Aric Chase snorted a laugh. “You mean the reputed mistress? If this woman is under thirty, brainless, and full of plastic, odds are pretty good Crowe was banging her.”

“We don’t have a physical description,” Gideon said. “We also don’t have work history, tax records, nada. All we’ve got is a name registered to an IP address, which I then ran down a bit more by hacking into several layers of the ISP’s parent company records. A few more database taps, log file scrubs, and I got a hit on a location in Finglas, County Dublin.”

Dante and Tess’s son, Rafe, smirked. “Anyone with poor enough taste to be spending time with some Atlantean scumbag is suspect in my book.” Rafe shot a glance at Zael. “No offense.”

Zael arched a wry brow. “You’re right. Crowe was a scumbag. What’s the name of this woman?”

“Iona Lynch,” Gideon replied. “Any ties to your people that you know of?”

“None that I’m aware of. Crowe may have been Atlantean, but he had been gone from the realm for a very long time. What he did and who he associated with in the time since is anyone’s guess.”

“I’ve never heard the name either,” Brynne said. “If I could get access to my old JUSTIS records, I might be able to search—”

“Been there, done that.” Gideon’s smile was a little sheepish, but mostly smug. “I’ve had my hands up JUSTIS’s skirts for a long time. Anything in their global databases or secured servers is ours as well. They don’t have anything on this woman. No one does.”

“Except us now,” Rafe said. The warrior had his blonde mother’s looks but his father’s dark tenacity. “If this woman has anything to do with Crowe, she might be the only person we’ve got who can help us unmask the other members of Opus.”

Dante nodded in agreement with his son. “And if Iona Lynch is part of Opus, then we need to get our hands on her and do it yesterday. We sure as fuck don’t want another situation like what happened with that Irish lawyer, Hayden Ivers.”

The men were right. And Lucan was still simmering over the Order’s near miss with Ivers. They’d already had a team on the ground at the human’s house, closing in on the bastard, when Ivers popped some poison then set his own house on fire to avoid capture.

Mathias Rowan looked Lucan’s way. “Shall I put my London team on this?”

“No. You’re spread thin enough, between the panic in the fallout of the JUSTIS attack and now this hit on the GNC. I need you and your team ensuring the security of the council members over there, Mathias.”

The London commander gave a nod. “Nova and I can be ready to return anytime.”

“Within the hour. We’ll have the jet readied for you,” Lucan said. He met the concerned faces of the rest of the Order. “We need to be vigilant in our other cities too. Commanders should head back to your bases as soon as possible and be ready for the worst.”

“Worse than what’s happened these past couple of days?” Aric Chase asked.

“Something can always be worse, son.” Sterling Chase’s grim reply echoed what Lucan and the other warriors surely were thinking.

Aric was new to the business of war, and although he was every bit as lethally skilled as any member of the Order, he was barely tested. He couldn’t be expected to understand what Lucan and the other warriors had learned through centuries of bloodshed and death.

They had charged into too many battles with too many enemies to make the mistake of believing that any crisis was as bad as it could possibly get.

Something could always be, and often was, far worse than you expect.

All you could do was pray you beat the monster before it beat you.

“Rafe and Aric,” Lucan said, his thoughts returning to the other problem they couldn’t afford to ignore. “We do need a stealth team to track down this Lynch woman in Ireland and hold her for questioning. Can the two of you be ready to leave with Mathias and Nova tonight?”

The two warriors exchanged an eager look.

“Hell yeah,” Rafe said. “Let’s go get the bitch.”

 

 

CHAPTER 11

 

After the warriors went off to carry out their orders from Lucan, Zael found himself pulled into a conversation with Dylan and Jenna. As much as he wanted to give both women his full attention, there was another female who was currently driving him to distraction.

It didn’t help matters that she was gone.

Brynne left the room as soon as the meeting had ended. Left it as abruptly as if her hair was on fire, to be more precise. No explanation. Not even a glance in his direction before she slipped away and didn’t return.

Was something wrong?

Where the hell was she?

Finally, he couldn’t take not having those answers. With vaguely murmured excuses, he slipped out of the room and headed into the corridor at a determined pace. Maybe she was with Tavia and the other women. Then again, headstrong investigator Brynne might just as likely be in the technology center with Gideon, persuading him to brief her on all of the intel he was gathering on Opus.

“If you’re looking for Brynne, she’s not down here.” Carys came out of another room up ahead in the corridor, accompanied by a dark-haired, hard-looking Breed male. The immense vampire held her hand possessively, yet tenderly, leaving no question that this was Rune, the cage-fighting nightmare she had recently taken as her mate.

“Did you see where she went?” Zael didn’t even attempt to dodge the truth. It wouldn’t have done much good with Carys anyway, considering what she’d walked in on a short while ago.

More accurately, what she had almost walked in on.

She pointed to the elevator that went to the residential areas upstairs.

“Thanks, Carys.”

“Good luck,” she called after him with a giggle as he all but sprinted in that direction.

Zael didn’t bother waiting for the lift. Using the small bit of crystal on the thong at his wrist, he closed his eyes and pictured the third floor corridor. Light flashed behind his closed lids.

When he opened them a moment later, he was standing in front of the door to Brynne’s suite. He knocked on the panel and waited.

And waited some more….

“Brynne?” He knocked harder now, his preternatural hearing picking up the sounds of quiet movement inside. He tried the knob and swore when he found it locked from inside. “Brynne, is everything okay? Open up.”