Darker After Midnight by Lara Adrián

beautiful,” said Dante’s mate, Tess, who’d come into the room as well now. She held their three-day-old infant son in her arms, a pink-skinned, swaddled bundle that cooed and gurgledwithin the pale blue blanket that surrounded his tiny form. She lowered her voice to a tender whisper as she dipped her face toward her child. “Look at this, Xander. Your very first Christmas tree.”
    As she spoke, Gideon’s longtime mate, Savannah, and Elise, who’d been mated to Tegan for only the past year, entered the great room too. It didn’t take more than a moment for all of the women, Mira included, to cluster around Tess and the baby. Not even Gabrielle was immune. She ditched Lucan without a word, apparently drawn like the others by some invisible, female-mesmerizing beacon to the presence of such a little package of innocent life.
    Lucan spared the baby and his admirers only a passing notice, and begrudging at that. He’d long felt that the Order’s base of operations was no place for children, let alone helpless infants. Then again, until he’d met and fallen in love with Gabrielle, he hadn’t been too keen on females underfoot at the compound either.
    Not that this was a compound, exactly. Or anything close to a viable command base, least of all now, when the Order needed every tactical advantage it could get in this war with Dragos.
    He looked around him, at the borrowed Darkhaven in the middle of a secluded forest, the cozy great room with its fireplace and soaring rafters and the enormous pine that stretched up toward them, fragrant with the evergreen scent of the outdoors. He looked at the people who stood around him there, most of his brothers in arms and their beloved mates. The family he’d never wanted but had somehow ended up having anyway.
    And then he looked at Gabrielle.
    She was his irresistible beacon. His greatest strength, and his most vulnerable weakness. She was his heart. And it was there that he felt a tightness growing as he watched her stroke the velvety cheek of the baby in Tess’s arms. She leaned her face down and kissed the infant’s delicately rounded brow, and the pure beauty in that single instant made the fist around Lucan’s heart squeeze even tighter.
    He didn’t want to acknowledge this thing that was infiltratinghis body. This queer ache deep inside him that could mean no good, especially now.
    It was a relief to hear the sudden, long stride of boots pounding in the hallway. The urgent beat thrust him into battle mode in an instant, even before Tegan appeared, trouble written across the warrior’s stern face. “More bad news out of Boston.”
    “Chase?” Lucan asked, dreading the answer as the rest of the room fell into an equally grave silence.
    Tegan nodded. “Gideon just got wind of it on an Internet news-feed. Senator Clarence is dead, Lucan. Brutally attacked and killed in his home, along with several of his security detail. And guess who vanished without a trace from the police station last night?”
    Lucan’s veins erupted with fury. “Son of a bitch. What the fuck is wrong with Harvard?”
    But he didn’t really need to ask that, and Tegan didn’t bother to answer. They’d both brushed shoulders with the addiction that Chase was suffering from now. And if it turned out that Bloodlust had driven him to kill—especially so blatantly, and such a highly visible individual whose death could have irrevocable consequences for all of the Breed nation—then Chase had effectively just signed his own death warrant.

CHAPTER NINE
     

     
    C HASE FLICKED UP the collar of his coat as he rounded a corner off a dark side street in the city and headed deeper into the evening crush of pedestrians and rush-hour commuters. His gunshot wounds were bleeding again. He could feel the liquid heat of his own blood seeping through the fabric of the baggy jeans and lumberjack flannel shirt he’d pinched from a church thrift shop box overflowing with holiday donations. His tan