Chapter 6
CHAPTER
SIX
The bodies were easy enough to dispose of. The car was even easier.
Corpses were simple to handle when one had the right tools and a strong stomach.
The vampires were stuffed into three barrels of lye he kept ready, and the car was stripped of all identification before it was plunged unceremoniously into the heart of a junkyard two hundred miles from where he’d stolen it.
The most difficult part of the day was, unfortunately, returning to the barracks.
Unlike the rest of Patrol, Fracture’s headquarters was located in Stern Grove, a small, forested corner of the city blocked by a tall gate.
Towering Blue Gum eucalyptus and native redwoods ringed the barracks and trapped a nearly perpetual ghostly fog.
The area was chosen by Thaddeus II himself, who wanted them isolated in every possible way — even from their fellow soldiers.
Normally, Sloane was good at acting like he hadn’t done anything wrong when he walked through the barracks. That was mostly because he never felt any guilt when he did. This time was different.
Tension was a live wire between his powerful shoulders as he strode through the door.
He rapidly ran through everyone he knew to be on an assignment and those who might be off-duty.
They’d all been relatively local since they’d been “benched for deliberate, if creative, disobedience” by the sovereign, which made things trickier than usual.
He wasn’t normally in the mood to socialize, if one could even call what the members of Fracture did such a thing, but he was even less so knowing that his charge was back in his bed. If any of them knew, they’d try and take her away from him. They might even try and steal her for themselves.
Who wouldn’t? Sloane’s breathing deepened as he passed into the mess hall, his focus on the entrance to their private quarters. She’s perfect. And they’d all be better at keeping her safe. They’d take one look at her and snatch her away.
“Are you all right?”
His back stiffened. A bright pop of fury erupted inside his chest. It wasn’t aimed at the empath who so casually curled up on one of the arm chairs in the lounge, a tablet in her hands and a blanket thrown over her legs. It was aimed at himself for failing to notice her.
Gods, where is my fucking head?
The answer was simple enough, he supposed. His head was back at the Battery, in bed with the woman he’d vowed to protect.
Sloane flexed his claws when he flatly replied, “Yes.”
“Are you sure… Sorry, I still have trouble figuring out which of you is which with your helmets on.”
He forced himself to turn slightly toward his captain’s mate.
Not that getting a better look at his visor would help her.
They were designed to keep team members anonymous.
If no one ever saw their faces, it helped Thaddeus perpetuate the myth that he had a secret army of hundreds of shadow soldiers rather than a handful of broken elves too good at killing.
But Atria had other ways of figuring out their identities.
The instant the air began to buzz around him, full of the strange kind of static all witches seemed to carry with them, Sloane’s skin crawled.
“Ah, Sloane.” A smile stretched across Atria’s face.
It wasn’t the same as Cecilia’s smile. Atria’s was…
patient. Like she did it to manage him rather than because she felt any true warmth toward him.
Which didn’t really make any sense, because Atria had known him longer and Cecilia had only smiled at him that one time.
It was the truth, though. He felt it in that raw, aching thing in his chest.
Oblivious to his growing impatience, Atria continued, “I should’ve guessed. Kaz told me you’d be around. You’ve got a couple days off, right?”
Sloane doubted he’d ever get used to how much the captain shared with his mate. He knew she was good friends with the sovereign’s consort, Margot Goode, and a wildly intelligent scientist in her own right, but he didn’t think it was wise to give her access to so much confidential information.
And he’d never, ever be comfortable with her ability to read his emotions.
Fighting the urge to simply ignore her and walk away, he replied, “Yes.”
Job done, he turned to leave. He didn’t make it far.
The sound of blankets rustling heralded further delays. “Wait, Sloane!”
Fighting back a snarl that would’ve gotten him a brutal ass-kicking from her mate, he turned his head to look over his shoulder at the witch.
She’d sat up and slung her arms over the back of the couch.
The marks of her previous order, Burden’s Bonded, ringed her slim wrists, but it was the tattoo around her neck that marked her as Kazimier’s mate.
Her brow furrowed deeply as she stared at him with those penetrating brown eyes that saw too much. Speaking slowly as if she was trying not to spook him, she asked, “Are you sure you’re okay? You feel… off.”
His mind went quiet. In the span of a heartbeat, all paranoia and anxiety over the state of his charge vanished. In its place was the perfect, empty stillness of the predator.
As Sloane silently watched her, letting her question hang unanswered in the air, he wondered if she knew how easily he could kill her.
Even having seen her impressive range of abilities used in combat, it wouldn’t take him more than a minute to dispatch her.
Witches were just as weak as arrants if you got to them fast enough.
He had no desire to kill her. She was his captain’s consort, and that meant she was one of them. But he’d kill any one of his team members to protect his doe.
And he’d do far worse to keep her.
Sloane stared at her blankly from behind his visor, his breathing slow and even. For a long moment, she ceased to be a person. She was no longer his captain’s mate. She wasn’t an honorary member of Fracture. She was an obstacle and a threat to the only thing that mattered to him.
Atria had no idea how narrowly she avoided danger when she added, “I don’t mean to pry.
I just… If there’s ever anything I can do to help you — something that you can’t go to Kaz or the rest of the team for — just know that you can come to me, okay?
Not to put you on the spot or anything, but you’ve got plasma streaks on your helmet. ”
Passing his hand over the damaged side of his helmet, which would need to be replaced if he didn’t want a single hit to shatter the new weak spot, he muttered, “A weapon misfire.”
Atria blew out an incredulous breath. “Oh come on, Sloane. I won’t snitch.”
His eyes narrowed. “You’d tell your mate.”
“Only if whatever it was posed a risk to yourself or someone else,” she replied, somehow managing to hold his gaze steadily despite the visor.
When she dipped her chin, her long, dark hair slid against her cheek.
For just a moment, the similarities between his doe and his captain’s mate were uncanny.
All at once, the familiar predatory emptiness left him. She was once again a woman, a team member, and a witch whose features echoed those he’d become so very fond of.
She firmed her jaw before announcing, “Otherwise, no. I wouldn’t tell Kaz. And I would expect the same from him. You’re his family, Sloane, which means you’re my family, too. We keep each other’s secrets.”
A strange frisson of something passed through him. A feeling, maybe, but one he didn’t care to acknowledge, let alone identify.
“It’s a bad idea to be my family,” he warned her. “They usually end up dead.”
He didn’t stick around to hear her reply. Sloane strode out of the mess hall and down the corridor to his room, intent on accomplishing his task.
It was good, he reasoned, that he ran into Atria. He’d been seen, which would hopefully give him just a little more time before anyone reported him as missing. There was no reason to kill her when a witness might actually make things a little easier.
It had absolutely nothing at all to do with the new, uneasy stirring in his gut at the thought, or how similar she looked to his doe.
Taking a bag wasn’t unusual for any of them, so he didn’t bother trying to hide it as he walked out of his room with a black backpack slung over his shoulder. It had everything he needed — the scant few possessions that meant anything at all to him.
When he walked back out into the mess hall, he wasn’t surprised to find Atria still in her spot. This time, he wasn’t determined to ignore her.
Passing the couch, he asked, “Where do you get the strawberry soda?”
“Huh?” She blinked up at him, dark eyebrows arched with surprise.
“The strawberry soda you keep in the fridge,” he clarified. “Where do I get it?”
Atria shook her head slightly. “Oh, um… You can get it at pretty much any grocery store. You’ve been to one, right?”
“Yes,” he lied.
Information obtained, he crossed the room. When he reached the door, Atria called out, “I thought you hated sweet things!”
He pushed open the door. “Not all sweet things.”
Sloane switched vehicles one more time before he finally made it back to the Battery, a six pack of strawberry soda dangling from the tips of his claw.
He released a slow breath as he reverently laid out Cecilia’s soft pink sweater.
Mother of pearl buttons winked in the golden light of sunset that streamed through the large windows overlooking the cliffside.
The urge to take off his helmet was strong, but he knew it was useless.
The scent he was so addicted to had faded only a few weeks after he brought it back to the barracks.
And yet he continued to press his nose into it at every opportunity, some desperate animal in him whining as it searched for the essence of her.
He’d never smelled anything like her before. He’d never felt anything like how he did when he breathed her in. It’d rattled something loose in him. Like the first falling stones heralding an avalanche, it unlocked an uncontrollable need to be near her, to watch over her, to pin her down and bite—
Sloane pushed himself away from the counter. There weren’t many hours left in the sedative dose he’d given her, and it was ridiculous to sit there pining after a sweater when his doe was safe in his room.
Compulsively straightening his kit, he followed the stark concrete hallway to the primary suite. A lock blinked red beside the door knob, awaiting his code. Sloane’s heart rate picked up again as he swiped the complex pattern on the screen.
The door unlocked with a hydraulic hiss. Throat tightening with anticipation, he stepped inside the bedroom.
Immediately, his gaze landed on the bed. The empty bed.
Senses screaming to high alert in the span of a heartbeat, he twisted to the side just in time to catch the full force of a metal lamp to the plasma-damaged side of his helmet. The blow shattered one side of his visor and, with a single breath of her scent, what was left of his control.