Ashes of Midnight by Lara Adrián Read Free Book Online Page B

accident at his Darkhaven some time ago?”
     
Roth’s fingers tightened on the thin case of the mobile phone. “Apparently the bastard is very much alive … for the moment. Instruct the team that I want him taken out on sight. Make him dead, agent.”
     
“Yes, sir.”
     
     
     
     
     
CHAPTER
Five
     
     
R eichen stood over her in silence, his hands braced on the arms of a moss green wingback chair in one of the estate’s receiving rooms, where Claire had fallen asleep. For a moment, when he’d first come to alone in the pitch-dark cellar, he hadn’t the first clue where he was or how he’d gotten there. Nor could he immediately recall why it was that most of his body was recovering from UV burns. It was like that for him sometimes, after the pyrokinetic energy faded. Hard to remember details. Hard to make sense of his surroundings.
     
Hard to know anything except the fierce blood thirst that overtook him once his inner fire had a chance to cool.
     
He had been disoriented when he first regainedconsciousness in the cellar, but then he’d breathed in the softest trace scent of vanilla and warm spices.
     
Claire.
     
Her blood scent had drawn him out of the dark and up the flight of stone steps, into the room where she dozed now. He breathed her in as he loomed over her, tempted to close his eyes and savor the memory of what had been, but instead he barely blinked. He watched the quick, darting movement of her eyes beneath her closed lids.
     
She was dreaming.
     
Reichen wondered how long she’d been sleeping, or where her dreams had carried her that her pulse would be beating as rapidly as a skittish hare’s. His thirsting gaze drifted down from the delicate beauty of her face to the smooth golden brown skin of her throat. Ticking frantically at the right side of her neck, her artery beat beside a small scarlet-colored birthmark. Reichen’s fangs were already filling his mouth, but now they throbbed, his eyes rooted on that tender patch of flesh with its diminutive teardrop-and-crescent-moon symbol riding so close to Claire’s pulse.
     
Jesus, he was parched.
     
His belly was tight and empty, his limbs heavy and fatigued. He licked his lips, hardly able to keep himself from leaning in a bit closer, until the light beat of her pulse was banging in his own veins as loud and demanding as a drum.
     
God, he thirsted… so deeply that the need was primal, animal, urging him to sweep in and take his fill like the predator he truly was.
     
That it was Claire beneath him was the only thing that made him pause. How long had he wondered what she would taste like? How many times had he come thisclose—hell, even closer than this—to pressing his fangs into her buttery soft skin and drinking from her vein? He’d wanted that more than anything at one time. But it was the one thing he’d never done, not even in their most fevered moments together.
     
As much as he’d hungered to taste her, to bond her to him through blood, he had never taken his need for Claire that far. She was a Breedmate. Unlike the larger percentage of Homo sapiens females walking the planet, she was one of a small number bearing unusual blood and DNA properties.
     
Claire and those like her, born with the crimson stamp somewhere on their bodies, were also uniquely gifted with extraordinary psychic abilities. And, unlike other human women, they had the ability to form an unbreakable bond with members of the Breed and bear their young. When a Breedmate offered her blood to one of Reichen’s kind, it was a precious gift—the most sacred of all. It forged a bond that could be severed only by death.
     
Reichen couldn’t lie to himself and pretend that he’d never been tempted. But he’d hardly been the kind to settle down, especially then. For all his libertine ways, and as laughable as it seemed to him now, his honor had prevented him from taking something from Claire that could never be called back. One sip of her blood meant she would live in him for as