Break the Day - Lara Adrian Page 0,54

wet wheeze in reply. The human was too far gone to talk. He had seconds left, maybe less.

“What’s wrong, LaSalle? Opus decide you outlived your usefulness?” Rafe demanded. He grabbed hold of LaSalle, giving him a jolt of healing—just enough to extract a little sound from his drowning lungs. “Goddamn it, tell me who your contact is.”

“I don’t . . . don’t know.” Blood bubbled in the corners of the dying man’s mouth. “I don’t have . . . don’t have a contact. I just . . . just do what they ask me. Then money shows up in my . . . in my bank account.”

“Do you think he’s telling the truth?”

Rafe glanced up at Devony. “There’s one way to find out.”

Placing his palm over the human’s clammy brow, he tranced him and asked the question again. LaSalle told him the same thing. He never had direct contact with anyone—at least, until tonight.

“Who was it that did this?” Rafe asked.

LaSalle weakly shook his head. “I swear . . . don’t know. They said I . . . said I fucked up. They said . . . said you and the girl . . . said you both had to go.”

Rafe swung a look at Devony. “We need to get out of here.”

She wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. Her gaze was riveted to the blood-splattered TV screen. Rafe felt her shock in his own bloodstream, as cold as ice water.

The game had been pre-empted by a local news bulletin—a report of a massive explosion in a residential area of Back Bay. In the background behind the reporter, an inferno roared, ash and smoke billowing into the night sky as firefighters struggled to contain it.

Rafe let go of LaSalle. The man’s last breath rattled out of him as his body slumped to the floor again.

Rafe moved next to Devony. “Holy shit.”

She slowly turned her head toward him now. “That’s my block, Rafe. That building . . . that’s my house.”

CHAPTER 19

Devony sat beside him in silence in the warehouse guards’ stolen sedan as he drove.

Rafe glanced at her shell-shocked face, illuminated by the dim light of the dashboard. “Are you all right?”

She nodded once, but it was merely a reflex response. She didn’t look at him. She’d hardly said two words since they left all the carnage behind at the marina.

She was a strong, courageous woman, but not even a seasoned Order warrior would be expected to witness that kind of slaughter and come out of it unaffected. And now, according to LaSalle, Opus’s death squad had orders to come for the two of them.

Rafe wasn’t overly concerned that he was in their crosshairs. Just being associated with Lucan Thorne and the Order had put an Opus Nostrum target on his back. He lived with that truth every day. For Devony, the threat was new.

And tonight it had become starkly, dangerously, real.

“They firebombed my home, Rafe.”

“Yeah.” He winced inwardly at her wooden tone and reached over to her, placing his hand over her cool fingers. “But you’re okay. You’re safe. That’s all that matters.”

She mutely shook her head. “But everything else . . . All my work, my father’s research and notes. We’ve lost all of it now. We’re going to have to start all over, Rafe.”

He clamped his jaw closed, struggling to hold the secret that he had passed nearly every piece of intel she had over to the Order. Gideon had probably data mined every photo and note a dozen times each by now.

The Order hadn’t lost anything tonight, but he couldn’t divulge that to Devony without clearing it with his commanders.

Rafe’s answering curse came out brittle. “I’m sorry you’ve gotten mixed up in any of this. I’m just damn glad you weren’t anywhere near your Darkhaven when those Opus killers got there.”

Now, it wouldn’t be safe for her anywhere else in the city, either.

With the exception of one location.

There was only one place he knew of where he could rest confidently knowing neither Opus nor anyone loyal to them could touch her.

He headed there now, despite the understanding that his arrival could blow everything up in his face. His covert mission. His commanders’ faith in him. Hell, his entire future as a warrior could be lost by bringing an unauthorized civilian—one with JUSTIS ties and a price on her head—into the Order’s domain.

But all of those things paled compared to the possibility of losing Devony’s trust at the same time.

The fact that he hadn’t told her about