Break the Day - Lara Adrian Page 0,69

you, but part of me still wants to kill you for having a role in putting my mate through that.”

“I’m sorry,” Rafe said. “And I know Devony’s sorry too. She didn’t want to hurt either of you.”

“She did it to protect you.”

Rafe nodded, a movement that made his skull throb.

He would have done the same thing for her if he was able. He’d still do anything to protect her. And yet, he’d deceived her and broken her heart instead.

He had hurt her worse than anyone else possibly could. He’d felt that in the moments before she’d leveled him with her incredible power.

“She loves you,” Nathan said. “I saw it in her face that night at the museum.”

“Now she hates me.”

“You really believe that?”

He shrugged. Carefully shook his pounding head. Even though she was gone, he could feel her through their bond.

She didn’t hate him. He could still feel her love, and that gave him some small glimmer of hope that he could fix this.

But right now, her hurt was stronger than anything else she was feeling.

If she couldn’t forgive him, he might lose her forever.

“I have to go.” He swung his deadweight legs over the side of the infirmary cot. “I have to find her and bring her back.”

A deep, sardonic voice answered from the open doorway. “Then you’re going to need wings.”

Rafe glanced around Nathan and watched Aric Chase stroll into the open room. He paused next to the bed and exhaled a snort. “You look like shit.”

Rafe chuckled, and fuck, that hurt. Only his best friend could pull a smile out of him when his body was a feeble lump and his heart was shredded in his chest. “Good to see you too. What do you know about Devony? Where is she?”

“On her way to London, evidently. Gideon just sent word that she popped up on a commercial flight to Heathrow this morning. She should be on the ground there in about five hours.”

London. She was going home, even though she hadn’t wanted to go back there ever again after losing her family.

“I need to be there too. I need to make her listen to me.” Rafe tried to get up, but dropped right back down onto the bed. “Damn it.”

Aric gave him an assessing look. “This female really did a number on you, eh?”

He wasn’t talking about the fact that she had knocked him on his ass today. And Rafe wasn’t going to pretend with either one of his closest friends that he wasn’t out of his head with misery over the fact that he had lost Devony’s faith today.

That he might have lost it for good.

“We’re bonded. I took her blood. Fuck, I took a hell of a lot more than that from her.” He met the sober stares of both Breed males. “Then, last night after we arrived here, I let her drink from me too. I love her, and now she thinks I played her as an asset for my mission. She thinks I used her for intel. Shit. She thinks I chose the Order over her.”

“Didn’t you?” Nathan’s logic, as usual, cut as cleanly and as coldly as a knife.

Rafe wanted to rage at his friend, but even his anger failed him.

Because what the former assassin said was true. He had chosen the Order over her.

Rafe regretted that now. He had regretted it from the beginning. And he was going to regret it for the rest of his eternal life.

Because Nathan was right. Devony was right.

He had chosen duty over her.

And there was no way for him to take that back now.

CHAPTER 25

Devony paid the taxi driver in cash as she got out at the curb in front of her family’s Darkhaven in South Kensington.

After leaving the Order’s mansion in Boston, she’d gone straight to the airport and to a small locker there, where she had stored her passport and a few thousand dollars in multiple currencies. She hadn’t grown up in a family of spies and law enforcement officers without picking up a few professional tips along the way.

Using her real ID and traveling in public while Opus’s goons might be on her trail had been a risk, but she’d had little choice. Now that she was away from Boston, she allowed herself to exhale some of the paranoia that had clung to her until now.

The lovely Onslow Square stucco and brick townhouses with their black wrought-iron fences and classic, white-columned entrances had always been a welcome, comforting sight to her. Across