Break the Day - Lara Adrian Page 0,73

Crowe more than a year before the incident at the peace summit.

Why was Harrison standing there chatting with Reginald Crowe like old chums in the photo? Had it been part of his covert work with JUSTIS?

Devony didn’t recognize the third man. Evidently, her father hadn’t, either. He’d drawn a circle around the man’s semi-obscured profile and had jotted a question mark on the image.

She had spent the past six hours scouring the internet for information or other images, and running facial recognition apps to see if she could find anything out about the unknown man. She had even logged in to JUSTIS’s secured site using her father’s credentials she’d memorized—the ID and password she thought he’d carelessly left in his safe behind her mother’s portrait in Boston.

Now, she wondered if he’d wanted her to have that information too. Maybe he’d left all of his notes and research for her to pick up in his absence. For all the good it did.

She had lost everything to Opus’s firebombing and to the Order. And tonight she had found exactly nothing on the mysterious third man.

If her father thought she could resolve the question for him after his death, he had given her too much credit. All the photograph had done was raise a lot of troubling questions in her mind.

As did the date he’d scrawled onto the envelope. The day before the bombing at JUSTIS’s London headquarters.

Had he known about the danger? Had he some inkling of what was about to happen?

She dismissed both notions immediately. Her father never would have let his beloved wife and son get anywhere near that building if he feared it might be compromised. He would have sounded a swift and very vocal alarm within the organization the instant he suspected there might be trouble brewing.

So, no. He couldn’t have known any of that.

But he had been concerned enough about his son and the two men in the photo to place it somewhere she would eventually discover it, should anything happen to him.

God, she hated to think that he might have feared for his own safety.

Or that he feared for her brother’s and had been unable to protect him in the end.

Could the third man have had something to do with the attack on JUSTIS? Had Harrison been the true target of a bombing that had killed so many?

Her mind swam with a thousand possible scenarios and tangled theories, each one seeming to give birth to many more.

Obviously, she had spent too much time sitting behind her father’s workstation tonight. Her obsessive need for information and answers was beginning to wear on her body and her mind.

She got up from the desk and stretched, realizing she hadn’t eaten or had anything to drink since she arrived. Being a daywalker, she didn’t need nourishment the way humans did. She didn’t need to consume blood every few days the way Rafe and other members of the Breed did, either.

She’d drunk from human blood Hosts before, but how she would ever do that again after she’d tasted Rafe’s blood, she had no idea. She didn’t want to think about that eventuality.

She didn’t want to think about Rafe at all, but he’d been living in her thoughts all night, just as he lived in her blood through their bond.

Forever.

She didn’t even have to concentrate to feel his presence inside her now. He felt almost close enough to touch, which was a particularly harsh cruelty when she knew she had closed the door on her relationship with him—literally and figuratively.

But, wishful thinking or not, the comforting buzz in her veins accompanied her as she headed into the kitchen to make some tea.

Her anger with Rafe had ebbed hours ago. Her hurt was still raw, her heart still frayed and aching, but she couldn’t hate him. She hadn’t ever hated him, not even a little.

She loved him.

And more than anything, she wanted to see him again.

As she put the kettle on and rummaged for the tea and a mug, she realized that it wasn’t only her anger that had faded.

During the months following her family’s deaths, she had been driven by grief and fury. Revenge was what she lived for, not doing what was right or just. Those noble principles that she’d admired growing up, even aspired to, had morphed into something ugly and reckless after the JUSTIS bombing.

She had lost her grounding once she set out to avenge her loved ones. It had been buried by her pain over her family’s murders,