Edge of Dawn (31 page)

“I can’t let you live like this,” he murmured, breaking her heart even further. “I need to fix it, if I can. You need blood, Mira. The bond might be able to repair this.”

How long had she waited to hear him say his blood was hers to take? How many years had she pictured them together as a blood-bonded, mated pair? Now she felt his offer like a slap to her face. It stung. It hurt her so deeply, she rocked back, stricken and numbed by the blow.

“I don’t want you feeling sorry for me,” she managed to croak. “Don’t you dare give me your charity, Kellan.”

“Charity?” he murmured thickly. One of his hands came up to caress her cheek. “God, no. What I’m feeling isn’t pity. It’s regret. And fear. And love, Mira. So much love for you.” He blew out a raspy exhalation. “I never imagined things could go so wrong for us. There were so many times I wanted to ask you to accept me as your mate. I should have, but I was terrified of the pain I would feel if I ever lost you.”

“You were the one who left,” she reminded him. “I stayed. I would’ve stayed with you, even knowing how it might all end.”

“I know,” he replied, remorse thick in his deep voice. “And I owed you that choice. I see that now.” He scoffed quietly. “I see a lot of things more clearly now, when it’s too late to turn any of it back. But maybe not this,” he said, his thumb brushing gently across her eyelid as he continued to caress her face. “I might be able to fix this for you. And I’m asking you to give me that chance, Mira.”

Tender, beautiful words. She could feel his affection in the quiet hitch of his voice and in the careful way he stroked her skin. He cared. He loved her, she had no doubt now.

But he wasn’t giving himself as her mate. He was giving her a chance to heal through his blood bond. He wanted her whole again, but would he be offering this gift if she were looking into his eyes in this moment, seeing him as the man she loved, the male her heart was bound to, with or without his blood to seal it?

Her own blood must have betrayed her to him, because no sooner had she thought it, Kellan’s touch slid down along her chin, lifting her sightless gaze up to meet his eyes. “When I imagined sharing this part of me with you, Mira, it was a sacred thing. A thing done in passion, in pleasure, with a promise of eternity ahead of us. It was never like this,” he said, his voice rough, so gentle. “It was never supposed to be done with you suffering and afraid and me helpless, desperate, ultimately damned to lose you. And never less suited to be the one you bound yourself to than I am in this moment.”

“There’s no one else I want, Kellan. There never has been.” She reached out to him but struggled to find him, touching only air and darkness. Frustration boiled up in the back of her throat, erupting in a small, broken cry.

Then Kellan’s hand found hers, took it into his strong grasp. “There,” he said, pressing a kiss to the center of her palm. “I’ve got you, Mouse.”

“Yes, you do,” she replied, her love for him swelling inside her until she felt her heart might burst from it. “You won’t let go, will you, Kellan? That’s what you promised me. You won’t let go.”

His curse was a whispered oath. Then his mouth was on hers, claiming her in a possessive yet achingly sweet kiss. When he broke the contact a long moment later, she felt him moving his arm. She heard a soft, wet sound, smelled the spicy-dark scent of his blood.

“Open your mouth for me, baby,” he whispered, placing his wrist against her parted lips.

Mira took him into her, the first sip of his blood like a lick of fire on her tongue. She swallowed, then drew another sip into her mouth. And another.

She hadn’t been prepared.

How could she have ever been prepared to know the roar of heat and power that was Kellan’s bond?

Mira drank him down in fevered, greedy gulps. As their blood bond completed, she could only hold on to him and give herself over to the rush of light and strength and something even more intense—something that defied all description—pouring into her every muscle, bone, and cell.

He was hers.

Kellan belonged to her in every way now, and if fate wanted to take him from her, Mira intended to give that cruel bitch one hell of a fight.

21

EMPTY.

No sign of Mira or Bowman or anyone else at the old military fort at the far end of New Bedford. The bunker and its collection of underground batteries, which crouched on an outcrop of overgrown, untended parkland banked on three sides by the Atlantic, appeared to have been vacated very recently. They’d missed the rebel bastards.

It was not the kind of report Nathan wanted to have to give Lucan. Hell, it was bad enough reporting it to Nikolai a few moments ago. He hadn’t taken it well, erupting in murderous, black fury. Mira’s father, in Boston with a small squad of his Order brethren, had been determined that Mira would be going home safe with them before dawn. Now that prospect was looking less and less feasible.

Nathan’s team, along with Mira’s three teammates, had just completed a full sweep of the purported rebel base and turned up nothing. Just abandoned furniture, tables and chairs, cots and beds, all still in place as it ostensibly had been when the base’s occupants used it last. But Mira
had
been there; Nathan could almost feel her presence in his bones.

“Damn it!” The curse exploded out of him, a reaction too strong to contain. He didn’t miss the turn of heads in his direction. The grave looks of his team and Mira’s met him through the darkness as the warriors regrouped on the thick, weed-choked grass outside the bunker. Niko and his squad were heading there now too, to see the place for themselves and to strategize the rest of the night’s patrol with Nathan and the other men.

“Cleared out fast, evidently,” Balthazar remarked, the big vampire’s typical humor absent tonight. “Like rats from a sinking ship.”

Rafe nodded, grim. “Maybe someone warned them we were coming.”

“If they did get a warning we were on to them,” Eli put in, “that would mean they hauled ass outta here less than five minutes after our lead came in.”

“Didn’t take off in a panic,” Torin said. He tipped his head back, long braids at his temples swinging against his sharp cheekbones as he read the energy in the air. “They had time to gather everything they needed. When they left—by the fade of it, my guess would be sometime late morning—they left on their own terms.”

Jax twirled one of his hira-shuriken between nimble fingers, the metal winking with lethal precision under the moonlight. “Doesn’t matter why or when they left. Only matters where.”

“And that puts us right back at square one,” said Webb, the warrior Lucan had put in charge of Mira’s squad after the incident with Rooster not even a week ago. From the sober look on the Breed male’s face, it was a mantle he accepted out of duty alone, not personal ambition. “Can’t believe she hasn’t kicked those rebels’ asses single-handed by now and come strolling back to us like it was no big thing. Shit, the way Mira goes into combat?” Webb shook his head, contemplating. “Fucking Valkyrie, man. Doesn’t matter she’s not Breed; it would take an army of humans to knock her down and keep her there. And I, for one, refuse to believe she’s not still breathing out there somewhere.”

For what hadn’t been the first time, Nathan’s thoughts were going down a similar path. What had they done to Mira to keep her captive for so many days? Had she tried to fight back? And what of Bowman? How had he been able to bring her last night into La Notte, a public place, and she not find some way to break free of him?

A troubling scenario was beginning to take root in Nathan’s mind.

He didn’t like the taste of it. Didn’t want to think that Mira might have gotten somehow unwillingly entangled with the rebels and their criminal acts. Or worse . . . could she possibly have allowed herself to be charmed by Bowman?

The last was almost laughable, it was so incomprehensible. There had only ever been one man for Mira, and he was eight years dead and gone. A handful of days in the company of human rebels—a class of individuals she openly despised—would not suddenly turn her away from the Order and her kin.

And yet . . .

It was that last disturbing possibility—the least logical of them all—that proved the hardest for Nathan to ignore.

There was something he wasn’t seeing. Something he hadn’t yet connected. Something he’d maybe glossed over and dismissed as unimportant amid the urgency of the bunker’s search.

“Problem, Captain?”

He waved off the question without acknowledging who had asked it. His boots were already chewing up earth beneath him, his strides long and purposeful as he stalked back into the damp gloom of the rebel hideout.

He checked each room and corridor again, less rushed this time, sending his gaze over every rustic table, chair, and cot, into every corner and cranny of the place. And he found nothing.

Not until he stepped into the last room, the one situated at the far end of the concrete passageway.

Something crunched under his boot heel. A small piece of broken glass.

He paused, lifted his foot to pick up the sleek, silvery shard. Holding the tiny bit of shattered mirror between his thumb and forefinger, Nathan lifted his gaze and scanned every inch of the lightless room, his Breed eyes keen in the dark.

He cocked his head, narrowing in on an object lying in the center of the tumbled bedsheets. Even now he was tempted to dismiss it. Just a broken mirror, tossed in haste onto the unmade bed as the rebels raced to vacate the premises.

Except they hadn’t left in haste.

Nathan had suspected as much earlier, when it was obvious they’d had time to take weapons and equipment, clothing and foodstuffs. Then Torin had confirmed it, reading the energy of the place left in the wake of the evacuation.

Bowman and his rebels had left with Mira on their own terms, not in a panic. They’d had time to sweep up all but one minuscule splinter of the glass that must have littered the floor, yet they hadn’t bothered to remove the broken mirror along with it.

And now Nathan’s Hunter instincts prickled with cold realization.

The mirror had been left behind, not tossed onto the bed and forgotten.

Placed there deliberately.

He walked over, picked it up. Stared at the intricately crafted design inlaid onto the polished silver back of the piece. The insignia was familiar at once, even though he hadn’t seen it in a long time—not since the near annihilation of the family to whom the bow-and-arrow emblem belonged.

“Archer,” Nathan murmured under his breath. Then a curse that was equal parts incredulity and outrage. “Bowman.”

How could it be possible?

There was only one person he knew who might have this memento. One person who might possess the ability to be running under the radar of the Order, right under their damn noses.

But that person was dead.

Nathan had personally witnessed the explosion that killed the warrior who’d been like a brother to him. He’d seen the flames shoot into the night sky moments after Kellan Archer had gone inside—mere seconds before Nathan and Mira would have followed him into the warehouse to perish along with him.

But what Nathan hadn’t seen, he realized now—what no one had ever sought to find in the ash and rubble left behind—was Kellan’s presumed remains.

Son of a bitch.

Nathan’s grip tightened around the delicate mirror bearing the Archer family emblem. He didn’t like this sense of confusion that gnawed at him now, as he tried to logically sort the pieces of a disturbing puzzle he was just seeing for the first time. Could Kellan Archer be alive? All this time, deceiving everyone he knew, living in Boston like some kind of ghost? If so, how had he ended up in this place, with a new name and a band of human rebels under his command?

Betrayal wasn’t something Nathan’s lethal logic had trained him to combat. He’d never cared enough about something to experience any sense of unfairness when it was gone, but now the unfamiliar emotion roiled in his gut, bitter as acid.

And what about Mira?

As badly as he wanted to deny Kellan’s deception, the prospect of Mira being pulled into the equation made the acid churning inside him turn cold. It made the assassin in him go still and calculating, preparing to sever all emotional ties in the execution of his mission.

Nathan considered the shattered mirror clutched tight in his fist. Either Kellan or Mira had left it, knowing—perhaps hoping—it would be discovered by someone who would recognize it. Someone from the Order. Maybe even Nathan himself.

If it had been Mira, perhaps it was a cry for help, some kind of clue to aid in her rescue. Except Nathan knew the Breedmate warrior too well to believe that. Her love for Kellan Archer had endured eight years of absence. If she were reunited with him now, after all that time mourning him, there would be no tearing her away from his side.

As for Kellan, Nathan knew him well too—or thought he did. Still, Nathan was certain the memento was intended to be found, not as a reckless taunt meant to incite the Order’s full wrath.

No, Nathan understood now, it had been left behind as an invitation.