He helped her to her feet. However, inside he knew he couldn't go with her. Not yet. Not after what Reiver had done here tonight.
Thane, the guard who was no guard at all, gave Mal a grim look. "Reiver won't get far. Neither will his cronies. The Agency is aware of what was going down here tonight. My squad will be here any minute, if they're not waiting outside right now to round everyone up."
Malcolm gave a slow shake of his head. He couldn't trust anyone else to finish this. Not after everything he'd been through. He couldn't rest for a moment thinking Reiver or his murderous colleagues were still walking free, able to hurt more innocent people.
Able to hurt Danika or Connor, the two people who mattered more to him than anything else in his life.
He looked at Dani, his heart squeezing with a love so profound it rocked him. As determined as he was to see Reiver dead, there was only one thing that could keep him from pursuing that goal now. Danika could stop him. With a word, a tear, a pleading look.
But she held his gaze with a steady courage. A faith that humbled him, even as it gave him new resolve.
His strong, beautiful female.
His Breedmate, once this was finally over.
He knew what her courage right now cost her. It was written in her haunted blue eyes as she gave him a subtle nod of permission, of stoic understanding.
Malcolm gathered her close and brushed his mouth against hers in an unrushed kiss. "I have to finish this."
Her reply was quiet but resolved. "I know."
It was a struggle t c a ght="0em"o let her go, but he released her and glanced to Thane. "Keep her safe. I'm counting on you."
The other Breed male gave him a solemn nod. "You have my word."
Mal couldn't take his eyes off Danika. She held his gaze, her own unwavering, as proud and stalwart as the regal Nordic princess she truly was. "Go and finish this, Malcolm. Then come back to me, and never leave me again."
Epilogue
He came back to Danika two nights later, haggard and worn, but the most welcome sight she'd ever seen. She opened the door of her little farmhouse in Denmark and there was Malcolm, standing on the cold front stoop in the December moonlight, snowflakes dancing all around him. Her heart swelled so swiftly, she couldn't speak. And while the urge to throw herself into his arms was a need that arrowed through her as basic as the need for air, she held back, trying to read his grave, unsmiling expression.
"Reiver is dead," he told her. "The others too."
She exhaled the breath she'd been holding. Relief flooded her, not so much for the final justice Malcolm had delivered on his enemies but for the simple fact that he was standing in front of her now, whole and hale, safe and sound.
Mal didn't move. He cleared his throat. "Thane tells me his contact in Boston, an Enforcement Agency director by the name of Mathias Rowan, has alluded to big trouble brewing over there. If things get as ugly as Rowan and the Order seem to feel they will, Thane and his men may be called on to help them out."
The news worried her deeply. She'd been trying to get in touch with Gideon since she'd arrived home, but the private number she had for the Order's compound in Boston was out of service. Which had never happened in all the time the direct line to the warriors had existed.
If the Order was off grid-by their own choice or by force-and gearing up to combat something awful, she hated to imagine what that could mean.
"Thane's offered me a place in the Enforcement Agency," Mal added. "He wants me to be part of his team."
Danika's heart sank like a stone. The two days he'd been gone had been torture, but she'd made it through. She'd had faith because she knew he'd come back once he'd done what he had to do. She'd endured his absence because she trusted that when he returned, he'd be back to stay.
But she put on a brave face as she looked at him now. "When do you leave?"
"I turned him down, Dani." He took a step closer now and caught her face in the warm, callused palms of his hands. "There's only one place I want to be, and that's with you."
Elation filled her, but she couldn't celebrate if it was her fear for him that was holding him back. "Don't do this just for me, Mal. I know I f a ghould2019;ve told you that I can't bear the thought of you in danger, and it's true. But I don't want to be the one keeping you somewhere you don't want to be. I can't ask that of you."
"You didn't," he said, caressing her cheek with his thumb. "Thane and his offer will wait, but this won't. I love you, Danika. Be with me. At my side, as my mate."
She held his intense gray gaze, love swelling inside her, filling her up with joy and hope. "Yes, Malcolm. I will be with you. As your mate, your partner, your friend."
He pulled her against him as an amber fire began to spark in his eyes. "My everything, Dani."
She gave him a happy nod. "Forever."
"Starting now," he said, possession raw and thrilling in the deep growl of his voice.
He kissed her passionately, the sharp points of his fangs grazing her lip with dark promise. Then he swept her into his arms and carried her into the house and up to her bed, where their forever was about to begin.
Can't get enough of the Midnight Breed?Get ready to sink your teeth into the next book in Lara Adrian's bestselling seriesDARKER AFTER MIDNIGHTOn sale 1/24/2012
CHAPTER ONE
"THE CHARGES ARE SET, Lucan. Detonators are ready whenever you say the word. On your go, it all ends right here."
Lucan Thorne stood silent in the dusk-filled, snow-covered yard of the Boston estate that had long served as a base of operations for himself and his small cadre of brothers in arms. For more than a hundred years, on countless patrols, they rode out from this very spot to guard the night, maintaining a fragile peace between the unwitting humans who owned the daytime hours and the predators who moved among them secretly, sometimes lethally, in the dark.