The last thing Edgar Fabien or any of his associates needed on their side was a grasping pissant like Alexei Yakut. He was a loose cannon, one that would have to be dealt with carefully. If Fabien had his druthers, he'd opt for swift extermination, but there was someone else who ultimately would need to make that call.
As for the captive member of the Order? Now, that was intriguing. That was a boon well worth considering, and the many appealing possibilities it presented made Fabien's four-hundred-year-old heart beat a little faster.
"I will have to make a few...arrangements," he said. "It may take me an hour or so to line up resources and make the drive out to the lodge to retrieve the prisoner."
"One hour," Alexei Yakut agreed eagerly. "Don't keep me waiting any longer than that."
Fabien bit back his acid reply and ended the call with a terse "I will see you then."
He sat down on the edge of his desk and looked out at the nighttime skyline twinkling in the distance beyond his Darkhaven estate. Then he walked to his safe and twisted the combination lock, turned the crank handle to open the secured storage box. Inside was a cell phone reserved for emergency calls only. He hit a programmed number and waited for the encrypted signal to connect.
When the airless voice on the other end answered, Fabien said, "We have a situation."
Heavy chains circled his bare torso, binding him to a rough-hewn wooden chair. Nikolai felt similar restraints on his hands, which were caught behind him, and his feet, which were bound at the ankles and held hard against the chair legs. He'd taken a hell of a beating, and not just from the debilitating mind blast he'd gotten courtesy of Renata. Thanks to that crippling blow, he had been in and out of consciousness for some time, struggling just to lift his eyelids even now. Of course, part of the problem there was that his face was bruised and battered, his eyes swollen, lips cracked open and bitter with the taste of his own blood. He'd been too weak to put up much of a fight when Lex and his guards had worked him over like a punching bag as they stripped him down to his skivvies and hauled him into the lodge's great room to await his fate.
Nikolai didn't know how long he'd been sitting there. Long enough that his hands felt numb from lack of circulation. Long enough to have noticed when Renata had come through the room a while ago, protectively ushering Mira away from the whole ugly scene. He had watched her from under a hank of his sweat-soaked hair, seeing the pain and tension in her face as she'd shot a baleful glance in his direction.
Her reverb was probably hitting her pretty hard by now, he guessed. Niko told himself that the twinge he felt was just another muscle screaming from abuse; he couldn't possibly be stupid enough to feel any kind of sympathy for the female's suffering. He couldn't possibly be stupid enough to care what she thought of him - that she might actually think he'd done what Lex accused him of - but damn it, he did care. His frustration at not being able to talk to Renata only amplified his physical pain and fury. Across the room from him, the four guards were examining his weapons and the handmade hollowpoint titanium rounds that were one of Nikolai's personal creations. They had all of his gear laid out on a trestle table, well out of his reach. Niko 's cell phone - his link to the Order - lay in shards on the floor. Lex had taken great pleasure in smashing it under his boot heel before he left Nikolai to the supervision of his guards.
One of the beefy Breed males said something that made the other three laugh before he pivoted around with Niko's semiauto and pointed it in his direction. Nikolai didn't flinch. In fact, he barely breathed, watching from within the puffy slit of his left eye, every muscle slumped as if he were still unconscious and unaware of his surroundings.
"Whattaya say we wake him up?" joked the guard with the gun in his hand. He swaggered toward Niko, temptingly within arm's reach, if Niko's arms hadn't been heavily secured behind him. The nose of the 9mm lowered slowly, down past his chest, then past his abdomen too. "I say we castrate this murdering piece of shit. Blow his balls off and let the Enforcement Agency take him away in pieces."
"Kiril, stop being a jackass," one of the others warned. "Lex said we couldn't touch him."
"Lex is a pu**y." Polished black steel grated with a cold snick as Kiril chambered a round. "In two seconds, this warrior's going to be nothing but a pu**y too."
Nikolai held himself very still as the gun pressed snugly against his groin. Part of his patience was born of genuine fear, as he was rather fond of his manly bits and had no wish to lose them. But overriding even that was the understanding that his opportunities to turn this situation in his favor were few and fleeting. He had shaken off most of the internal effects of Renata 's talent, but he couldn't be sure of his physical strength unless he tried it.
And if he tried it now and failed...well, he didn't want to contemplate the odds of walking away with his manhood intact if he tried to break out of his bonds and succeeded only in upsetting trigger-happy Kiril.
A hard palm cuffed the side of his skull. "You in there, warrior? I got something for you. Time to wake up."
Eyes closed to conceal their change from blue to amber, Nikolai let his head loll bonelessly with the blow. But inside of him, fury was beginning to kindle in his belly. He had to hold it at bay. Couldn't let Kiril or the others see the change in his dermaglyphs and risk telegraphing the fact that he was very much awake and aware and totally pissed off.
"Wake up," Kiril growled.
He started to lift Niko's chin, but then a noise outside the lodge drew his attention away. Gravel spraying and crunching underneath the tires of approaching vehicles. A fleet of them, by the sound of it.