Minion was made to suffer in his final moments of life. The savagery of the killing left little doubt that he had suffered greatly, his body broken and bloodied almost beyond recognition. And that fact was surprising in itself, considering the Minion's executioner had most certainly been Tegan. He had killed the Minion that Marek had dispatched to get rid of the Darkhaven female--not with the immaculate, cold efficiency the warrior was known for, but with a clearly evidenced rage.
Tegan had killed with a vengeance.
That he'd acted in retaliation over the female could mean only one thing: Tegan cared for her.
Marek could hardly wait for the chance to exploit that weakness in the warrior. He'd nearly destroyed Tegan once through his love of a woman; how gratifying it would be to use this new affection to finally finish him off for good.
How satisfying it would be to finish off all the Order, and to assume his rightful place as the ruler of all the Breed. It was what he'd been working toward all along, a plan that had required more patience than Marek had thought himself capable of.
He'd been dreaming of his crowning moment for centuries--ever since the warrior Dragos had confided in him a powerful, damning secret.
Marek got up from his desk and paced to the tall window that overlooked a moonlit Berkshires valley in the distance. The woods were thick out here, as dense as any medieval forest. The landscape reminded him of the Old Times, his thoughts returning to the Order's long-ago past.
Back then, a war had been raging within the vampire nation. It pitted father against son, except the fathers in this scenario were the band of vicious otherworlders--the Ancients, alien creatures who arrived on Earth thousands of years ago and preyed on human blood for their survival. Their eventual sons, the hybrid progeny born of alien seed carried by human mothers, formed the first generation of the Breed. Marek, Lucan, and Tegan were among those rare Gen One sons. They saw firsthand the savagery perpetrated by the Ancients on humankind, the wholesale slaughter of entire villages at times, lives lost to ravenous vampire appetites. The carnage had never disturbed Marek the way it did his younger brother.
While Lucan despised the terror the Ancients delivered, Marek often indulged in it himself. The power to stir panic and kill without recourse was heady stuff, and more than once he wondered why the Breed shouldn't simply enslave their human Hosts and claim the planet for their own. Marek had been feeding those seeds of discontent to the Ancients for some time when all of his plans were thrown into a tailspin.
In a fit of Bloodlust, his alien sire took the life of Marek and Lucan's mother. The creature slaughtered her, and Lucan, claiming justice, took the vampire's head in exchange. With that killing of an Ancient, Lucan declared war on the remaining few like him and any who served them. Lucan formed the Order, pulling Marek into the fold as well, along with Tegan and five other Gen One vampires all pledged to end the mass carnage and start a new way of life for the Breed.
Such noble, lofty intentions.
Marek could hardly contain his derisive chuckle, even now. He hadn't been the only one of the Order to bristle at Lucan's vision of a peaceful coexistence with humankind. Another warrior, Dragos, eventually confided in Marek that he had different ideas for the future of the Breed.
And even more intriguing, he'd actually taken steps to ensure that future.
While the Order waged war on the surviving Ancients, hunting them down one by one in a battle that took years to complete, one of those deadly creatures remained.
Dragos and his alien sire had made a pact. Instead of killing the vampire, Dragos had helped to hide him away.
It wasn't until sometime later, after Dragos was mortally injured in combat, that he chose to spill his secret to Marek. But the bastard wouldn't surrender all of it. Dragos refused to give Marek the location of the crypt where the Ancient slept in a state of prolonged hibernation.
Marek's rage over that omission had been uncontrollable. He put a blade to Dragos's neck, and with one furious blow, he sent the vampire-- and that crucial bit of information--to the grave.
Marek had gone after the only other person who might have been of use to him: Dragos's Breedmate Kassia. But the female was shrewd, and in the moment her mate perished at Marek's hand, she