"It's Nina," Kellan murmured, already rolling off Mira and throwing on his pants. He sent her a sober look. Mira scrambled out of the bed and hurried into his T-shirt and sweatpants. He glanced to make sure she was clothed, then flipped the lock with his mind and opened the door on Nina's ashen face.
"Oh, my God," the human woman gasped. "It's Vince. He - oh, my God!"
"What's going on?" Kellan demanded. "Where is he?"
"I don't know!" Nina shook her head, indigo hair tossing, sending the dozens of tiny metal loops swinging in her pierced earlobes. She was sobbing now. "Vince is gone. He took the van. He's got Ackmeyer with him."
Although Mira tried to stay in the background, she couldn't bite back her gasp of alarm. Even Kellan seemed to take the news with no small amount of shock. He went still for an instant, silent. Then seemed to shake it off like the leader he now was.
"Where?" His voice was a roll of thunder, dark and lethal, fully Breed. He stepped out into the corridor. "Where did he take him?"
"I don't know," Nina cried. "But Chaz and Candice tried to stop him. Oh, God . . . he killed Chaz. He's dead, Bowman. Vince slit his throat - "
"Jesus Christ," Kellan muttered. His shoulders slumped a bit, but when he spoke, his voice was level with cold command. "When did this happen? How long has the bastard been gone?"
Nina shook her head. "I don't know. A little while ago, not long. He killed Chaz, then he stole the van and took off."
Mira closed her eyes, absorbing the weight of all she was hearing. Jeremy Ackmeyer in the hands of a cold-blooded killer. Kellan betrayed by one of his own. A death among the ranks of his comrades.
"And Candice," Nina went on. She sucked in a hitching breath, then dissolved into more tears. "Vince stabbed her too. Doc's trying to take care of her, but she's bleeding really bad. He says the blade nicked an artery in her thigh. He can't get it to stop."
Kellan's answering curse was quiet but savage. He swung a look over his shoulder at Mira, somewhere between misery and apology. Mira's own guilt gnawed at her with sharp teeth. All of this violence and betrayal had happened while she and Kellan were making love.
Her body was still humming from the pleasure of Kellan's touch, but her chest was heavy with the knowledge that one life had been cut short today, another stolen away with Vince's escape. If anything happened to Candice now, Mira could see in Kellan's tormented eyes that he would never forgive himself.
She gave him a faint nod, understanding that whatever they'd shared in the privacy of his bed for the past few hours was over now. He wasn't hers in this moment; he belonged to them. To his comrades. His friends.
"They need you," Mira said quietly, meant for his ears alone. "Go to them."
Kellan took off like a shot, Nina trailing after him at a run.
Kellan didn't have to guess where Doc was treating Candice. The olfactory blast of spilled fresh red cells led him like a beacon to the cell where Ackmeyer had been held.
Jesus Christ.
Blood was everywhere. Pooling almost black under the crumpled slump of Chaz's unmoving body inside the opened cage. Splattered on the cement block walls. Smeared in a chaotic path by Vince's boots and Jeremy Ackmeyer's stumbling feet as he'd obviously been dragged away. And then there was Candice.
Lying supine inside the cell, arms splayed out at her sides, she was covered in blood from the front of her T-shirt down, with still more of it seeping out beneath her. Her legs were bare; Doc had apparently removed her jeans so he could work on the nasty puncture in her right thigh. His brown eyes sober, he glanced Kellan's way only briefly before returning all of his focus to treating Candice's wound.
Kellan's skin went tight, fangs filling his mouth. His vision had gone instantly red - not only in physical reaction to the presence of so much fresh-flowing blood but in deadly rage for the betrayal by one of his own. A betrayal that had resulted in the slaying of one friend and the grave injury of another.
All of this havoc and loss wreaked while Kellan had been distracted by the pleasure of having Mira in his bed.
He'd failed his crew in the worst possible way. Failed Jeremy Ackmeyer too, whom Kellan should have freed immediately upon learning of his innocence several hours ago. None of this would have happened if Kellan had kept his head on straight as the leader these people expected him to. They had entrusted their lives to him, trusted him to protect them.
Instead, he'd allowed himself to get caught up in a romantic entanglement with Mira that could only end in disaster. So, yeah, he'd failed her today as well, and it was too late to call back any of his mistakes.
"Goddamn it," he snarled, self-directed anger making his voice sound raw and violent, even to his own ears.
More than anything, he wanted to tear out of the bunker and hunt Vince down - daylight or not. He wanted the bastard to suffer for this, wanted to make him bleed. But it was Kellan's crew that was bleeding and suffering now - one of them bled out on the floor in front of him, another possibly heading that way too.
The sight of Candice injured so severely jolted Kellan back to his duty as the commander of this base and its people. He ignored the coppery gut-punch of Candice's bleeding wound as he walked to her side and went down on his haunches next to her.
Her breath raced between slack, pale lips. Her eyes were wide and unblinking, fixed on the ceiling as Doc bent her leg at the knee, elevating the wound, before fastening his belt around her thigh as a tourniquet.
Kellan grabbed her discarded jeans and rolled them into a makeshift pillow. As he lifted her head off the floor and rested it back onto the softer fabric, her glassy gaze slid to him. "Vince . . . I tried to stop him, but he - "