Break the Day - Lara Adrian Page 0,66
lead. Anyone holding on to liquid UV is either in bed with Opus Nostrum or on their bad side. I don’t give a shit which camp this son of a bitch is in. I just want him in our hands—yesterday.”
“I’ll put a team on it as soon as we have your go,” Chase said.
Lucan nodded, glancing at Rafe. “Excellent work on all of this. I know it hasn’t been easy for you, living like this these past weeks. Or more recently.”
“No, sir.” Rafe cleared his throat. “Ah . . . about that.”
When he came down here with the intent to explain to his commander and the Order’s leader what Devony meant to him, he hadn’t expected an audience of his whole damn team and then some. But the words needed to be said and he couldn’t wait another moment to put them out there.
He’d screwed things up with her, not only tonight, but from the beginning. He only hoped he would have the chance to make them right.
“It’s about Devony,” he said. “I’ve made a terrible mistake with her—”
He felt her presence through their blood bond . . . even before he heard her sharp intake of breath just outside the room.
He turned around and there she was.
All the breath left his lungs on a curse.
She stared at him, but only for a second. Her wounded gaze flicked to the other members of the Order gathered around the room alongside him. His friends, obviously. Teammates he had never truly lost.
Then she glanced over at the screens that contained all the information she had opened up to him in the privacy of her Darkhaven. All of father’s meticulous notes and theories. Her months of work in her quest to avenge her slain family.
All of the secrets she had shared with Rafe in the moments before he took her virginity on the floor of her father’s study.
Christ.
He felt her stunned confusion like a blow to his chest. Her sharp feeling of betrayal pierced him.
“Devony.”
She mutely backed away.
“Devony, wait.”
She took a step into the corridor.
Then, in a flash of movement, she was gone.
CHAPTER 23
She was an idiot.
He told her he was dangerous. He told her she was in over her head. That they wouldn’t be friends or anything else.
She hadn’t believed him.
She still didn’t want to believe it, and yet she had just seen the evidence of his duplicity with her own eyes. She felt it. His guilt seeped into her through their blood bond, feeling as thick and black as oil.
He had betrayed her.
Lied to her.
Used her.
A choked sob caught in her throat as she moved through the Order’s mansion as a flash of motion. She hurried back into the lovely guestroom Tavia Chase had provided for her, feeling on the verge of a hideous emotional breakdown.
She couldn’t let herself fall apart. Not here. Not when Rafe and the rest of his comrades were likely down in the command center’s meeting room roaring with laughter over her naïveté. Her blind stupidity.
Her foolishness over allowing herself to fall in love with him. To bind herself to him in blood.
Oh, God.
She needed to get out of there.
She slammed the door behind her and held it shut with her mind as she hastily changed out of Carys’s borrowed clothing and back into the grime-caked black turtleneck and jeans she had arrived in. She didn’t want anything she had been offered here. Not the comfort or the clothing, not the kindness, either. Not if it had never been real.
She especially didn’t want a damn thing from Rafe.
“Devony.” He stood on the other side of the closed door.
She heard him try the latch, heard him swear when he couldn’t break through the mental hold she had on the lock.
She just wanted to get away from him.
“Leave me alone.”
“I can’t do that.” He tried the lock again. Another vivid curse. “Damn it, Devony. I need to see you. I need to talk to you, and not through this door.”
She didn’t answer. Mostly because she didn’t trust her voice. She could feel the sincerity of his plea. He was hurting too. He felt as terrible as she did. Maybe more, although how that could even be possible she didn’t know.
Good. Let him hurt too.
“Go away, Rafe. Go back to your friends. I’m leav—”
The thick wood panel burst off its hinges, exploding inward. Rafe stood in the ruined doorway, a look of pure anguish on his handsome face.
“Devony, I’m sorry.”
“For which part? Pretending we were some kind of team when