1001 Dark Nights: Bundle Seven Page 25

  Also from Laura Kaye

  The Hard Ink Series:

  Hard As It Gets

  Hard As You Can

  Hard to Hold On To

  Hard to Come By

  Hard to Be Good

  Hard to Let Go

  Hard Ever After

  Hard to Let Go

  A Hard Ink Novel

  By Laura Kaye

  Now Available!

  Click here to purchase.

  Beckett Murda hates to dwell on the past. But his investigation into the ambush that killed half his Special Forces team and ended his Army career gives him little choice. Just when his team learns how powerful their enemies are, hard-ass Beckett encounters his biggest complication yet--a seductive, feisty Katherine Rixey.

  A tough, stubborn prosecutor, Kat visits her brothers' Hard Ink Tattoo shop following a bad break-up--and finds herself staring down the barrel of a stranger's gun. Beckett is hard-bodied and sexy as hell, but he's also the most infuriating man ever. Worse, Kat's brothers are at war with the criminals her office is investigating. When Kat joins the fight, she lands straight in Beckett's sights . . . and in his arms. Not to mention their enemies' crosshairs.

  Now Beckett and Kat must set aside their differences to work together, because the only thing sweeter than justice is finding love and never letting go.

  * * * *

  Time slowed and Kat’s heart raced as Beckett slowly leaned in.

  By the time her mind shoved through the haze of surprise and lust to react, his lips were brushing hers.

  Just a brush of skin on skin, amazingly soft and tentative. So surprising given his size.

  The world froze for a long moment, but then that little bit of contact set off a flash fire in Kat’s blood. And apparently Beckett’s, too.

  Because the kiss turned instantly and blisteringly devouring. On a groan, his tongue invaded her mouth, and she sucked him in deep. Their hands pulled one another closer and their bodies collided. Their height differentiation was so great that Kat had to push onto her tiptoes and Beckett had to lean way down. Kat wasn’t sure if she pulled herself up or Beckett lifted her, but the next thing she knew her legs were wrapped around his hips and his hands gripped her ass.

  They stumbled into her room and Beckett kicked the door shut behind them. Kat moaned as her back came up against the wall and his erection ground against her core.

  With his tongue in her mouth and his hands roaming her body and his hips pressing maddeningly against the center of her need, Kat was possibly more overwhelmed than she’d ever been in her life. Beckett Murda was all she felt, saw, smelled, tasted. Her mind was on a repeating track of Wait … wait … omigod … what’s happening? But her body had totally left the station.

  Whatever small part of her wanted to pull back or slow down gave way to the more urgent need to let go. Let go of worrying about Cole. Let go of the fear she felt for her brothers. Let go of the horrible images she carried in her mind of the Hard Ink roof collapsing and Jeremy going down with it, which was the scariest thing she’d ever seen.

  Not to mention the conversation she needed to have, the one that would force her to break confidentialities and put her job at risk.

  So she did. Kat let it all go in favor of letting Beckett pull her under the waves with him.

  She plowed her fingers into his hair, which was just long enough to grip and tug, and squeezed her legs around his hips, bringing them closer. Creating more of that delicious friction. He groaned low in his throat, and the sound reverberated into her belly, causing her to grind her hips forward against him.

  Wait …wait…wait…turned into want…want…want…

  “Jesus, want you, too,” he growled. He kissed and licked at her jaw, her ear, her neck.

  “Beckett,” she rasped as he trailed little bites down the side of her throat. She bowed off the wall, thrusting against him. And, God, he was deliciously hard and thick between her legs.

  Suddenly, she wanted to know: Just. How. Thick.

  Stroke of Midnight

  A Midnight Breed Novella

  By Lara Adrian

  Acknowledgments

  I am thrilled to be part of the 1001 Dark Nights collection for a second time with this novella in my Midnight Breed vampire romance series. My thanks to the awesome and endlessly creative Liz Berry, MJ Rose, Jillian Stein, and everyone else working behind the scenes at Evil Eye Concepts to make the project a success. Big hugs to my fellow 1001 Dark Nights authors as well. Every year, the lineup gets more impressive and the depth of talent more amazing. I’m grateful for your support and honored to call so many of you my friends.

  And I have to send out lots of love and heartfelt thanks to my readers. I can’t tell you what it means to me that you continue to embrace my characters and my work. I hope you have fun reading this new Midnight Breed adventure, and I hope you enjoy all the rest still to come!

  With love,

  Lara Adrian

  CHAPTER 1

  Screams shot up from one of the many narrow, cobbled alleyways in the heart of Rome’s quaint old Trastevere ward. The shrieks of mortal terror pierced the night as effectively as a blade.

  Or, rather, a pair of razor-sharp fangs.

  Like the ones on the gang of lethal predators who’d shredded the throat of a human civilian in a dance club across the city only minutes ago.

  Shit. Jehan swung an urgent look over his shoulder to the two other Breed warriors currently on foot behind him. “They’re getting away.”

  He and his teammates from the Order’s Rome command center had been in pursuit of the four blood-thirsty Rogues since their patrol had been alerted to the killing at the club. They had contained the situation before any of the other humans had realized what was going on, but their mission wouldn’t be over until they ashed the feral members of their own race.

  “Split up,” he told his men. “Damn it, we can’t lose them! Close in from all sides.”

  His comrade and good friend, Savage, grinned and gave a nod of his blond head before veering right to take one of the other winding alleys on Jehan’s command. The other warrior, a hulking, shaved-head menace called Trygg, made no acknowledgment to his team leader before vanishing into the darkness like a wraith to carry out the order.

  Jehan sped like an arrow through the tight artery of the ancient street ahead of him, dodging slow-moving compact cars and taxis who were getting nowhere fast in the district that was clogged with tourists and club-hoppers even as the hour crept close to midnight.

  The public out and about tonight was a mix of human and Breed civilians, something that would have been unheard of just twenty years ago, before the Breed’s existence had been revealed to mankind.

  Now, in cities around the world, the two populations lived together openly. They worked together. Governed together. But their hard-won peace was fragile. All it might take was one horrific killing—like the one earlier tonight—to set off a global panic.

  While every Breed warrior of the Order had pledged his blood and breath to prevent that from happening, others among mankind and the Breed were secretly—and not-so-secretly—instigating war.

  Tonight’s Rogue attack had the stamp of conspiracy all over it. And it wasn’t the first. During the past few nights there had been a handful of others, in Rome and elsewhere in Europe. While it wasn’t unusual for one of Jehan’s kind to become irreversibly addicted to blood, the spate of recent slayings in all-too-public places by Rogues torqued up on some kind of Bloodlust-inducing narcotic had fingers pointing to the terror group called Opus Nostrum.

  Just a few days ago, the Order had scored a staggering hit on Opus, taking out its newest leader, who’d been headquartered in Ireland. The cabal was hobbled for now, but its hidden members were many and their machinations seemed to know no bounds. They and all who served them had to be stopped, or the consequences were certain to be catastrophic.

  Jehan was a blur of motion as he leapt over the hood of a standing taxi to vault himsel
f up onto the tiled rooftops above the thick congestion on the streets.

  His heavy black patrol boots made no sound as he traveled with preternatural stealth and speed over the uneven terrain of the buildings. He jumped from one rooftop to the next, following his instincts—and the trace, metallic scent of fresh blood that floated up on the night breeze as the Rogue attempted to escape his pursuers.

  He lived for this kind of action. The adrenaline rush. The thrill of the chase. The conviction that came from doing something with real purpose, something that would have true and lasting impact on his world.

  A far cry from the posh wealth and useless decadence he’d been born into with his family in Morocco.

  That old life was still trying to call him back, even though he hadn’t stepped foot on his homeland’s soil for more than a decade.

  It had been twelve months and a day since he’d received the message from his father. Jehan knew what that meant, and he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t heard every tick of the damned countdown clock in the time since.

  With a growl, he pushed aside reminders of the obligation he’d been pointedly ignoring. Right now, his focus was better spent on the more urgent mission in front of him.

  Down below in a twisting alleyway, Jehan spied one of the fleeing Rogues. Fingers gripping the handle of one of his titanium blades, he drew the weapon and let it fly. Direct hit. The dagger nailed the Rogue in the center of his spine, dropping him in his tracks.

  Ordinarily, it took more than that to disable one of the Breed, but the titanium was toxic to vampires who’d gone Rogue, and as corrosive as acid to their diseased bodies. In minutes or less, the corpse would be nothing but ashes in the street.

  Jehan didn’t wait to see the disintegration happen. As he continued his dash across the rooftops, he spotted Trygg gaining ground on one of the remaining Rogues. The big warrior took the escaping vampire down in a flash of movement. The Rogue howled, then abruptly fell silent when Trygg severed its head with a slice of his blade.

  Two down. Two to go.

  Make that one left to go. Jehan’s acute hearing picked up sounds of a brief struggle as Savage caught up to his quarry on a different stretch of cobblestones and delivered a killing strike of titanium.

  Jehan leapt to another roof, racing deeper into the ancient district of the city. His battle instincts heightened as he homed in on the last of the fleeing Rogues. The vampire made a crucial mistake, turning into an alleyway with no exit. A literal dead end.

  Jehan sailed off the edge of the rooftop and dropped to the cobbled street behind the Rogue, cutting off any hope of his escape. An instant later, Savage emerged from out of the shadows, just as the feral vampire spun around and realized he had nowhere left to run.

  The big male faced the two Order warriors. His fangs dripped with blood and sticky saliva. His transformed eyes glowed bright amber, the pupils fixed and narrowed to thin vertical slits in the center of all that fiery light. His jaw hung open as he roared, insane with Bloodlust and ready to attack.

  Jehan didn’t allow him the chance.

  He threw his dagger without mercy or warning. The titanium blade glinted in the moonlight as the weapon sliced through the distance and struck its mark, burying to the hilt in the center of the Rogue’s chest.

  The vampire roared in agony, then collapsed in a heap on the cobbles as the poisonous metal began to devour him.

  When the process had finished, Jehan strode over to retrieve his weapon from the ashes.

  Savage blew out a low curse behind him. “Four Breed males gone Rogue in the same city on the same night? No one’s seen those kind of numbers in the past twenty years.”

  Jehan nodded. He’d been a youth at that time, but more than old enough to remember firsthand. “Let’s hope we never see bloodshed again like we did back then, Sav.”

  And all the more reason to take Opus Nostrum out at the root. For Jehan, a Breed male who’d spent a lot of his privileged life in pursuit of one pleasure or another, he couldn’t think of any higher calling than his place among the Order.

  He cleaned his dagger and sheathed it on the weapons belt of his black patrol fatigues. “Come on,” he said to Savage. “I saw Trygg ash one of these four a few blocks back. Let’s go find him and make sure we don’t have any witnesses in need of a mind-scrub before we report back to Commander Archer at headquarters.”

  They pivoted to leave the alley together—only to find they were no longer alone there.

  Another Breed male stood at the mouth of the narrow passage. Dark-eyed, with a trimmed black beard around the grim line of his mouth, the vampire was dressed in a black silk tunic over loose black pants tucked into gleaming black leather boots that rose nearly to his knees.

  The only color he wore was a striped sash of vibrant, saffron-and-cerulean silk tied loosely around his waist. Family colors. Formal colors, reserved for the solemnest of old traditions.

  Jehan couldn’t bite back his low, uttered curse.

  Beside him in the alleyway, Savage moved his fingers toward his array of weapons.

  “It’s all right.” Jehan stayed his comrade’s hand with a pointed shake of his head. “Naveen is my father’s emissary.”

  In response, the dark-haired male inclined his head. “Greetings, Prince Jehan, noble eldest son of Rahim, the just and honorable king of the Mafakhir tribe.”

  The courtly bow that followed set Jehan’s teeth and fangs on edge almost as much as his official address. From within the folds of his tunic, Naveen withdrew a sealed piece of parchment. The royal messenger held it out to Jehan in sober, expectant silence.

  A stamped, red wax seal rode the back of the official missive...just like the one Jehan had received in this same manner a year ago.

  A year and a day ago, he mentally amended.

  For a moment, Jehan just stood there, unmoving.

  But he knew Naveen had been sent with specific orders to deliver the sealed message, and it would dishonor the male deeply if he failed in that mission.

  Jehan stepped forward and took the stiff, folded parchment from Naveen’s outstretched hand. As soon as it was in Jehan’s possession, the royal messenger pivoted and strode back into the darkness without another word.

  In the silence that followed, Savage gaped. “What the fuck was that all about?”

  “Family business. It’s not important.” Jehan slipped the document into the waistband of his pants without opening it.

  “It sure as hell looked important to that guy.” When Jehan started walking out of the alley, Sav matched his clipped pace. “What is it? Some kind of royal subpoena?”

  Jehan grunted. “Something like that.”

  “Aren’t you going to read it?”

  Jehan shrugged. “There’s no need. I know what it says.”

  Sav arched a blond brow. “Yeah, but I don’t.”

  To satisfy his friend’s curiosity, Jehan retrieved the sealed message and passed it over to him. “Go ahead.”

  Sav broke the seal and unfolded the parchment, reading as he and Jehan turned down another narrow street. “It says someone died. A mated couple, killed together in a plane crash a year ago.”

  Jehan nodded grimly, already well aware of the couple’s tragic demise. News of their deaths had been the reason for the first official notice he’d received from his father.

  Savage read on. “This says the couple—a Breed male from the Mafakhir tribe and a Breedmate from another tribe, the Sanhaja, had been blood-bonded as part of a peace pact between the families.”

  Jehan grunted in acknowledgment. The pact had been in place for centuries, the result of an unfortunate chain of events that had spawned a bloody conflict between his family and their closest neighbors, the Sanhajas. After enough blood had been spilled on both sides, a truce was finally declared. A truce that was cemented with blood spilled by another means.

  An eternal bond, shared between a male from Jehan’s line and a Breedmate from the rival tribe.

  So long as the
two families were bound together by blood, there had been peace. The pact had never been broken. The couple who perished in the plane crash had been the sole link between the families in the modern age. With their deaths, the pact was in limbo until a new couple came together to revive the bond.

  Savage had apparently just gotten to the part of the message Jehan had been dreading for the past twelve months. “It says here that in accordance with the terms of that pact, if the blood bond is severed and no other couple elects to carry it forward within the term of a year and a day, then the eldest unmated son of the eldest Breed male of the Mafakhir tribe and the unmated Breedmate nearest the age of thirty from the Sanhaja tribe shall...”

  Sav’s long stride began to slow, then it stopped altogether. He swiveled his head in Jehan’s direction. “Holy shit. Are you kidding me? You’re being drafted to go home to Morocco and take a mate?”

  A scowl furrowed deep into his brow at the very thought. “According to ritual, I am.”

  His comrade let out a bark of a laugh. “Well, shit. Congratulations, Your Highness. This is one lottery I’m happy as hell I won’t be winning.”

  Jehan grumbled a curse in reply. Although he didn’t find much humor in the situation, his friend seemed annoyingly amused.

  Sav was still chuckling as they resumed their march up the alleyway. “When is this joyous occasion supposed to take place?”

  “Tomorrow,” Jehan muttered.

  There was a period of handfasting with the female in question, but the details of the whole process were murky. In truth, he’d never paid much attention to the fine print of the pact because he hadn’t imagined there would be a need to know.