Kiss of Midnight(73)

She had taken it all in with a stalwartness that most human men would not possess.

Lucan watched her struggling to process the information as she sat at the table with her head in her hands, stray tears only just beginning to stream down her cheeks. He wished there was a way to make her path easier. There wasn’t. And things were going to go from bad to worse for her, once she learned the full truth of what lay ahead of her.

For her own safety and that of the Breed, she was going to have to leave her apartment, her friends, her career. Leave behind everything that had been a part of her life so far.

And she was going to have to do it tonight.

“If you have any other photographs like these, Gabrielle, I need to see them.”

She nodded, lifting her head. “I have everything on my computer,” she said, pushing her hair out of her face.

“What about the ones in the darkroom?”

“They’re on disk, too, along with every image I’ve sold through the gallery.”

“Good.” Her mention of art sales tripped an alarm in his memory. “When I was here a few nights ago, you mentioned having sold an entire collection to someone. Who was it?”

“I don’t know. It was an anonymous purchase. The buyer arranged a private showing in a rented penthouse suite downtown. They looked at a few images, then paid cash for all of them.”

He swore and Gabrielle’s already stressed expression slipped toward true terror.

“Oh, my God. Are you thinking it was the Rogues who bought them?”

What Lucan was thinking was that if he were the one standing at the helm of the Rogues’ current operation, he would be most interested in acquiring a weapon that could home in on his opponents’ locations. To say nothing of crippling his enemies’ ability to use said weapon for their own gain.

Gabrielle would be an extraordinary asset in Rogue hands, for many reasons. And once they had her in their possession, it wouldn’t take them long to discover her Breedmate mark. She would be abused like the meanest brood mare, forced to take their blood and bear their spawn until her body simply gave out and died. It could take years, decades, centuries.

“Lucan, my best friend took those photographs into the showing that night, by himself. It would have killed me if anything had happened to him. Jamie walked in there without knowing anything about the danger he was in.”

“Be glad for that, because it’s probably the only reason he walked out alive.”

She recoiled as if he’d slapped her. “I don’t want my friends getting hurt because of what’s happening to me.”

“You’re in more danger than anyone right now. And we need to get moving. Let’s download those pictures off your computer. I want to take all of them into the lab at the compound.”

Gabrielle led him over to a neat corner desk in her living room. She powered up the desktop workstation and as it cycled through its startup, she pulled a couple of flash memory sticks out of their store packaging and popped one into the computer’s USB drive.

“You know, they said she was crazy. They called her delusional, a paranoid schizophrenic. They locked her away for believing she had been attacked by vampires.” Gabrielle laughed softly, but it was a sad, empty sound. “Maybe she wasn’t crazy after all.”

Behind her, Lucan moved closer. “Who would that be?”

“My birth mother.” After beginning the copying procedure, Gabrielle spun around in her chair to look up at Lucan. “She was found late one night in Boston, injured, bloody, disoriented. She didn’t have a wallet or purse, or any kind of ID on her, and in the brief periods when she was lucid, she couldn’t tell anyone who she was so the police processed her as a Jane Doe. She was just a teenager.”

“She was bleeding, you say?”

“Multiple throat lacerations—presumably self-inflicted, according to the official records. The courts deemed her incompetent to stand trial and locked her away in a mental institution once she was released from the hospital.”

“Jesus.”

She gave a slow shake of her head. “But what if everything she said was true? What if she wasn’t crazy at all? Oh, God, Lucan…all these years, I’ve blamed her. I think I’ve hated her, even, and now I can’t help but think—”

“You said the police and the courts processed her. You mean, for some kind of crime?”

The computer beeped to indicate the memory stick was full. Gabrielle turned back to continue with the next copying function, and she stayed there, giving him her back. Lucan put his hands down gently on her shoulders and brought the swivel chair back around.