There was no outlet for his rage, no course of action in which to channel his fury. Instead, it coiled into a dark ball in his gut, leaving the rest of him to simply shut down.
The greatest assassin in the New Zone had been rendered completely powerless with one act, and now he was adrift. No matter how he tried to gather the frayed ends of his composure, his centuries of experience, he could not come up with a plan to find her that would not immediately get her killed and her body dumped somewhere for him to find.
As if reading his mind, Atticus’s hard voice came through the speaker on his phone like the crack of a whip, “We know she’s not dead. We’re going to find her.”
Harlan’s tone was flat when he replied, “Do we know that?”
“Yes, we do.” The sound of a car door slamming briefly interrupted him. Atticus had spent thirty minutes assembling a guard to keep his sister on complete lockdown before he hopped in his car to assist in Zia’s rescue — or recovery.
There was a low rumble of an engine in the background when he bit out, “Julius isn’t a fucking idiot. He might not know that she’s your anchor, but we know he’s probably been watching you, which means he’s seen you with her. He’ll know she’s important to you. There is not a chance on Burden’s Earth he’s gonna kill her when he can use her as leverage instead.”
There were, of course, worse things than murder, but no one in the room pointed this out.
The air was thick with anger and anticipation. Harlan got the distinct impression that every single person took Zia’s kidnapping almost as personally as he did.
Most of his men were themselves vampires. The others were an assortment of demons and predatory shifters. All of them knew that a mate was a sacred, precious thing, and all of them would kill to get Harlan’s anchor back because they understood he would do the same thing for them.
More than that, though, Zia wastheirs.
All of his men were hardened soldiers pulled from bad situations, and all of them were possessive, greedy bastards who knew when to latch on to a good thing. They adored Zia in their own quiet ways because she was kind to them without reservation.
When they went out, she often insisted that they join in the conversation. She invited them into the manor to play boardgames, and roped several baffled soldiers into assisting her in the garden. Michael helped her hang garlands of pine around their fireplace, and even Tarrence, a particularly antisocial lynx shifter in charge of cyber security for the estate, surprised her with an elaborate light display around the fountains.
Her loss wasn’t just devastating for Harlan. It was a fatal blow to the ugly, patchwork family they had scraped out of the gutters of the New Zone.
Harlan dropped his head and squeezed the back of his neck with both hands. He fought to throw off the hopelessness and the fear that clouded his judgment. Zia needed him to be the assassin, the ruthless criminal he was trained to be. She needed him to be herprotector,not this weak creature crippled by terror and inaction.
“She’s not dead,” he rasped, mostly to himself. “I’d know if she was dead. I wouldknow.”
But would he know if she was in pain? If she was being tortured? Harlan felt the bond, the magic that flowed in an invisible current even across whatever distance lay between them, but he couldn’t get a handle on much else. It was too new and he was an amateur when it came to nuanced magic. When the idea came up to track her using their new bond, he was immediately crushed to realize that he simply didn’t knowhow.
But he was certain he would feel it if she died. Even without the bond, he would feel it.
“Think about what you would do in his position,” Atticus said, drawing Harlan’s eyes away from the tops of his shoes and back to the phone on the coffee table. “Julius is going to let you stew for a while, really make you sweat, and then he’s gonna call you. He’s going to taunt you because he’s a sick sonuvabitch, but ultimately he’s going to demand you meet him somewhere to negotiate Zia’s return. He wants something from you, boss. He’s not gonna risk damaging his best bet of getting whatever that is.”
Harlan squeezed his neck harder, to the point of pain, and used the feeling to ground himself. His voice was raw when he replied, “Yes, that sounds like him.”
Like what I would do if I had no heart, no fucking honor, no godsdamned soul.
“Right. So what the fuck do you want to do when he calls?”
He felt every eye on him as his men waited, silent and still, for his answer. One sharply drawn breath cracked the ice that had encased him since he found Zia’s note — it splintered, the pieces falling away to reveal that molten core of pure, unbridled rage.
His anchor had beentaken.There was no greater sin. There was no retribution cruel enough.
Zia was the blood in his veins, the heart outside of his body, the mother of children yet to come, and the soul he did not know he possessed.
Julius thought he had the key to controlling Harlan in the palm of his hand.
What he really had was a gun pointed at his own fucking head.
“We get her back,” he answered, lifting his head to look each of his grim-faced men in the eye. “And then we make him answer for his crime.”
ChapterTwenty-One
The call came at nine,exactly two hours after Zia’s kidnapping.
Everyone froze as his phone rattled against the coffee table, their eyes swinging to the device like it more closely resembled a bomb.
