Darion scoffed. “No? Not sure?”
Gopnik vigorously shook his head. He screamed a second later, because that’s all the time it took for Darion to open the cell door and flash inside to grab the lying bastard under his jaw with one hand. Darion lifted Gopnik in his grasp, higher and higher, until the human’s feet danced an inch off the floor of the cell.
“How about now?” Darion glared into the Opus soldier’s terrified eyes, his lip curling away from his emerged fangs. “Touati knew about the assault on the theater, didn’t he? He’s the one who made sure you and your crew were able to get in past any security.”
Gopnik sputtered what sounded like an affirmative. His face was turning from red to a sick-looking purple under Darion’s vise-grip around his throat. “P-please,” he gasped. “Please! I can’t . . . can’t . . . breathe . . .”
It took every bit of self-control to keep from snuffing the life out of the piece of shit right then and there. Gopnik didn’t deserve to live after the scores of deaths that stained his and his comrades’ hands. Didn’t deserve any mercy after what had happened to Lucan tonight. Because of this human and his associates, Darion’s mother was suffering in unspeakable agony just a few hundred feet above their heads.
Darion dropped the man unceremoniously to the cell floor. While Gopnik coughed and wheezed, Darion sank into a crouch in front of him.
“As of tonight, breathing is the last of your concerns.”
“Ah, shit. Dare, what are you--”
Gideon’s alarmed voice barely reached Darion’s ears before he had yanked Gopnik forward and sank his fangs into the human’s neck.
Blood gushed into his mouth while Gopnik screamed and struggled. All futile efforts. Darion drank hard and fast, without an ounce of hesitation.
But his goal wasn’t to kill the human.
He was going to drain him--just to the brink of death, where Gopnik’s humanity would ebb away, leaving a pliable shell in its place. A Minion. Unquestioningly obedient, and bound to serve the Breed vampire who made him.
Gideon obviously realized what was happening and uttered a curse under his breath. “For fuck’s sake, Darion. This isn’t how we do things . . . there are lines we don’t cross.”
Darion let go of Gopnik and swiveled his head toward Gideon. The warrior wasn’t alone behind him anymore. Several Order members had arrived and now stood in the chamber with him. Rafe and Devony. Hunter, Brock, Nathan and Jax.
They all stared in stunned silence. Even a bit of horror.
Darion rose, wiping his bloody mouth on the back of his hand. “New rules,” he announced tersely. “After what Opus did tonight, there are no lines we can’t cross.”
He glanced down at his Minion, who was already recovering from the draining bite. Gopnik blinked dully at the audience gathered outside the cell, then his gaze lifted to find Darion.
“Master,” he murmured, getting up from the floor as if awaiting instructions.
Darion looked at his fellow warriors again. “No more waiting or searching for a way in to Opus’s inner circle. We’ve got everything we need right here. Let’s get to work.”
He strode out of the chamber and headed for the Order’s war room, his comrades silently following his lead.
CHAPTER 9
Nathan stepped out of the Order’s war room several hours later with Rafe, Devony and Jax. None of them said a word as the sound of their combat boots echoed crisply on the marble floor of the corridor.
What was there to say after the night they’d just been through?
Lucan Thorne was as good as a walking dead man after Opus Nostrum’s attack.
His Breedmate was in so much shared agony, not even a heavy trance had eased her suffering.
As for their son, the fact that he had made a Minion of the captured Opus soldier had shocked everyone. Not only because that kind of act was considered a violation of honor among the Order, a tactic used by their enemies but never by them, but also because the warrior who had chosen to cross that line had been one of the steadiest, most calmly logical and strategic voices in all of the Order.
Tonight, even Darion Thorne had been pushed beyond his limits.
Nathan could hardly blame him.
Vengeance boiled in the veins of every Order member, himself included. No Breed male wanted to consider the hellish madness of Bloodlust. Nor the horrific suffering it would inflict on their blood-bonded mates.
None of the warriors who’d been in the room with Darion tonight or reporting in virtually from other locations was ready to give up on Lucan. Yet few of them dared hope the Gen One leader of the Order would, by some miracle, be able to recover from the massive dose of Red Dragon he’d ingested.
