Love...
Fuck. Of all the rash impulses he had been unable to resist when it came to Melena, that would be the most foolish of them all.
Loving her would be even more selfish than the blood bond he had no right to claim and no intention of completing.
CHAPTER 10
Lazaro was gone when she woke up that morning.
He had stayed away most of the day, vanished to his command center until the time came for Melena and him to leave for the flight to D.C. that afternoon. Even on board the Order’s private jet, Lazaro had remained distant, his comm unit to his ear most of the time, or his attention rooted to his work and his computer. She would have called him preoccupied, but his smoky aura had conveyed a deliberate resistance.
Hours later and thousands of miles away from everything they’d shared in Rome, Melena had sat beside him in the debriefing with Lucan Thorne and a few other members of the Order at the Washington, D.C., headquarters, feeling almost as though she were seated next to a polite, detached stranger. He’d introduced her graciously, almost formally, giving no one cause to suspect she was anything more to him than a civilian temporarily placed in his safekeeping following the attack on Turati’s yacht.
He was careful not to touch her, even though heat crackled between them at the slightest brush of contact. He was careful not to let his gaze linger too long, even though his indigo eyes smoldered with awareness every time he glanced her way. He was coolly, determinedly remote.
It had made her want to scream.
She still felt that swamping urge, having since been removed from the meeting to accompany some of the Order’s women in the living room of the headquarters’ elegant mansion while the warriors continued their discussion in private.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to drink or eat, Melena?” Lucan Thorne’s auburn-haired Breedmate, Gabrielle, offered a warm smile as she indicated a side table laid out with plates of finger sandwiches and tea cakes. Aromatic Darjeeling and chamomile steeped in their pots next to an elegant white china service.
Although her appetite wasn’t there, everything looked and smelled delicious, and Melena was reluctant to reject the woman’s kindness. “Thank you, I think I will have a little something.”
She walked over from the sofa, joined by Gabrielle and two other women of the Order.
All of the Breedmates present tonight at the headquarters had been nothing but kind and welcoming. They were a family. That much was clear. And in the short time she’d been sitting with them, they’d each done their best to make Melena feel at home among friends as well.
Melena had been exhausted from her session with Lucan and the other warriors, to say nothing of the dread she felt every time she looked at Lazaro. Being around other women had helped dissolve some of that anxiety, even if it might only be for a little while.
She couldn’t help watching the hallway outside, waiting for some indication that the meeting had broken so she and Lazaro could finally go somewhere to speak privately. So she could get rid of the awful feeling she had that he was somehow already gone.
Gabrielle handed her a small plate, collecting Melena from her dark thoughts. “If you’d like something more substantial, Savannah made a big pot of jambalaya earlier today. You really can’t go wrong with any of her amazing cooking.”
“I do have my numerous and varied talents,” Savannah said, her doe-brown eyes dancing at the compliment. The beautiful, mocha-skinned Breedmate was bonded to Gideon, another of the warriors present tonight. Where her big blond-haired mate had an intense, slightly mad genius quality about him, Savannah exuded tranquility and smooth confidence.
As Melena put a few cucumber sandwiches and peach tarts on her plate, she found it next to impossible to keep from staring at the third woman in the room with them—the one mated to the warrior named Brock. Jenna looked like neither of her Breedmate companions. In fact, Melena didn’t think she was a Breedmate at all, though she definitely wasn’t fully human either.
Tall and athletic, Jenna wore her brown hair cropped close to her scalp. She was pretty, yet formidable in some indefinable way, and when she leaned across the sideboard to pour a cup of tea, Melena noticed an intricate pattern of skin markings at her nape. Skin markings that looked remarkably, impossibly, similar to...
“Are those tribal tattoos, or—”
“Not tattoos.” Jenna’s hazel eyes were smiling, but there was a note of seriousness in her voice. She turned to provide a better look. The array fanned out to cover the back of Jenna’s neck, disappearing beneath the collar of her shirt. The arcs and swirls tracked upward too, well into her hairline and up the back of her skull. From the looks of it, they continued down Jenna’s spine and onto her shoulders as well.
“They’re dermaglyphs.” Melena frowned, astonished and confused. Females born Breed had been unheard of for millennia. They might never have come into existence if not for the genetic experimentations conducted in Dragos’s labs in the decades before he was killed by the Order. Even then, there were only a handful of women known to bear the glyphs and blood appetites of the Breed.
Melena found herself staring harder now, watching Jenna pile her plate with a healthy assortment of sweets and sandwiches. “You can eat all of that?”
Jenna grinned. “I’ll probably come back for seconds.”
“I’m sorry,” Melena blurted, immediately feeling stupid and rude for letting her curiosity overrule her manners. “I just thought...”
“You thought I was Breed?” Jenna popped a tiny pastry in her mouth and gave a shake of her head. “Not quite. But I haven’t been fully human for a long time either. I guess as long as Brock loves me, it doesn’t matter where I end up. Together we can handle anything—and we have.”
Her two friends nodded in agreement, and Melena smiled even though the sentiment was bittersweet for her. She’d believed she and Lazaro were heading toward something special like that too. Her father’s death was still a raw ache in her heart, and would be for a very long time. The attack she’d narrowly survived still held her in a cold grasp. But Lazaro had helped her through.
He’d been her rock, her comfort, whether he wanted to accept that role or not. And ever since they’d left Rome, she felt that support slipping away. No, she felt pretty damned certain that he wasn’t slipping—he was running away. Cutting her off with his forbidding silence and maddening stoicism.
When she finally heard his deep voice approaching with Lucan and the others, Melena’s heart started pounding in a heavy, expectant tempo. She didn’t know whether to be relieved or terrified when he strode to the threshold of the drawing room and those penetrating dark blue eyes found her, locking on with the intensity that would probably always kindle an instant heat in her blood.