blood on you, I'd say this wound is pretty deep. It 's going to require stitches, a lot of them. Somehow I don't think you're up to doing that yourself, are you? And you're going to need to get out of these pants. I can't do much so long as you're wearing them."
When he didn't move, she frowned. "You're not going to just sit here and bleed all over my tile, are you?"
His gaze on hers, he gave a slight shrug, then stood and unfastened the button at his waistband. When he started sliding the zipper down over his tattooed skin and the dark thatch of hair at his groin, Tess's cheeks warmed. God, after last night, she should have remembered that he wasn't a boxers or briefs kind of guy.
"Um, here's another towel," she said, pulling one off the bar for him to cover himself.
She turned her head as he finished undressing, although it was probably a little late for modesty considering what they'd done together the night before. Being with him again, especially when he was sitting there naked except for a piece of terry cloth, made the small bathroom seem as tight as a closet and as humid as a sauna.
"So, are you going to tell me what happened to you?" she asked without looking at him yet, busying herself with the small collection of medical supplies she'd assembled on the sink vanity. "What were you doing tonight to end up on the business end of an obviously very large knife?"
"Just par for the course. My partner and I were in the process of apprehending a drug dealer, and I ran across a couple of obstacles. I had to remove them."
Remove them, Tess thought, instinctively understanding what that actually meant. She set a roll of gauze bandage down on the basin, feeling an inward shudder at Dante's cold admission. She didn't like what she was hearing, but he'd sworn he was a good guy, and maybe it was crazy, but she trusted him at his word on that.
"All right," she said, "let me have a look at your leg."
