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"Never."
"You may be tough, Mira, but you're not Breed," he reminded her. "You can't outrun me."
"And you made sure I couldn't fight you either. Don't think I haven't noticed your thieving colleagues kept my daggers."
"You'll get the blades back after this is over. I'll see to that."
"Even the one I dropped during the ambush by your rebel underlings?"
Kellan scowled, caught off guard.
"Oh, didn't you know?" she asked, visibly pleased by his surprise. "They must not have noticed, and left it behind. My comm unit too. It's in the glove compartment of the car I was driving."
"Fuck," Kellan growled through gritted teeth.
"Homo sapiens." Mira sighed with no little drama. "So careless sometimes. I'm sure Lucan's going to be curious why my comm signal hasn't moved in the past, what . . . twelve hours?" She gave him a cold, satisfied smile. "It makes you wonder, doesn't it? What else might your crew have overlooked that will come back to bite you in the ass later?"
Kellan considered the possibility, reluctant to admit she had a point. But she underestimated Candice, Doc, and Chaz. Even Vince had plenty of pros to make up for the frequent cons of his hair-trigger temper and tendency toward excessive force. The team had phoned in the problem of Mira's disabled vehicle, and so Nina had tapped a contact in that area to toss the plates and hack the VIN before towing the heap to a scrap yard. Mira's comm unit was very likely nothing but crushed circuitry and dust by now.>Even though his body yearned for action, his mind thirsted for knowledge. And the history contained in this room alone was enough to keep him busy for decades.
Not surprising, since it had taken a full twenty years to collect it. The library represented millennia's worth of information, everything from the otherworldly origins of the Breed and their alien forebears, their language and customs, their lineage here on Earth, to their often-violent past as powerful, savage beings perched at the top of the food chain. The wealth of insight was nothing short of staggering.
And Jenna Tucker-Darrow, the woman responsible for the archive, was adding more volumes all the time.
"If you spend any more hours in here, I may start worrying about my job security."
Dare swung his head up at the sound of Jenna's voice. She was smiling as she entered the room, wearing a little black dress and strappy high heels. Her brown hair was shorn close to her scalp, showing off her lean cheekbones and big hazel eyes. She was dressed for a date, no doubt with her warrior mate, Brock, but she carried what looked to be a newly completed journal in her hand.
"I don't think you ever have to worry about job security," Dare told her. "No one can do what you do."
She winked at him. "I am cyborg, hear me roar."
Strolling over to a bookcase far across the room, she slipped the journal onto one of the shelves, carefully selecting its placement. It was hard not to stare at the female, and not only because she was beautiful and Dare was a man with two eyes in his head. Jenna was stunning for an altogether unique reason as well.
Her simple black dress plunged low in the back, baring her pale, slender neck and spine, both of which were covered in a graceful tangle of dermaglyphs. Unusual, particularly given that Jenna was neither Breed nor Breedmate.
She'd been fully human once, but all of that changed twenty years ago, when the last of the alien fathers of the Breed transplanted a biotech chip from his own body into Jenna's. The Ancient likely had his reasons for leaving behind a piece of himself before he was killed by the Order. For Jenna, that bit of alien DNA and technology had meant numerous astonishing physical and psychic changes, coupled with memories of a long, often-disturbing past that did not belong to her.
It was those memories that now filled the countless volumes of hand-scribed journals lining the built-in bookcases of the archive chamber.
"I hadn't heard you and Brock had arrived from Atlanta," Dare said.
Jenna ran her fingers across the spines of several journals on the shelf, pausing to rearrange one that apparently had been misfiled. "We got in before dawn this morning. I wanted to come early, do some work in here before the summit later this week. Dante and Tess are coming in tonight. Tegan and Elise too. Everyone else should be arriving over the next couple of nights, from what I understand."
Dare nodded. Lucan had informed him of the gathering of all the Order elders and their mates from their various districts of command around the world. It would be good to see them all again. The warriors and their mates were as close as kin to him, but Dare couldn't help resenting the fact that the summons to publicly assemble was anything more than a command performance instigated by the GNC members. A means for them to show the world that the Order endorsed the peace summit wholeheartedly and would abide by the GNC's terms without question. The politics of it all disgusted him.
Jenna regarded him over her shoulder. "Will you be at the gala reception too, Darion?"
He grunted. "Me, in a monkey suit? Not likely. I can think of a hundred things I'd rather do than stand around kissing the rings of those posturing GNC blowhards. That goes double for kissing their useless asses."
Jenna's brows arched upward. "You're a lot like your father, you know that?"
"I'm nothing like him," Dare insisted. "He's too willing to let the humans have the reins. He's too careful with their fragile egos, when the world would be a better place - a safer place for mankind and our own - with the Order firmly in charge."
"And if you ask the humans, they would argue the opposite. Sooner or later, it would be war." Jenna strode over to him and took a seat on the edge of the table. "Things were different before First Dawn, simpler. The Breed kept their own counsel, lived in the shadows. Now that we're out to the humans, we have more freedoms. We have more power now that we don't have to hide our existence, but there are trade-offs. And the line we must walk to maintain peace is even thinner. Lucan's actions impact the entire Breed nation now. He doesn't take that responsibility lightly."
"He doesn't trust anyone to help him shoulder that burden either." Dare glanced away from Jenna's sage expression and gave a curt shake of his head. "He doesn't give anyone the credit that they could be useful, maybe even as capable as him, if he gave them half a chance to prove it."
When he looked back up at her, Jenna held him with a knowing smile. "Still fighting that same battle with him, are you? He'll come around one day, Darion."
