All of it gone now, nothing but cinder and shrapnel in the middle of a thick Connecticut forest.

Now the power and privilege that Dragos had been accustomed to for centuries had been replaced by skulking in the shadows and constantly watching over his shoulder to make certain his enemies weren’t closing in on him. The Order had made him flee and cower like a rabbit desperate to evade the hunter’s snare, and he liked it not one damned bit.

The latest irritation had taken place in Alaska, with the escape of the Ancient, Dragos’s most valuable, irreplaceable tool in his quest for ultimate domination. Bad enough that the Ancient had broken free during transport to his new holding tank. But the disaster was made all the worse when the Order somehow managed to find not only the Alaskan lab but the fugitive otherworlder, as well.

Dragos had lost both of those important pieces to the warriors. He wasn’t about to forfeit another damned thing to them.

“I want to hear good news,” he told his lieutenant, glaring up at the male from under the furrow of his scowl. “How are you progressing with your assigned task?”

“Everything is in place, sire. The target and his immediate family members have just returned to the States this week from holiday abroad.”

Dragos grunted in acknowledgment. The target in question was a Breed elder, nearly a thousand years old—Gen One, in fact—which was precisely why Dragos had him in his sights. In addition to wanting Lucan Thorne and his band of warriors put out of business, Dragos had also returned to one of his initial mission objectives: the systematic and total extinction of every Gen One Breed on the planet.

That Lucan himself and another of the Order’s founding members, Tegan, were both Gen Ones only made that goal all the sweeter. And all the more imperative. By removing all of the Gen Ones—save the crop of assassins bred and trained to serve him unquestioningly—Dragos and the other second-generation members of the race would become, by default, the most powerful vampires in existence.

And if, or, rather, when Dragos tired of sharing the future he alone had envisioned and ensured was brought to fruition, then he would call upon his personal army of assassins to remove every second-generation contemporary, as well.

He sat in contemplative, if bored, silence as his lieutenant rushed to review the finer points of the plan that Dragos himself had masterminded just a few days earlier. Step by step, tactic by tactic, the other Breed male laid everything out, assuring him that nothing had been left to chance.

“The Gen One and his family have been under our surveillance round the clock since their arrival back home,” the lieutenant said. “We are ready to pull the trigger on the operation on your command, sire.”

Dragos inclined his head in a vague nod. “Make it happen.”

“Yes, sire.”

The lieutenant’s deep bow and scraping retreat was almost as pleasing to Dragos as the notion that this pending offensive strike would make it clear to the Order that he might be down, but he was far from out.

In fact, his presence at the swank Boston hotel—and one of several important introductory meetings that had taken weeks to arrange between him and a hand-picked group of influential humans—would solidify Dragos’s position on the ladder toward his ultimate glory. He could practically taste success already.

“Oh, one more thing,” Dragos called out to his departing associate.

“Yes, sire?”

“If you fail me in this,” he said pleasantly, “be prepared for me to feed you your own heart.”

The male’s face bleached as white as the carpet that blanketed the floor like snow. “I will not fail you, sire.”

Dragos smiled, baring both teeth and fangs. “See that you don’t.”

CHAPTER

Nine

After the death-soaked mess of his night’s work in the city, Brock considered it a personal triumph that he’d managed to avoid Jenna for most of the day that he’d been back at the compound. With the two men’s bodies dumped in the frigid backwaters of the Mystic River, he had stayed out alone until near dawn, trying to shake off the fury that seemed to follow him all night.

Even after he’d been back at the Order’s headquarters for some hours that morning, the unwarranted—completely unwanted—sense of rage that gripped him when he thought of an innocent woman coming to harm made his muscles vibrate with the need for violence. A couple of sweaty hours of blade work in the weapons room had helped take off some of his edge. So had the scalding, forty-minute shower he’d punished himself with following the training.

He might have felt damned good, felt that his head was screwed on straight and tight again, if not for the one-two punch that Gideon had delivered not long afterward.

The first hit was the news that Jenna had come down from breakfast with the other women of the compound and had asked him to run another round of tissue testing and blood work. She had recalled something about the time she’d spent in the Ancient’s company—something that Gideon had said left the stalwart female pretty shaken up.

The second blow had come almost immediately after the first samples were drawn and run through the analyzers.

Jenna’s blood counts and DNA had changed significantly since the last time Gideon had run them.

Yesterday, her results were normal. Today, everything was off the charts.

“We can’t jump to conclusions. No matter what these reports seem to indicate,” Lucan finally said into the quiet, his deep voice grave.

“Maybe we should run another sample,” said Tess, the only one of the females in the tech lab at the moment. She glanced up from the disturbing lab results to look at Lucan, Brock, and the rest of the Order who’d been summoned there to review Gideon’s findings. “Shall I get Jenna and bring her back down to the infirmary for a second test?”

“You can,” Gideon said, “but running another sample isn’t going to change a thing.” He took off his pale blue glasses and tossed them onto the acrylic workstation in front of him. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he slowly shook his head. “These kinds of DNA mutations and massive cellular replications simply don’t occur. Human bodies aren’t advanced enough to handle the demands that changes of this significance would place on their organs and arteries, to say nothing of the impact something like this would have on the central nervous system.”

Arms crossed over his chest, Brock leaned against the wall next to Kade, Dante, and Rio. He said nothing, struggling to make sense of everything he was seeing and hearing. Lucan had advised that no one jump to conclusions, but it was damned hard not to assume that as of right now, Jenna’s future well-being was severely in question.

“I don’t get it,” Nikolai said from the other side of the tech lab, where he sat at the large table along with Tegan and Hunter. “Why now? I mean, if everything was normal before, why the sudden flood of mutations to her blood and DNA?”

Gideon shrugged vaguely. “Could be the fact that until just yesterday she’d been in a deep sleep, almost a coma. We knew her muscle strength had increased once she had awakened. Brock saw that firsthand, and so did we, when Jenna fled the compound. The cellular changes we’re seeing now could have been a delayed reaction to simply waking up. Being conscious and alert may have acted as some kind of switch inside her body.”

“Last night she was shot,” Brock added, biting back the angry snarl that was clogging the back of his throat. “Could that have anything to do with what we’re seeing in her blood work now?”

“Maybe,” Gideon said. “Anything is possible, I suppose. This isn’t something that I, or anyone else in this room, have ever seen before.”