“Occam’s Razor,” Syre murmured, his mind shifting through the known facts.

“Fuck Occam. I’d like to shove his razor up his ass.”

Brows lifting, he refocused on his son. “Use your anger to strengthen your focus.”

“None of us have our head in the game, Dad. We’re al reeling.” Torque took a deep breath. “But the reason I interrupted your afternoon snack is Vash. I just got off the phone with Salem, and he’s concerned about the Alpha.”

“So am I.” He would never forget the sight of Vash pinned to a tree by a bristling, infuriated lycan—a breed she had just cause to revile.

“He fucked her last night.”

A long moment passed as Syre’s brain struggled to process the impossible. “Be careful how you speak of her.”

“How else am I supposed to say it?” Leaning forward, Torque set his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands. “I know how she feels about lycans, and this one is under suspicion for Nikki’s kidnapping.”

“But we seem to have discovered that he’s not responsible.”

“Let’s not forget the lycan she tortured for information. What are the chances the Alpha doesn’t know about that or that she was hunting him when she did it? You ever heard of a lycan not avenging the unprovoked death of a packmate?”

“You think he forced her? Or extorted her cooperation in some way? Is that what Salem said?” Syre’s voice was low and furious. The thought twisted through his mind, rousing a murderous ferocity.

He would raze the earth to protect Vashti. She was his conscience, his adviser, his hammer, his ambassador, and countless other extensions of himself. She was the strongest woman he’d ever known, yet he’d seen her shattered into pieces. Utterly broken and defiled. She’d pul ed herself together in the years since, but the cracks and fissures remained. While others thought she was harder and more inviolate than she had ever been, he knew she was more fragile. It was why he forced himself—against every instinct—to keep her on the front lines. If she thought he viewed her as diminished by the desecrations inflicted on her, it would be a blow he didn’t think she was strong enough to bear. His belief in her strength was what bolstered her belief in herself.

“Salem doesn’t know what’s going on; that’s why he cal ed. He only knows that they had sex and the Alpha wouldn’t let him see Vash this morning, said she was sleeping.”

Syre pushed to his feet, knowing damn wel that Vash hadn’t slept in ages.

“She hasn’t touched a man since Charron,” Torque reminded him unnecessarily. “You real y think her first go would be with a lycan?”

“Ready my plane.” Syre stalked toward his bedroom to pack. He’d heard enough. “I want to take off within the hour.”

Vash blinked against the harsh glare of the sun as she exited Shred. Behind her, Elijah growled at the Vegas heat not yet at its fiercest. Lycans were sensitive creatures, which—if she’d been thinking clearly—might’ve clued her in to how much Elijah enjoyed being touched. She knew now, and she damned the time constraints that prevented her from indulging him. She’d had him purring at the time Salem came back to pound on the door. Her captain had given them barely thirty minutes between interruptions, just long enough for Salem to get a blow job while he cal ed Torque, taking multitasking to the extreme.

If she could have…if there had been time…she would have sent Salem away so Elijah could finish what he’d started. She was shamed now to think of what she’d done to him the night before in her fear. Her own astonishing weakness for him made her so vulnerable, which both terrified her and made her blind to his returning vulnerability where she was concerned. That she, a woman who’d long ago learned to use her attractiveness against men, could miss that susceptibility was a sign of how skewed she was. It would have soothed her body and mind to do it over again, to start the day with gentle morning sex to erase the lingering anger of the night before and to reestablish her control of herself and the situation.

Taking a deep breath, she tried to clear Elijah from her mind. She’d reached the Jeep alongside Salem before she realized the Alpha wasn’t with them. Turning around, she looked for him and found him circling slowly, his head tilted back to put his nose in the air. Something in the way he held his body warned her. She grabbed one of her katanas and her cel phone from the backseat and returned to him.

“What is it?” Vash inhaled again, but her sense of smel wasn’t as acute as a lycan’s.

As she shoved her phone into her top, he looked at her, his face grim. “An infected. No more than two blocks over. Somewhere to the north of us.”

Yanking his shirt over his head, he toed off his boots and dropped his jeans. In an instant he was wolven, a big and beautiful y regal beast. A moment beyond that, he was gone.

She was right on his tail, tracking the scent of him that seemed embedded in her senses. Distantly, she was aware of Salem at her side. They’d been hunting together so long it was effortless. He feinted in counterpoint to her, darting around obstacles like Dumpsters and discarded cardboard boxes. With nary a signal between them, they took to the wal s, racing opposite each other down an al eyway. Her hair whipped in the wind, her steel stilettos bit into the stucco, breaking off chunks to crumble to the ground below.

And in the back of her mind she was aware that Elijah had thrown himself into a hunt for a vampire without a second thought. One of her people, as they were al hers. As if it was instinctive for him to do so when in truth he’d simply been wel trained. By Adrian.

How could that have slipped in importance in her mind?

The shattering of glass preceded her turning a corner. Elijah’s tail disappearing through a broken window directed her along with his scent. It was a building under construction; most of the windows stil bore the manufacturer’s sticker. Salem bounded through first, widening the opening. Vash sailed through after him, tucking and rol ing and springing up onto her feet. And froze.

The construction workers that should have been al over the site were al over the floor instead. In pieces.

Salem cursed. Elijah crouched low and growled.

The bare concrete was covered in blood and entrails. Limbs and heads were scattered across the floor or lifted to ravenous foaming maws of at least a dozen wraiths. Bloodshot eyes glittered, nostrils twitching as they smel ed fresh meat.

Vash had seen such carnage before, when a rogue minion, driven insane by the deterioration of his mortal soul, had Changed everyone in his family. Lost to the initial bloodlust of the Change, they’d gone on a rampage, slaughtering their entire neighborhood.

God. It never got easier to bear.

One of the wraiths stood apart from the others. Hunched and shuffling, he darted back and forth swiftly, wearing a semicircular path in the blood.

His gaze was riveted to Elijah, who paced with restless energy. With his ears flattened to his head, the Alpha snarled a threat.

The sickened vamp glanced at Vash and Salem. “Go. Away.”

The words were uttered in a voice so guttural it took her a moment to figure out what he’d said. “Fuckin’ A. Did that wraith just talk?”

Just as she processed the possibility of higher brain function, the wraith leaped a good twenty feet across the room…directly at her. Startled, she raised her katana, knowing she was a split second too late and steeling herself for the impact.

Elijah blocked the assault in midair, jaws first, catching the wraith in the juncture between the shoulder and neck. A sickening crunch reverberated through the space, inciting an unexpected reaction—the bloodpack abandoned their feast and lunged at the powerful lycan en masse.

Vashti leaped into the fray with a scream of rage, cutting anything that got in her way. Salem waded in bare-handed, cracking heads and necks as he progressed. None of the wraiths came after them. They remained dog piled on Elijah, ignoring the incoming vamps with a complete lack of self-preservation. Tossing his head, Elijah threw one after another over the writhing bodies surrounding him, his growls and barks lost amid the mindless screeches of his attackers.

She sliced through the frenzy toward the center, her heart pounding when she lost sight of him completely. Spurting blood obscured her vision as she hacked her way deeper. She swiped at her eyes, searching for Elijah amid the massacre, yel ing his name.

His yelp of pain seized her lungs. His pained howl broke her paralysis. “Salem! Goddamn it. Help him. ”

“I can’t get to him. Shit. I’m fucking trying!”

Yanking heads back by fistfuls of gray hair, she ripped wraiths off her lycan and decapitated them, her stomach knotting at the sight of chunks of bloodied fur clinging to their foaming mouths.

An agonized scream rent the air, fol owed by another.

Not Elijah. The tone wasn’t deep enough. Jesus. The room was spinning around her in her panic.

She hauled another wraith back and saw Elijah in the space she’d opened up. The wraith’s body went limp in her grasp, then began to convulse.

Another wraith jerked away. Then another.

Suddenly what was left of the bloodpack fel away from the downed lycan. Flopping on their backs like fish out of water, they writhed, foam pouring from their mouths and their eyes rol ing back. The one who’d spoken clutched his head, wailing. Abruptly, he ceased, crashing to the ground in a dead faint.

Or just dead, period.

When nothing moved in the lake of blood, Vash dropped her blade and sank to her knees beside Elijah, who lay panting on his side, his fur matted and his flesh torn away in deep gouges. She reached out, wanting to comfort but unsure of how she could.

“Don’t touch him!” Salem kicked bodies out of the way as he approached.

Elijah gave a low warning growl.

“He’s a wounded animal, Vash. You know better.”

Yes, she knew. Lycans were at their fiercest when they were most vulnerable. But as she looked into the green eyes of the wolf, she saw the man.

The man who’d mastered her during the long night, then surrendered to her touch in the morning.

“Can you shift?” she asked softly, knowing that the process of shifting forms would knit some of his injuries and staunch the copious amounts of blood draining from his body.

His eyes closed on a shuddering breath. He was stil for so long she feared she’d lost him.

“Elijah!” The urgency in her voice made it harsh. Uncaring of the danger, she gingerly touched his head, stroking it. His eyelids lifted slowly, revealing unfocused irises. “Shift. Now. You can do it, you arrogant son of a bitch. You’re too fucking stubborn to let a couple of diseased vamps get the best of you.”

His rumbling growl was stronger than before, giving her wild hope.

“Vash—” Salem set his hand on her shoulder.

Elijah lifted his head and bared his teeth, snarling.

Salem yanked his hand back. “Crazy assed dog.”

“Salem wil have to take care of me if you can’t do it,” Vash goaded, fighting off another spurt of panic. “Raze, too. Maybe even that pretty pincushion I almost sucked on last night—”

Fire lit Elijah’s eyes. He began to shimmer, like heat waves rising from sun-scorched asphalt. For a breathless moment he hovered in that in- between state, flickering between human and lupine form. Then, with a rattling exhale, he settled before her as a nude, severely wounded man.

“Get the car,” she ordered over her shoulder, pul ing Elijah close to cradle his head in her lap.

Salem left so fast, he caused a draft. Around her, the wraith bodies began to gurgle and shake. She watched, horrified, as they disintegrated into puddles of a thick tarlike substance. “Eww.”

“Hey. I’m not…as bad off as I look,” Elijah whispered, his eyes stil closed.

“Of course not.” But the blood that wasn’t his was now clearly demarked by its obsidian coloring, leaving far too much crimson on his ravaged skin. It ran in thin rivulets over her lap and eroded canyons in the black ooze. “You damned heroic idiot. Stop protecting me. I can take care of myself.”

“And let you have al the fun?”

Pain twisted in her chest. Lifting her wrist to her mouth, Vash pierced the vein with her fangs and pressed the gushing wound to his mouth. He gagged, then struggled weakly, but she held fast, pinching his nose so that he was forced to swal ow. One gulp. Two. Three. His protests gained strength and she ceased, licking her wound closed.

“Turn me into a vampire,” he said hoarsely, “and you’l be the first I suck dry.”

“You’d have to take me down first.” She brushed his sweat and blood-soaked hair away from his forehead. His heart beat too strongly to slip into the Change, but if she’d waited another few minutes…? She pushed the thought away.

“This babying you’re doing…as good as a verbal admission that you like me.”

“Ha!” Her eyes stung, but she told herself that was from the blood spatter on her face. She couldn’t stop touching him, running her fingertips over his face and stroking through his hair to his scalp. “You pul ed this little stunt just to play on my sympathy.”

“Not my fault you’d look hot in one of those naughty nurse’s outfits.” His chest lifted and fel with a sharp breath.

Their banter was breaking her heart, knowing how much the effort was costing him. But she didn’t relent. As bad as it sucked, his pain was keeping his heartbeat elevated, which was helping to pump her healing blood through his veins. It was nowhere near as powerful as a seraph’s pure blood, but it would nevertheless speed his healing.

“Who knew I was so damn popular?” he groused. “Must be you, sweetheart. You want a piece of me…now they al do.”

The one wraith with some active brain cel s had baited Elijah. She’d bet her ass on it. He’d goaded the chase that led to this ambush and then provoked Elijah by attacking the woman covered in his scent.

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