Elise dragged herself into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Her fingers were trembling as she unfastened the leather knife sheath from her thigh and placed it on the sink. The sheath was empty. She’d lost the titanium blade in the snow when the Rogue kicked it out of her grasp. She had others to replace it. A lot of the money she’d left the Darkhavens with had gone into weapons and training equipment—things she had never wanted to know anything about but now considered necessities.
Lord, how drastically her life had changed in just four months.
She could never go back to what she was. In her heart, she knew there could be no going back now. The person she had been all the time she’d lived under the protection of the Breed was gone now—dead, like her beloved mate and her son. The pain of those losses had been a furnace that devoured her old life, reduced it to cinder. She was what was left—the phoenix that rose out of the ash.
Elise glanced up into the fogging mirror and met her own haunted gaze in the glass. Blood smeared her cheek and chin, grime smudged her brow, all of it like warpaint. There was a feral glint in the weary eyes staring back at her.
God, she was tired…so tired. But so long as she could stand, she could fight. So long as her heart still ached for vengeance, she would use the psychic gift that had for so long been her greatest weakness. She would endure any hardship, face any risk. She would sell her everlasting soul if she must. Whatever it took to have justice.
CHAPTER
Three
Tegan wiped his bloodied blade on the dead Rogue’s jacket and idly observed the swift disintegration of the last body in the alley. The postmortem cleanup was courtesy of Tegan’s titanium weapons, a metal that acted as poisonous acid to the diseased cellular makeup of Breed vampires gone Rogue. The three bodies dissolved in the snow, reducing flesh, bone, and clothing to nothing but dark spots of ash against the pristine white.
Tegan blew out a curse, his senses still quivering with the heat of combat. Battle-sharpened eyes lit on the knife Elise had lost in her struggle with the Rogue who’d attacked her. Tegan walked over and retrieved the weapon.
“Christ,” he muttered, picking the blade up from the snow. It wasn’t some dainty dagger a lady might carry for protection but a serious-looking bit of hardware. Seven inches long, serrated near the upward jut of the tip, and, unless he missed his guess, the metal was not your basic carbide steel but Rogue-eating titanium.
Which only begged the question again: what the hell was the Darkhaven female doing out on the streets alone, covered in blood, and toting warrior-grade weapons on her person?
Tegan lifted his head and sniffed at the air, searching for her scent. It didn’t take long to find it. His senses were always sharp, predatorially acute; combat lit them up like laser beams. He pulled the heather-and-roses scent of the Breedmate into his lungs, and let it guide him deeper into the city.
The scent trailed off at a shit-hole apartment building in one of the seedier sections of the low-rent area of town. Not at all the kind of place he’d expect to find a genteel Darkhaven-raised female like Elise. But without a doubt, she was inside the graffiti-tagged, brick-and-concrete eyesore; he was certain of that.
He stalked up the steps and scowled at the feeble door with its broken lock. Inside the vestibule his boots scuffed on ratty, stained carpeting that reeked of urine, filth, and decades of neglect. A battered wooden staircase rose to the left of him, but Elise’s scent was coming from the door at the end of the first-floor hall.
Tegan moved past another apartment door on his right, the thump of music vibrating the floor and walls. He could hear a television too, a deafening barrage of background noise that seemed to swell as he neared Elise’s place. He rapped on the door and waited.
No response.
He knocked again, dropping his knuckles hard on the scarred metal. Nothing. Not that she could hear anything inside the place with all the racket going on in there.
Maybe he shouldn’t be there, shouldn’t get involved in whatever it was that brought the female to this place in her life. Tegan knew she’d had a rough time since the disappearance and later death of her son. The Order had learned that Camden was killed by Elise’s brother-in-law, Sterling Chase, when the kid showed up at the Darkhaven in full-on Bloodlust. From the account Tegan heard, Camden had been about to attack Elise when Chase gunned him down with several titanium rounds—right in front of her.
God only knew what witnessing her son’s death might have done to the female.
Not his concern, though.
Yeah, not his fucking problem at all. So why was he standing in this rank tenement house with his dick in his hand, waiting for her to come around and let him in?