Although he hadn't confided in her about his first call to the Order's compound that night, Corinne had heard enough on his end of the conversation to know that something bad had happened while Hunter had been with her. She'd heard Dragos's name and the mention of a young Darkhaven boy whose family and home had recently been lost to Dragos's violence. From the little bit she'd gathered, and from Hunter's elusive, almost forbidding, expression right now, it seemed pretty clear that Dragos had somehow managed to gain the upper hand.
"Are they in terrible danger, Hunter?"
"We are in the midst of war," he answered, his maddeningly calm voice sounding more bleak than apathetic. "Until Dragos is dead, everyone is in terrible danger."
He wasn't speaking only about the residents of the Order's compound. Not even the warriors and the Breed nation combined. The war Hunter referred to encompassed something much larger than that. He was speaking of Dragos's threat to the world in total. If anyone else had said such a thing, she might have chalked it up to dramatics. But this was Hunter. Exaggeration wasn't a part of his personal lexicon. He was factual and concise. He was exact with both his words and his deeds, and that only made the weight of his statement settle all the more heavily on her.
Corinne sat back, unable to hold his piercing golden stare. She swiveled her head and looked out the tinted passenger-side window of the car, watching the side of the small jet open to allow the stairs to fold out and descend to the concrete floor of the hangar.
"Are you sending me back to Boston?"
"No." Hunter turned off the car's engine. "I'm not sending you anywhere. You are to stay with me for the time being. Lucan has charged me with your temporary safekeeping."
She glanced away from the waiting aircraft and ventured another look at her remote companion. She wanted to argue that she didn't need anyone's safekeeping, not when she'd just tasted freedom, bitter as that taste had been so far. But his announcement raised a bigger question. "If we're not going to Boston, then where is that plane headed?"
"New Orleans," he replied. "Gideon has been able to substantiate Regina Bishop's recollection of Henry Vachon. He owns several properties in the New Orleans area and is presumed to reside there. As of this moment, Vachon is our most viable link to Dragos."
Corinne's heart thumped hard in her chest. Henry Vachon was the Order's best link to Dragos ... which meant he was also her best link to Dragos. Perhaps the only link she had to finding out what had happened to her son.
As much as she wanted to reject the idea of being leashed to Hunter or to anyone else, a larger part of her understood that she had few options and even fewer resources at her disposal. If hitching her wagon to Hunter would bring her closer to Henry Vachon and any information regarding her child, she had to do it. Anything for her child.
"What will you do," she asked, "if you are able to find Vachon?"
"My mission is simple: Determine his connection to Dragos and extract any useful intelligence I can. Then neutralize the target to disable any potential future fallout."
"You mean you intend to kill him," Corinne said, not a question but a grim understanding. Hunter's stark eyes showed no waver whatsoever. "If I determine that Vachon does in fact have an allegiance to Dragos - past or present - he must be eliminated."
She felt herself nodding faintly, but inside she was unsure what to think. She couldn't feel pity for Henry Vachon if he had anything to do with her ordeal, but another part of her wondered how Hunter's brutal occupation must impact the one who dealt so frequently in death.
"Does it ever bother you, the things you have to do?" She spoke the question before she'd had a chance to decide if it was her place to ask it or not. Before she'd had the time to worry whether or not she wanted to know the answer. "Does life truly mean so little to you?"
Hunter's harsh, handsome face didn't flinch. The angles of his high cheekbones and square-cut jaw were rigid, as unforgiving as sharp-edged steel. Only his mouth seemed soft, full lips held with neither a scowl nor a smirk, only placid, maddening neutrality. But it was his eyes that held her the most transfixed. Beneath the crown of his closecropped blond hair, his eyes were penetrating, probing. As sharply as they bore into her, however, they seemed even more determined to reveal nothing of themselves no matter how deeply she searched.
"I deal in death," he answered then, no apology or excuse. "It is a role I was born into, one I was trained to do very well."
"And you never doubt?" She couldn't help pressing, needing to know. Wanting to understand this formidable Breed male who seemed so solitary and alone. "You never question what you do - not ever?"
Something dark flashed across his face in that instant. There was a flicker of evasion in his eyes, she thought. Brief but impossible to miss, and shuttered a second later by the downward sweep of his lashes as he palmed the car keys and dropped them into the center console of the vehicle.
"No," he answered finally. "I don't question anything my duties require me to do. Not ever."
He opened the driver-side door and began to step out of the vehicle. "The plane is ready for us. We must go now, while the night is still on our side."
"They're on the way to New Orleans now."
Lucan glanced up as Gideon ended his call with Hunter and came back to the tech lab's conference table where Tegan and he stood, poring over a set of unrolled blueprints. "No further issues with Corinne Bishop or her kin in Detroit?"
"Hunter didn't seem to be concerned," Gideon replied. "Said he had the situation under control."