At her frown, Tess held out her right hand, which bore a small red mark between her thumb and forefinger. It was a tiny crescent moon with what looked to be a teardrop, falling into its center. “All of you have this same tattoo?”

“It’s not a tattoo,” Alex said. “It’s a birthmark, Jenna. All Breedmates are born with one somewhere on their bodies. Mine is on my hip.”

“There aren’t a lot of us in the world,” Savannah said. “The Breed considers all Breedmates to be sacred, but not Dragos. He’s been collecting women for years, holding them captive, we assume for the sole purpose of birthing his Gen One assassins. A lot of them have been killed, either by Dragos himself or the Ancient.”

“How do you know that?” Jenna asked, horrified by what she was hearing.

Down the table from her, Dylan cleared her throat. “I’ve seen them. The dead, that is.”

The cop part of Jenna perked to full attention. “If you’ve got dead bodies, you’ve got hard evidence, and probable cause to turn this asshole, Dragos, in to the authorities.”

Dylan was shaking her head. “I haven’t seen the bodies. I’ve seen the dead. They … appear to me sometimes. Sometimes they speak to me.”

Jenna didn’t know whether to burst out laughing or hang her head in defeat. “You see dead people?”

“Every Breedmate has a particular talent or ability that makes her unique from any other,” Tess explained. “For Dylan, that ability is a connection to other Breedmates who have died.”

Renata leaned in, bracing her forearms on the edge of the table. “Through Dylan’s talent, we know for certain that Dragos is responsible for numerous Breedmate deaths. And through another friend of the Order, Claire Reichen, whose talent led us to actually locate Dragos’s base of operation a couple months ago, we know that he is holding many more Breedmates prisoner. Since then, Dragos’s operation has gone to ground. Now the Order’s primary mission—aside from taking the bastard out ASAP—is to find his new headquarters and bring his victims to safety.”

“We’ve been helping wherever we can, but it’s hard to nail a moving target,” Dylan said. “We can search missing persons reports online, looking for faces I recognize. And we run day missions to women’s shelters, orphanages, flophouses … anywhere we might get a lead on vanished young women.”

Renata nodded. “Particularly those with possible ESP skills or other unusual capabilities that might hint at a potential Breedmate.”

“We do what we can,” Gabrielle said. “But we haven’t caught a real break yet. It’s like we’re missing the key that will unlock the whole thing, and until we find that, all we’re doing is chasing our own tails.”

“Well, hang in there,” Jenna said, that rusty old cop side of her sympathizing with the frustration of following go-nowhere leads. “Persistence is often a detective’s greatest ally.”

“At least we don’t have to worry about the Ancient anymore,” Savannah said. “That’s one less battle to be fought.”

Around the breakfast gathering, a chorus of agreeing voices answered the statement.

“Why did the Ancient let you live, Jenna?”

The question came from Elise, the petite short-haired blonde on the other side of Tess. The reticent one of the group who looked like a fragile flower but had the frank, unwavering gaze of a warrior. She probably needed that inner steel, considering the company she and the other women in the compound were keeping.

Jenna glanced down at her plate and considered her answer. It took her a long moment to form the words. “He made me choose.”

“What do you mean?” Savannah asked, her brow furrowing in question.

What will it be, Jenna Tucker-Darrow?

Life … or death?

Jenna felt every pair of eyes rooted on her in the quiet. Forcing herself to meet the unspoken questions that hung like a weight in the air, she looked up. She squared her chin matter-of-factly and spoke the words succinctly, if quickly. “I wanted to die. It’s what I would have preferred—at that moment, especially. He knew that, I’m certain of it. But for some reason, he seemed to want to toy with me, so he made me decide whether or not he would kill me that night.”

“Oh, Jen, that’s awful.” Alex’s voice hitched a little. Her arm came around Jenna’s shoulders in a sheltering embrace. “That cruel son of a bitch.”

“So,” Elise prompted, “you told the Ancient to let you live and he did—just like that?”

Recalling the moment with harsh clarity now, Jenna gave a deliberate shake of her head. “I told him I wanted to live, and the last thing I remember is him slicing open his arm and removing that thing—that tiny bit of God-knows-what—that’s now embedded inside of me.”

She felt, rather than saw, the subtly exchanged glances that traveled around the table.

“Do you think that might be significant?” she asked, directing the question to the group as one. She tried to tamp down the sudden twinge of fear that was suddenly reverberating in her chest. “Do you think him placing that object inside me has something to do with whether I live or die?”

Alex took her hand in a reassuring grasp, but it was Tess who spoke before anyone else. “Maybe Gideon can run a few more tests and help us figure that out.”

Jenna swallowed, then nodded.

Her plate of food sat untouched for the duration of the meal.

In a shadowed corner of an expansive luxury hotel suite in Boston, heavy drapes securely closed to block even the slightest ray of morning sunshine, the Breed male called Dragos sat in a silk-upholstered chair and drummed his fingernails on the mahogany lamp table beside him. Tardiness made him impatient, and impatience made him deadly.

“If he doesn’t arrive in the next sixty seconds, one of you needs to kill him,” he said to the pair of Gen One assassins who flanked him like muscled, six-and-a-half-foot hellhounds.

No sooner had he said it than, out in the foyer of the presidential suite, the private elevator gave a soft electronic chime, announcing an arriving guest. Dragos didn’t move from his seat in the other room, waiting in irritated silence as another of his homegrown, personal guards escorted a civilian Breed male—a lieutenant in Dragos’s secret operation—into the suite for his private audience.

The vampire had the good sense to bow his head the instant his gaze lit on Dragos. “Apologies for keeping you waiting, sire. The city is teeming with humans. Holiday shoppers and tourists,” he said, disdain in every cultured syllable. He peeled off his black leather gloves and tucked them into the pocket of his cashmere coat. “My driver had to circle the hotel a dozen times before we were able to get close to the service doors below street level.”

Dragos continued to drum his fingers on the table. “Something wrong with the lobby entrance?”

His lieutenant, born second-generation Breed like Dragos himself, blanched slightly. “It’s the middle of the day, sire. In that much sunlight, I would burn to a crisp in minutes.”

Dragos merely stared, unfazed. He wasn’t happy with the inconvenience of their meeting location, either. He would much rather be enjoying the comfort and security of his own residence. But that wasn’t possible anymore. Not since the Order had interfered in his operation and sent him scrambling for cover.

Out of fear of discovery, he no longer permitted any of his civilian associates to know where his new headquarters was located. As a further precaution, none of them knew the locations of his other sites and personnel, either. He couldn’t run the risk that any of his lieutenants might fall into the Order’s hands and end up compromising Dragos in the hopes of sparing themselves from Lucan’s wrath.

Just the thought of Lucan Thorne and his self-styled warrior knights put a bitter taste in Dragos’s mouth. Everything he’d been working toward—his vision of a future he could hardly wait to catch in his ready hands—had been spoiled by the actions of the Order. They’d forced him to turn tail and run. Forced him to destroy the very nerve center of his operation—a scientific research super-laboratory, which had cost him hundreds of millions of dollars and several decades of effort to perfect.