"She couldn't be in better hands," Chase said, meaning it too. "Tegan adores her, as well he should. He's a good man, worthy of her. And she loves him, maybe even more than she did Quent."
"Yes. I've seen that for myself too," Rowan replied. "But at the time ..."
Chase picked up his old friend's trailing thought. "At the time I quit the Agency, I didn't know what I wanted. I only knew that if I wanted to keep my sanity - keep my damned soul - I needed to get out."
He gave Rowan the truth now - as much as he was willing to share. There were some things he didn't divulge to anyone. Things he had never shared, shames from his past that he expected he would keep to himself forever.
"And now?" Rowan asked after a moment.
Chase exhaled a humorless chuckle. "I don't worry about those things anymore."
"Maybe you should." Rowan reached over and put his hand on Chase's shoulder. "You and I go back a long time, my friend. I've seen you at your best. Even at your worst, you're a hell of a lot better than most of the ass**les calling themselves my friends inside the Agency. You ever need anything, I've got your back."
Chase frowned, reluctant to accept so undeserving a gift. "I wouldn't ask it of you, Mathias. Except - "
"The female upstairs," Rowan said with a grave nod. "Jesus Christ, Chase. I've seen her with my own eyes, but I still can hardly believe it. Dragos engineered a female Gen One in his labs?" "More than one, according to the patient records we saw at the clinic tonight."
Rowan kept his voice low, so as not to be heard by any of the other civilian residents of his Darkhaven. "Do you realize what that means? What that means to the future of our entire race? That young woman up there changes everything."
"Yes," Chase said. "And that's why she needs to be protected. The safest place for her is with the Order. I'm hoping you'll make sure she gets there."
"You can do that yourself, Chase." Rowan's shoulder lifted in a vague shrug. "I told you I had to inform Lucan about all of this. I called him as soon as we got back. He's sent Tegan and a few of the others down to collect the female. They're en route already, should be here within the hour."
Chase swore under his breath. When he walked out of the Order's mansion and into police custody with the humans a few mornings ago, he'd done it as an act of finality. His way of releasing his warrior brethren from the burden of his presence and all the failures he'd been at the center of since he'd begun to lose his battle with Bloodlust.
His walking out had been a last-ditch effort to scrape together a small bit of honor - a feeble grab at redemption - by sacrificing his own freedom for theirs. He didn't think he'd ever face Lucan or Dante or Tegan and the rest of the Order again. He sure as hell didn't want to see their rightful contempt now.
"You'll have to do the honors for me," he told Rowan. "I'm not planning to stick around that long."
"Where else do you have to go?"
The question wasn't posed with any challenge, but the concern wasn't welcome either. Chase got up and began a tight prowl around the kitchen. Above his head was the private guest room Tavia had been shown to on their arrival. The water from her shower was still running; he could hear the muffled whine of old copper pipes through the thick plaster walls. "She's been up there a long time. Do you think she's all right?"
"Considering everything she's gone through today alone, I'd say she's holding it together remarkably well."
"Yeah," Chase said. "Tavia is ... remarkable."
He thought back on the past several days and nights. All the astonishing revelations. The unexpected concern - the unwanted caring - he felt for a woman who'd been a stranger to him not even a week before. And yes, there was the added complication of his desire for her. All the more reason for him to cut and run now, before he let himself get entangled any further. "Shit." Chase raked his splayed fingers over his scalp on a deep sigh. "I gotta go. It's better this way. Better for her. Hell, it's better for me too."
Rowan studied him now. The shrewd Agency director didn't need anything more to understand just how intimately Chase had f**ked things up with Tavia already. "What am I supposed to tell her?"
Chase swore again, more vividly this time. "Just tell her I'm sorry. For everything."
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
"DO YOU THINK IT'S TRUE?" Lucan stood just inside Gideon's makeshift computer command center, leaning one shoulder against the wall. "Could Dragos have created a female Breed in his labs?"
Gideon glanced up from his study at one of several workstations. His gaze was serious over the rims of the pale blue glasses resting low on his nose. "Based on what I've found in the cryo container Hunter brought back from New Orleans, I'd say it's more than possible."
He rolled his chair across the polished pine-plank floor, stopping in front of another busy computer. "See this here?" He pointed to the schematic displayed on the monitor. Lucan strode over to have a look. "This is just one of a dozen analyses I've been running on the genetic popsicles in that laboratory ice box. We're talking about countless specimens, Lucan, harvested from the Ancient, his lab-bred offspring, and upward of twenty Breedmates. Hell, I even found some human samples in that tank. Dragos has been collecting DNA, blood cells, stem cells, embryos - everything a lab full of Minion geneticists could possibly need to keep them busy for a generation."
"Jesus Christ," Lucan muttered.
"And those are just the viable specimens," Gideon added. "The second cryo container had more of the same, but damage to the tank had broken the seals and destroyed all its contents." "What's going on over there?" Lucan asked, gesturing to still another computer with a monitor full of scrolling data. A program was running on it in split-screen mode, the bottom half ripping through line after line of rapid-fire code, the top displaying a string of thirteen-character fields. Only three of the fields were filled in with a static number: 5, 0, and 5.