In the grand, bookshelf-lined study her father’s carved oak desk stood like an immense, unbreakable sentry. Fitting, considering she’d always thought of him in much the same way. Her protector, her champion, her shining knight.
She smiled wistfully, picturing him in the room that was filled with so many of his cherished treasures. His books and collectibles, his chessboard where he used to patiently teach her and her brother about logic and strategy and the patience required to win a war. Across from the big desk hung a painted portrait of her beautiful, dark-haired mother, a piece he’d had commissioned especially for that very spot on his study wall so he could see his beloved mate even when their work kept them apart.
Devony’s gaze sought out another picture, the framed family photograph on the edge of her father’s old desk. It greeted her in this room each morning, a reminder of those better times.
Devony pressed her fingertip to her lips, then touched each of the three smiling Breed faces that surrounded her in the photo. Her handsome, ginger-haired father, Roland Winters. Her daywalker mother, Camilla. And her older brother, Harrison, who’d also been born a daywalker, just like Devony.
They were all the family she’d had. She let her fingers rest on the cold glass that covered them.
“I love you,” she whispered in the emptiness of the room.
Then she slid her hand beneath the edge of the desk and pushed the button that was concealed on the underside.
One of the enormous built-in bookcases opened silently on its hinges. Behind it was a room her father had designed as a security feature of the large home. The hidden space had been constructed during the time not long after the Breed’s existence had been revealed to mankind. Back when wars between the races had been a terrifying new normal.
Daytime raids on Breed households by humans afraid of their night-dwelling neighbors were epidemic. Retaliations were brutal and blood-soaked.
Those wars that followed First Dawn had been mostly extinguished in the twenty years that passed since then, thanks in no small part to the work of the Order. The law enforcement officers of the Joint Urban Security Taskforce Initiative Squad around the world had helped too.
But hatred was a difficult disease to wipe out completely. It festered in silence, invading wherever it found the slightest purchase.
It waited for the opportunity to spread.
Waited for a new carrier to come along and give it fresh life.
And now it had found one in the terrorist group calling themselves Opus Nostrum.
Devony walked inside the former panic room and let her gaze travel over the maps and photos and dossiers that covered each of the four walls. Red strings attached to pins connected some of those individuals to others on the wall. Drug dealers, gangbangers, petty criminals. Corporation heads, politicians, community leaders. A few weeks ago, she’d added photos of Ricardo Cruz, Wayne Fishbaugh, Vincent Axelrod, and Eugene “Ocho” Snyder.
Many of the faces she’d added to the walls now had a large “X” drawn on them.
Before this was over, she expected to eliminate numerous more.
Because this room served a new purpose now.
No longer a place for panic, but one for cold and steady justice.
It was aiding in a new war—a very personal one.
Devony took a sip of her tea as her gaze moved along the images and connecting lines she’d established between groups and individuals. Eventually, she would find the link that led her to Opus. One day, she would pay them back for what they had taken from her.
Until then, she had to have patience.
And she was not about to let the former warrior from the Order knock her off that course.
CHAPTER 5
Devony rode her Triumph into the parking lot behind Snyder’s Exotic Auto in Roxbury.
At 10PMon a weekend, Ocho’s garage had been closed for several hours but a dim light glowed from the small windows above the two bays out front. Cruz’s dark gray Lambo was sitting in the nearly empty lot next to the rest of the group’s vehicles.
They were all here ahead of her. That didn’t exactly ease the niggle of anxiety that had been troubling her from the moment she’d received Cruz’s text, instructing her to come for a meeting at the gang’s unofficial headquarters.
All day, she’d been plagued with paranoia about her standing in the group.
It was bad enough that she nearly revealed herself to them at Asylum. Then, at Judah LaSalle’s party, she had practically bolted from the place after her unnerving run-in with Rafe on the terrace.
Had anyone noticed her extreme discomfiture around the Breed male?
