She had, however, replaced a large, seventeenth-century English tapestry of Alexander the Great with another, far older one, which she said depicted a hero she much preferred to look at instead.
Lucan paced in front of that medieval-period artifact now, feeling the hand-rendered likeness of his own face judging him from within the woven threads of the tapestry that once hung in his quarters at the Order's Boston compound. Gabrielle, Gideon and his mate, Savannah, Brock, Jenna, and several others gathered in the drawing room in prolonged silence as Lucan practically wore a track in the Oriental rug beneath his boots.
Rio and his Breedmate, Dylan, were less than an hour arrived from the Order's base in Chicago. The Spanish warrior with the scarred face and normally easygoing demeanor was coiled forward where he sat, elbows resting on his knees, topaz eyes intense.
The other recent arrivals, Tegan and Elise, had come in from the base he commanded in New York City. The tawny-haired Gen One was one of the Order's original members from the time of its founding - and within the past twenty years had become one of Lucan's closest friends. Tegan and Elise had their own issues to contend with, namely, their twenty-year-old son, Micah, who was fresh out of warrior training and already embarking with his team on a black ops mission taking them to Budapest.
Elise was openly worried about letting her only surviving child out of her sight, but Micah was his father's son, and Lucan knew as well as anyone that holding on too tight would only risk making the break that much more permanent when it came. He saw that in his own son every day, a weight that settled on him even in the midst of the more immediate problems he faced tonight.
The remaining members still due at the D.C. headquarters included Hunter and Corinne, coming in from New Orleans in a few more hours. Scheduled to arrive tomorrow night were Dante and Tess, now in charge of the Order's base in Seattle, and Kade and Alex, overseeing the command center in Lake Tahoe. In light of the night's events in Boston, Chase and Tavia were staying put there until the eve of the summit gala, when they'd be coming in to attend.
Across the elegant space now, Nikolai's muttered curse was a hiss ripe with malice as his blond head swung away from his pregnant Breedmate and his glacial blue eyes hit Lucan. "Do we have any more intel about who these rebel bastards are and where they're hiding?"
"Only what you already know from Nathan's call tonight," Lucan replied gravely. "Unfortunately, his best lead so far was the information that one of the rebels had defected from his fold, taking Ackmeyer with him for ransom bait. We all know how that turned out."
Niko grunted. "And we have nothing on Mira. Not where she is or what they want with her. Or if she's already been . . ."
That the Siberian-born, battle-hardened warrior had been unable to finish the thought told Lucan just how deeply Niko's concern went. Renata's too. The tough-as-nails female who'd become a valued, highly effective member of the Order's combat missions these past two decades was slumped close to her mate, her jet-dark hair drooped into her face but not quite masking the lines of worry there. Renata's mercilessly lethal hands trembled a bit where they rested on the pronounced bump of her late-term pregnancy.
"We don't have anything more yet, but we will," Lucan told them. "We'll get her back safe and sound, I promise you."
He considered the kill op he'd sent Nathan on, its purpose to recover Mira and the human and shut down their captors with a minimum of noise or attention. Nathan's skill and suitability for the job would never be in question, but the laboratory explosion and the killing of Jeremy Ackmeyer had blown their mission objective to pieces.
And the fallout from that disastrous event was creating newer, bigger problems of its own.
In just the handful of hours since the news of the prominent human scientist's death broke, there had been a swift, and extremely vocal, public outcry for justice. An outcry made all the more troubling when reports suggested not only that rebels were involved but that the Order was partially at fault for his abduction and resulting murder.
Lucan was still pissed that Ackmeyer's uncle, GNC director Charles Benson, had immediately gone to investigators and the press with the fact that the Order had been enlisted - and had ultimately failed - to keep the civilian safe on what was supposed to have been a simple security escort to D.C. for the upcoming summit gala.
The already uneasy human population reacted with paranoia and suspicion, a few vitriolic prophets of doom warning that this failure only confirmed what they already feared: that the Breed, and the Order in particular, could not be trusted to value human life.
Peace, the worst of them were shouting to anyone who would listen, could never be had living alongside inhuman monsters.
The answering panic was widespread and quickly gaining ground. Riots in Boston had begun spreading to other cities. The small number of protesters that were commonplace in front of the Order's D.C. headquarters had swelled to dozens in just a matter of hours. And while the civilians' upset was trouble enough, militant groups around the world were now using the attack on Ackmeyer's lab by suspected rebels as a rallying cry to vandalize and loot, to lash out at governments they deemed too willing to capitulate to the might and will of the Order and the rest of the Breed.
The current situation was, in a word, chaos.
With Lucan and the Order now standing squarely in the middle of it.
"We need to shut this shit down," Lucan growled, anger spiking as the rumble of picketers outside the estate's gates droned on. "We should be back on watch at our district command centers, in case the response to tonight's news escalates from aggravating provocation to all-out anarchy."