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Nikolai considered him in silence for a very long time. Then he nodded like he could see that Rio wasn't going to budge on this. Rio could tell that his old friend realized that Dylan was not merely a civilian, or a mission Rio had failed to execute. By the glint of the warrior's wintry blue eyes, Rio could see that Niko understood just how much Dylan had come to mean to him. He understood, and based on the crooked smile that tugged at the corner of his mouth, he approved.
"Shit, amigo. Yeah. I'll tell him what you said."
As Niko and Kade strode off to the compound's elevator together, Rio and Dylan got out of the Rover and headed in a couple of minutes behind them. Hands linked, they took the elevator down the three-hundred-foot descent to the Order's headquarters.
It felt strange to walk the labyrinth of secured corridors and not feel like he had for the long months following the explosion - like a lost beast left to roam its lair without place or purpose.
Now, he had both, the heart of which could be summed up in one word: Dylan.
"Will you be comfortable talking about what you saw in that hospital room tonight?" he asked her as they traveled the corridors. "Because if you'd rather not, I can do it for - "
"No, it's fine. I want to help, if you think I can."
He stopped her in the long stretch of white marble hallway, not far from the glass walls of the tech lab where his brethren would be waiting.
"Dylan, what you did for me tonight - giving me your blood, staying with me when you had every right to leave me there and never look back...Everything that happened between us tonight, I want you to know that it meant something to me. I am..."
He wanted to say that he was falling in love with her, but he hadn't said those words in so long - hadn't believed he would ever mean them again, let alone mean them as deeply and honestly as he did now. He stumbled over the admission, and the awkward pause made the chasm seem even wider.
"I am...grateful to you," he said, settling on the other emotion that was filling his heart when he looked at her. "I don't know that I can ever repay you for all that you gave me tonight."
Some of the light seemed to dim from her eyes as she listened to him. "Do you think I would ask you to repay me?" She shook her head slowly. "De nada. You don't owe me anything, Rio."
He started to say something more - some other feeble attempt to explain what she had come to mean to him. But Dylan was already walking ahead of him.
"Shit," he hissed, raking his hand through his hair.
He caught up to her a few paces up the corridor, just in time to hear Lucan's voice boom through the glass of the tech lab.
"What the fuck do you mean, he's bringing her in with him? My man had better have a goddamn good reason for bringing that reporter back into this compound."
Any irritation Dylan had felt toward Rio for his polite gratitude was dwarfed by the dread that ran cold in her veins when she heard the Order's leader bellow in outrage. She didn't want to think she needed Rio's protection, but the presence of his broad palm coming to rest at the small of her back as they entered the meeting room full of eight grim-faced, combat-garbed vampire warriors was the only thing that kept her knees from quaking beneath her.
Dylan's eyes made a quick scan of the menace she faced: Lucan, the dark-haired one in charge, was obvious. He'd been with Rio earlier today, laying down the curt instructions that she be taken back home to New York and mind-scrubbed like her mom, her boss, and her friends.
Beside Lucan at an impressive command center of more than half a dozen computer workstations and twice as many monitors was a Breed male with spiky blond hair that looked like it had been raked into a state of total anarchy on the top of his head. He glanced at Dylan from over the tops of thin rectangular sunglasses with pale sky blue lenses. Of all of the warriors gathered there, this one seemed the least threatening, even though he was easily more than six feet tall and had a body as lean and fit and muscular as the others.
"This is Dylan Alexander," Rio announced to the group. "I'm sure by now you've heard all about what happened in Jicin, with the cave, and the pictures Dylan took of what was inside."
Lucan crossed his arms over his chest. "What I'd like to know is why you apparently ignored mission directives and brought her back with you tonight. She may be a Breedmate, but she's a civilian, Rio. A civilian with media contacts, for fuck's sake."
"Not anymore," Dylan interjected, speaking for herself before Rio was forced to defend her. "My media contacts, such as they were, are gone. And even if they weren't, you have my word that I would never willfully pulge any of what I know to the outside world. I wish I'd never taken those pictures or written that story. I am truly sorry for anything I've done to put the Breed at risk of exposure."
If they believed her, none of them gave any clear indication of that. The rest of the Order stared at her from where they were seated at a large conference table, like a jury measuring the convicted. Niko and Kade were there, sitting next to a black warrior with a skull-trim and shoulders that would dwarf the biggest NFL linebacker. But if that guy looked menacing, the one across the table from him was even more intimidating. With shoulder-length tawny hair and shrewd, jewel-green eyes, the warrior looked like he'd seen - and likely done - it all...and then some.
He watched Dylan with a narrowed, studying gaze, as did the remaining two males in the room - a cocky-looking warrior polishing a rather nasty pair of curved blades, and a military-type with a tight buzz cut, chiseled chin and cheekbones, and grim, steel blue eyes.
Rio's arm came around her shoulders. It was a light embrace that made her feel safe, as if she wasn't standing alone before this dangerous cadre of combat-trained warriors. Rio supported her, perhaps her sole ally in the room.
He trusted her. Dylan could feel that trust in the warmth of his body, and in the tender way he looked at her as he addressed his brethren.
"You all are aware of Dylan's discovery of the hidden cave on that mountain, but you haven't heard exactly how it was that she was able to find it." Rio cleared his throat. "Eva showed her the way."
A rumble of disbelief - even blatant hostility - rolled through the room. But it was Lucan's voice that rose above them all.
"Now you're telling us she's somehow connected to that traitorous bitch? Just how the hell is that possible when Eva's been dead for the past year?"
"Dylan saw Eva's ghost that day on the mountain," Rio said. "That is Dylan's special ability, to see and hear the dead. Eva appeared to her and guided her to me up in that cave."
