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Holy hell.
Kellan drew his hand back as if burned. The realization sank in like bitter acid, corrosive and impossible to scrape off now that it had touched him.
Jeremy Ackmeyer had been telling him the truth. He had no idea his work had been used as a weapon for assassination against the Breed.
Kellan had ordered the kidnapping of an honest, innocent man.
"Anything more I should know about the situation?" Lucan Thorne's grim face filled the flat-screen monitor on the wall of the Boston Command Center.
He hadn't been pleased to hear Nathan's report from the field, but where the Gen One leader of the Order had every right to swear and bellow over the simple escort mission gone so terribly wrong, he clearly struggled to accept the fact that one of the Order's own had gone missing from an assignment. That it was Mira, a female raised by the Order from the time she was a child, made the gravity of the loss all the more difficult to deal with objectively, not only for Lucan, but for Nathan and the other pair of Order members gathered with him in the private conference room that morning.
Sterling Chase, the Breed warrior who'd helmed the Boston operation for the past two decades, sat soberly in the room beside his mate, Tavia, his big hand resting over her slender fingers on the table. Tavia accepted the tender gesture, despite that she was no delicate Darkhaven lady, sheltered from the realities of the world.
Born in the same laboratory, of the same alien DNA that had spawned Nathan and a small army of assassins bred and raised just like him, Tavia was an awe-inspiring rarity among the race: a genetically crafted, Gen One female, and a daywalker besides. Where Nathan would perish after minutes of exposure to UV light, his half sister Tavia and her offspring - a set of fraternal twins named Aric and Carys - could sunbathe all day in the tropics without breaking a sweat.
"If anything's happened to Mira," Tavia murmured, her leaf-green eyes sparking with flecks of amber, "if she's harmed in any way - "
"We'll find her," Nathan assured them all. "I won't rest until she and the human scientist are located."
On the monitor, Lucan nodded his dark head. "I know we can count on you. That's why I'm giving this whole thing to you as a solo assignment. It's crucial that we keep this problem out of the public eye. I want a lid clamped down tight on this, and I want the bastards dealt with cleanly and permanently. Your training makes you ideal for this kind of surgical precision job, Nathan."
He inclined his head in acknowledgment. "I will do whatever it takes."
"I know." Lucan's gray gaze bore into him through the video screen. "You have my permission to remove any and all obstacles in order to meet your mission objectives. If there's fallout afterward, I'll take sole responsibility for the op."
Nathan held the Gen One's grave stare. "It will not be necessary."
"Nikolai and Renata will need to be informed about this," Chase said, his thumb stroking idly over the back of Tavia's hand. "There'll be nothing to keep them from joining the search."
"Nothing, except the fact that Renata is pregnant and due very soon," Tavia pointed out. "But Chase is right. They need to know, Lucan. Mira's their daughter."
The Order's founder pressed his lips together in a flat line but acceded with a sober nod. "It's not the kind of news any parent should hear," he remarked woodenly, the lines of his face seeming more pronounced as he considered the advice. "Gabrielle and I will make the call to them together, as soon as we finish here." To Nathan he said, "This is a kill op. I don't want any of these rebel bastards left standing to rise again after the dust settles. Agreed?"
Nathan accepted with a downward tip of his chin. "Yes, sir."
A few minutes later, the call was ended and Nathan left the conference room to find his team waiting outside the door. Rafe, Eli, and Jax were joined by Aric Chase, who rose as soon as Nathan came out. "What happened in there? Has Lucan assigned a team to go after these sick fucks and bring Mira back?"
The twenty-year-old son of Sterling and Tavia, Aric had trained under his father's direction alongside his best friend, Rafe. But where Rafe had finished months earlier, Aric had not yet been inducted as a full-fledged member of the Order. In a few weeks, he would get his chance, leaving the East Coast for Seattle, to be assigned as a newly minted warrior on one of Dante's teams in that district.
Nathan did not respond to the recruit's rookie question, and the rest of his team knew better than to prod for answers about a private conference with Lucan Thorne. The other Breed males followed Nathan as he set off toward the corridor that would take him to the command center's training facility.
"Damn, I wish Lucan had tasked me with escorting Ackmeyer to that summit gathering," Aric said, falling in with the rest of them. "I would've made sure those Homo sapiens sons of bitches OD'd on lead and steel. Let them take on a Breed in the daytime and watch the rebel cowards piss themselves a river of please-god-save-us."
Even Nathan had to admit the idea held some amusement. He felt grim humor tug at his mouth as the banter between his fellow warriors continued, each of them ratcheting up the fear factor on the pain and terror they'd like to deliver on the bastards who'd taken Mira.
As they cuffed one another and slung good-natured insults, Nathan held himself apart from the pack with a remoteness that came as naturally to him as breathing. He had let a friend - a brother-in-arms - into his life once, and the loss when Kellan died had been as visceral as a limb torn from his body. These other warriors were his team, his comrades, but he'd learned better than to let himself care for them beyond their role as soldiers under his command.
And now Mira was gone too.
If she didn't come home whole and unharmed, he wasn't sure how he would handle it.
No, he mentally corrected.
He'd been trained the first thirteen years of his life to shut out all emotion, to steel himself to caring for anything but his master's commands. If things went badly for Mira, he would draw on the harsh lessons of his upbringing to get him through.
But first he would kill her captors. Every last one of them.
His mind was already preparing for the covert mission he would begin as soon as the sun set. So much so that it took him a moment to realize there had been a shift in the air temperature up ahead in the corridor. The source of that change appeared a moment later, in the form of Carys Chase, ducking out of a room off the long hallway. The crisp scent of morning rushed in behind her, clinging to her caramel-brown hair and the form-fitting black blouse and leg-hugging skinny jeans that disappeared into the tops of spiked ankle boots.
