Something about the way he said that, the quieting of his tone, and the almost raw edge to his words made her drift back toward him. She rubbed a chill from her arms as the recollection of her accident washed over her with fresh terror.
“Well, you did save me. You pulled me out of that frozen pond and you saved my life.” He didn’t look her way at all, hardly acknowledged she had returned. “My family was in Boston, visiting at your Darkhaven. A bunch of us kids were playing outside that night, mostly boys—your grandsons and young nephews and my older brother, Derek. Unlike me, they were all Breed, and as the only girl with them besides, it took all I had to keep up.”
Sometimes she felt as though she were still competing, still struggling to prove her worth in everything she did. She realized she held others up to her same impossible standards too. Her parents had pointed it out to her on numerous occasions. So had more than a few of her exes.
Now here she was, making a point to remind this arrogant man of the stupidest thing she’d ever done in her life.
Melena let out a soft sigh as she stood next to Lazaro once more. “The boys didn’t want me there with them at the pond, but I followed them anyway. They started daring each other to walk farther and farther out onto the ice.”
“Idiots, all of them,” Lazaro grumbled. “Winter came late that year. The pond hadn’t yet frozen toward the center.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “And it was very dark that night. I didn’t realize the ice wouldn’t hold me until I was already too far out. I stepped onto a thin section, and it broke away underneath me.”
The curse Lazaro uttered was ripe, violent. But the look he finally swung on her was oddly tender, haunted. To her complete shock, he reached out and grazed the pad of his thumb over her scarred eyebrow. “You’d hit your head on something.”
“The edge of the ice was jagged,” she murmured, her throat going a bit dry for the mere second his touch had lingered on her face. When his hand was gone, she shivered, though not from anything close to a chill. “I went down very quickly. God, the water was so cold. I could hardly move my limbs. I panicked. I couldn’t see anything. When I tried to swim back up, I realized I was trapped under the ice.”
Lazaro was listening intently now, his expression impossible to read. His aura forbid her too, the dull gray haze blurring the edges of his broad shoulders and strong arms, haloing his dangerously handsome face like a brooding cloud against the darkness of the night that surrounded him.
“I remember everything started to go black,” Melena said. “And then...there you were. In the water with me, pulling me to the surface. You dived into that frigid pond and searched until you found me. Then you brought me back to your Darkhaven.”
“You were bleeding,” he said, his gaze returning to the scar above her left eye.
Melena nodded. “Your Breedmate, Ellie, helped my mother patch me up.”
Both women were gone now. Melena’s adoptive mother, Byron Walsh’s mate, Frances, had been killed in a senseless car accident a few years ago. Lazaro’s kind-hearted, beautiful Breedmate, Eleanor, had suffered a far more brutal end. Killed just a couple of years after Melena had met her, along with the rest of Lazaro’s family who’d been home at his Boston Darkhaven the night of an horrific attack.
His gaze hardened, going distant at the mention of his lost mate. It took nearly all of Melena’s self-control to keep from reaching out to offer comfort to him now.
If she didn’t think he’d snap her fingers off at the roots, she might have braved it in spite of his forbidding glower.
And yet, there was something more in his eyes as he looked at her. As much as she was drawn to him tonight, she couldn’t help feeling that he was aware of her too. Not as the hapless girl he’d fished out of a frozen pond, not even as the grown-up daughter of a colleague and friend.
He was annoyed with her tonight, no question. Given a choice, he’d probably still prefer her gone. But Lazaro Archer was also looking at her the way a man looked at a woman. And she couldn’t deny that his interest made her pulse trip into a faster tempo.
“What are you doing here, Melena?” His gruff question caught her off guard.
Did she even know the answer to that? She shrugged lamely. “I guess I just...I don’t think I ever got the chance to thank you—”
“No.” He cocked his head slightly, those unsettling eyes narrowing shrewdly now. “I mean, what are you doing here at this meeting? As skilled of an interpreter as you are, I think we both know there’s something you’re not saying.”
She stared at him, wondering how he’d gone from looking at her like he wanted to touch her—maybe even kiss her—to pinning her in a suspicious glare. Maybe he hadn’t been ignoring her all evening, but silently assessing her, even now.
Part of her wanted to tell him the truth. That she’d been a psychic insurance policy, to make certain her father wasn’t walking into a trap with Turati or his men, regardless of the Order’s assurances. Lazaro would be furious to hear it, no doubt. That she and her father had defied diplomatic protocol to insert her into a top secret meeting without the knowledge or permission of the Order or the GNC? She didn’t even want to consider the ramifications of that, for her or her father.
And anyway, it wasn’t her place to publicly voice her father’s fears or suspicions, not even to Lazaro Archer. If any of Byron Walsh’s colleagues knew how paralyzing his paranoia had become lately, he would surely lose his position on the Council. Her father lived for his work, and Melena would not be the one to jeopardize that for him.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she murmured, hating that she had to deceive Lazaro. “And I really ought to get back inside now.”
“You’re protecting him. From what?” Lazaro took hold of her by the arms, preventing her from escaping his knowing stare or his questions. His large hands gripped her firmly, strong fingers searing her with the heat of his touch. “What is your father trying to hide?”
“Nothing, I swear—”
He wasn’t buying it. Anger flashed in his eyes. Behind his full upper lip, she glimpsed the sharp points of his emerging fangs. “Tell me what he’s afraid of, Melena. Tell me now, before I go in there and haul his ass out here to tell me himself.”
“It’s nothing,” she insisted, finding it impossible to break Lazaro’s hold or his stare. “It doesn’t matter anyway. He had no reason to be afraid tonight. Turati’s intentions are good, he means no harm to—”
She wasn’t able to finish what she was saying because in that same instant, Lazaro tensed. His head snapped up, eyes searching the dark sky. Some of the blood seemed to drain out of his grim face in that fraction of a second.
“Fuck,” he snarled, his grip tightening on Melena’s arms. “Goddamnit, no.”
He lunged into motion, yanking her against him protectively. His arms wrapped around her. He then tumbled her over the railing of the second-level deck along with him...
Just as a screaming object arrowed down from the sky.
It hit the yacht, a direct, dead center strike.
The vessel exploded. On the deafening boom of impact, Melena crashed into the hard waves with Lazaro. Engulfed by the cold, horrified by what she was seeing, all the air left her lungs on an anguished cry. She tried to break away, but Lazaro held her close, refusing to let her swim back up to find her father.
Together she and Lazaro sank deep into the water, falling down, and down, and down...
Far above them, a hellish ball of flame had erupted on the surface. Fiery chunks of debris dropped into the sea everywhere she looked.
There was only ruin left up there.
The yacht and all of its occupants obliterated in an instant.
CHAPTER 3
By Lazaro’s guess, they had been in the water roughly two hours before Anzio’s cliff-edged shore was finally within sight. Bleeding from shrapnel wounds and battered by the long journey, he was close to exhaustion—even with the preternatural strength and speed of Breed genet
ics at his command.
Melena was faring far worse. She was limp against him, having fallen unconscious somewhere around the halfway point of their swim. Although she wasn’t entirely mortal either, her human metabolism could not cope with the prolonged exposure in the cold seawater.
In that regard, Lazaro was doubly fortunate. Being Breed had given him another advantage. The same one that had allowed him to pull Melena out of the frozen pond twenty-two years ago. His ability to withstand extreme temperatures had given him the strength to search for her under the ice and pull her to safety before she drowned.
He hoped he hadn’t lost her tonight.
Lazaro held her close at his side as he paddled the last few hundred yards with his free arm. As soon as his bare feet were able to touch ground, he repositioned Melena in both arms and ran her toward the empty, moonlit beach.
The bulky cliffs that lined the shore loomed just ahead. Several large caves were burrowed into the rock—black, yawning mouths that had once been part of an ancient Roman emperor’s crumbled stone villa that was a thousand years in ruin. Lazaro carried Melena inside one of the caves, past a littering of rough rocks and pools of tidal water, to a spot where the sand was soft and dry underfoot.
As he set her down, he couldn’t help revisiting the night he’d carried a lifeless little girl into his Darkhaven in Boston. He’d remembered every minute of it, despite the indifference he’d feigned with Melena earlier on the yacht. She had been a seven-year-old child that first, and last, time he saw her before tonight. Back then, she had been as helpless and fragile as a baby bird to his mind. He’d rescued her the same way he would have done for any innocent child.
But now...
Now, Melena Walsh was a grown woman. She was as enticing a woman as he’d ever seen—even more so, with her lovely face and thick red hair, and all of her soft, feminine curves that drew his eye even as he carefully arranged her unresponsive, alarmingly chilled body on the sand.
And as fiercely as he’d wanted to save her life in Boston, he wanted to save her now.
Not the least of his reasons being his need to know what secret she was keeping from him. She’d been on the verge of telling him in the seconds before the yacht was blown to pieces. If that secret had anything to do with the attack tonight, he was going to see that Melena answered for it.
Lazaro felt in his bones that Opus Nostrum was behind the brazen act. Whoever did it knew just who and where to strike. But how did they know? Both parties were meticulously screened by the Order. Lazaro had personally vetted everyone in attendance, right down to the last man on the vessel’s crew tonight. He’d approved them all.
Except Melena Walsh.
He gazed at her in the cave’s darkness, his Breed eyes seeing her as clearly as if it were midday. She was beautiful, stunningly so. She was poised, intelligent, erudite. And he’d seen her wield her charm without effort over Turati and the rest of the men at the meeting.
Lazaro couldn’t deny he’d been equally affected. More than affected, despite his unwillingness to give it reins. A woman like Melena would make a deadly asset, if allied with the wrong people.
He didn’t want to think she might be his enemy, intentional or otherwise.
The fact that she’d nearly gotten killed tonight along with everyone else made it impossible to imagine her presence on the yacht could have had anything to do with the catastrophe that followed.
She would give him the truth, but first he had to make sure she stayed alive to do so.
Lazaro scowled at her sodden, bruised condition. Her skirt was shredded, her shoes lost like his somewhere between the yacht and the shore. Her blouse was in tatters, the burgundy colored silk dark with seawater...and blood. Fortunately, most of it was his.
Her hair drooped lifelessly into her face. Lazaro smoothed away some of the drenched red tangles, letting out a low curse when he saw how white her skin was. Her lips were slack, turned an alarming shade of blue. She had contusions on her forehead and chin. Blood from a scalp wound trailed in a bright red rivulet down her temple.
Fuck.
His vision honed in on that thin scarlet ribbon, everything Breed in him responding with keen, inhuman interest. The fact that she was a Breedmate made her blood an exponentially greater temptation to one of his kind.
Melena’s blood carried the subtle fragrance of caramel and something sweeter still...dark cherries, Lazaro decided, his lungs soaking in a deeper breath even though it was torment to his senses.
His fangs punched out of his gums, throbbing against the firmly closed line of his lips. His vision sharpened some more, his irises throwing off a rising amber glow that bathed her paleness in warmer light. His own skin prickled with the sudden surge of heat in his veins.
If Melena opened her eyes now, she’d see him fully transformed to the bloodthirsty, otherworldly being he truly was.
If she opened her pretty, bright green eyes, she would know that his desire for her didn’t stop at just her blood. He didn’t want to think what kind of base creature he was that he could feel lust and hunger for a bruised, bloodied woman who’d just lost her father and nearly her own life too.
The truth was, he’d felt these same urges back on the yacht too. He hadn’t wanted to admit it then either.
For all he knew, she could belong to another Breed male. Hell, she could already be blood-bonded to someone, a thought that should’ve relieved him rather than put a rankle in his brow. It would be pointless to let himself wonder, then or now. He wasn’t about to act on either of his unwanted needs. Least of all with a woman bearing the Breedmate mark.
Since Ellie’s death, he’d found other women to service him when required. Humans who understood the limits of his interest. More importantly, humans he could feed from without the shackle of a blood bond.
Instead here he was, shackled to the rescue and safekeeping of a woman he didn’t fully trust and had no right to desire.
On a rough curse, ignoring the pounding demands of his veins, he stripped off his ragged black combat shirt and hunkered down in the sand alongside Melena. She moaned softly as he wrapped his arms around her. Her raspy sigh as she instinctively settled into his heat was an added torment he sure as hell didn’t need.
Jaw clamped tight, pulse hammering with thinly bridled hunger, Lazaro gathered Melena to his naked chest to give her body the warmth it needed.
CHAPTER 4
She woke from an endless, cold nightmare, a scream lodged in her throat. She couldn’t force out any sound, and when she dragged in a sudden gasp of air, her lungs felt shredded in her breast.
No, not her lungs.
Her heart.
All at once, the details flew back at her. The explosion. The fire and debris. The cold, black water.
Her father...
No, he couldn’t be gone. Her kind and decent father—that strong Breed male—could not have been wiped from existence tonight.
Betrayed, murdered. Just as he’d feared.
Her father was dead.
Some rational part of her knew there was no other possibility, but accepting it hurt too much.
She tried to move and found herself trapped in a cocoon of warmth. Thick arms encircled her. Arms covered in Breed dermaglpyhs. The elaborate pattern of skin markings could only belong to one man.
“You’re all right, Melena.” Lazaro’s deep voice rumbled against her ear. “Lie still. You need rest.”
She felt him breathing, felt his large body’s heat all around her. And God, she needed that heat and reassurance. Every particle of her being wanted to burrow deeper and just close her eyes and sleep. Try to forget...
But her father was out there in the dark. Left behind in the frigid water, while she was safe and protected in the shelter of Lazaro’s arms.
She opened her eyes and took in her surroundings as best she could in the lightless space around them. She smelled the sea and wet rock. Felt soft sand beneath her.
“Where are we?” Her words came out
like a croak. She swallowed past the salt and soot, attempted to extricate herself from the comfort she couldn’t enjoy. She ached all over. Could barely summon strength to move her limbs.
“I brought you to Anzio. We’re in a cave at Nero’s villa ruins.”
She had no idea where that was, only that it had to be a good long distance away from the yacht. “How long have we been here?”
“A few hours.”
An irrational panic crushed down on her. “Why did you let me sleep for so long? We should be out there, searching for them!”
His answering curse vibrated against her spine. “Melena—”
“I have to get up. We have to go back for him, Lazaro. For all of them.”
On a burst of adrenaline, she managed to slip out of his loose embrace. She sat up, registering dimly that her clothing was damp and ruined, torn open in more places than it was held together.
And Lazaro was only half-dressed. Just his black pants, clinging to him in tatters as well. No shirt on his bare, glyph-covered chest and muscled arms. There were numerous bruises on his torso and shoulders. When he sat up too, she noted that a healing gash in his thigh had bled through the material of his pants.
“There’s no reason to go back, Melena. There’s no chance of survivors.”
She didn’t want to hear him confirm the terror churning inside her. “No. You’re wrong!” She made a clumsy falter to her feet. Lazaro stood with her, catching her by the arms before her sluggish legs could buckle beneath her. She didn’t have the strength to break out of his hold again. “You have to be wrong. I have to go back and find him. My father—”
Lazaro shook his head. His handsome face was grim with sympathy and something darker. “I’m sorry, Melena. The missile strike was a direct hit. There was nothing left.”
Some of her hysteria leaked out of her under his grave stare. She couldn’t hold back the grief, the tears. It all flooded out of her on an ugly, shuddering sob. And then her knees did give out, and she sank back down to the sandy floor of the cave.