And while he was admitting damning truths and personal derelictions of duty, Nathan had to count among his the fact that his curiosity about Jordana Gates hadn’t ended when he returned to Headquarters with his team.
While Aric had vented his fury in the weapons room, Nathan had spent several hours online and in the Breed nation’s International Identification Database, researching Jordana’s apparent date at the event.
Or, rather, her imminent mate, Elliott Bentley-Squire.
Nathan had delved into every documented fact and figure he could find—all told, hours of digging. But he’d found no reason to dislike the wealthy, socially acceptable male.
Nor did he care to acknowledge that he’d been looking for cause to despise the trusted friend of Jordana’s father, simply for the way she had let Bentley-Squire touch her, even though her eyes hadn’t seemed able to break Nathan’s gaze from the moment they first saw each other at the party.
The look in Jordana’s eyes haunted him, even now. As if she’d been silently pleading for him to rescue her … to claim her.
Until her would-be mate noticed her distraction and Jordana had denied even knowing who Nathan was.
If he needed a reason to convince himself that beautiful, tempting Jordana Gates was a bad idea, certainly this was it. Nathan preferred his sexual dalliances to be uncomplicated, impersonal. A biological satisfaction of something his body needed in order to perform at its peak.
The way he viewed it, f**king was no different than feeding.
And he preferred to do neither close to the place he called home.
“We did learn something about Cassian Gray last night,” Nathan said, bringing his thoughts back in line where they belonged. “Cass’s office at La Notte was orderly, too much so. Anything of value to someone looking into him or his interests had been removed.”
To the left of Nathan at the table, Rafe smirked. “His private apartment had been vacated too, except for an interesting collection of restraints and spiked collars in the bedroom.”
Elijah and Jax chuckled along with Rafe, but Nathan remained serious, glad to put his mind back on the trail of their quarry. “Cass already knows he’s being pursued. His employees at the club said we’d just missed him, but it’s probable they were lying to us. My guess is he cleared out of there days ago.”
“I wonder if Cass realized he’d been outed the moment Kellan touched him.” This from Tavia, her first comment of the entire morning. “He might be fully aware that the Order suspects he’s not human and would come after him soon enough.”
Nathan nodded with the rest of the warriors around the table. Kellan Archer was recently reunited with the Order and since mated to Mira, one of the few female squad captains. The couple had been at La Notte on a mission of their own no more than a week ago, when Kellan and Cassian Gray became embroiled in a brief altercation. Kellan pushed the club owner, tactile contact that had roused the Breed male’s unique psychic gift to read human intention with a touch.
Cassian Gray had been a blank slate.
Cass wasn’t Breed; there was no mistaking that fact. But Kellan had realized at once the man wasn’t human either.
He hadn’t been sure what else Cass could be—no one had been—until a few nights ago in Washington, D.C., at a global peace summit event that had ended in an act of terror meant to sabotage the gathering and blow hundreds of Breed lives away in the process.
Lucan Thorne and most of the Order’s elder members included.
The individual who’d tried to carry out the plot under the banner of a shadowy organization called Opus Nostrum hadn’t been human or Breed.
No, Reginald Crowe had been something else entirely: Atlantean.
Known publicly around the world as a billionaire business magnate with holdings all over the globe, Crowe was, in actuality, one of a powerful race of immortals that had existed on Earth unknown for millennia. They had been as much a secret to the human population as the Breed.
And now the Order understood the Atlanteans to be an even greater threat than any enemy they’d ever faced before.
“It’s been three days since Crowe’s death and it’s still trending on all the news outlets around the world,” Jax said, spinning one of his hira-shuriken stars on the conference table. “If Cass is Atlantean, the killing of one of his own by the Order would be enough to send him to ground.”
Eli exhaled a drawled curse. “Unfortunately, Crowe’s death—and all the shit that went down before that—was a little too public to be contained.”
The ultraviolet bomb at the summit had been only one of Crowe’s crimes in his role as Opus Nostrum’s leader. Before plotting to derail the gathering and ash every Breed dignitary in the building, Crowe’s cabal had arranged for the murder of a brilliant human scientist and that man’s uncle, a senior member of the Global Nations Council, the governing arm responsible for ensuring peaceful relations between the vampire and human populations of the world.
“It’s true, we’re at a disadvantage right now,” Chase interjected. “The only good to come of the exposure of Crowe’s actions and his death is the fact that now the public, Breed and man, is united in their fear of Opus Nostrum. Only the Order is aware of the Atlanteans and the bigger threat Crowe divulged before he died.”
The threat of a brewing global war being plotted at the hands of the Atlanteans and their exiled queen.
“The Order has already waged a battle—and won—against a sinister member of our own race,” Tavia murmured quietly. “To think that another, more insidious enemy has been lurking in the shadows all this time …” She slowly shook her head, unwilling or unable to finish the grave direction of her thoughts.