"Someday you'll win, Lucan. Then all the violence can finally be over."
"You think so," he drawled, a trace of mockery in his tone. "And you know this to be certain, based on what? A short twenty-eight years of life?"
"I base it on hope, for one thing. On faith. I have to believe that good will always come out on top. Don't you? Isn't that why you and the others here do what you do? Because you have hope that you can make things better?"
He laughed. Actually looked straight at her, and laughed. "I kill Rogues because I enjoy it. I'm damn good at it. I won't speak for anyone else's motives."
"What's going on with you, Lucan? You seem..." - Pissed off? Confrontational? A tad psychotic? - "You're acting different here than you were with me before."
He pinned her with a scathing glare. "In case you hadn't noticed, sweetheart, you're in my domain now. Things are different here."
The callousness she was seeing in him now took her aback, but it was the rage burning in his eyes that really put her on edge. They were too bright, hard as crystals. His skin was flushed, too tight across the stark cut of his cheekbones. And now that she was looking closer, she could see a thin sheen of sweat on his brow.
Pure, white-hot anger rolled off of him in waves. Like he wanted to tear something apart with his bare hands.
And, as it happened, the only thing in his path at the moment was her.
He walked past her in silence, toward a closed door near one of the tall bookcases. It opened without him touching the latch. Inside, it was so dark, she thought it was a closet. But then he stepped into the gloom and she heard his hard footsteps falling on a stretch of hardwood as he strode down what was apparently a hidden corridor of the compound.
Gabrielle stood there, feeling like she'd just missed being trampled by a brutal storm. She released a pent-up breath. Maybe she should let him go. Count herself lucky just to be out of his way right now. He sure didn't seem to want her company, and she wasn't all that sure she wanted his when he was like this.
But something was up with him - something was seriously wrong - and she needed to know what it was.
Swallowing past her own prickling of fear, she followed after him.
"Lucan?" There was no light at all in the space beyond the door. Only blackness, and the steady clip of Lucan's boot heels. "God, it's so dark in here. Lucan, wait a second. Talk to me."
There was no change in his brisk pace ahead of her. He seemed more than eager to ditch her. Desperate to get away from her.
Gabrielle navigated the lightless path as best she could, hands extended out at her sides to help her follow the snaking corridor.
"Where are you going?"
"Out."
"What for?"
"I told you." A latch clicked open from where his voice now sounded. "I've got a job to do. Been lax as hell about doing it lately."
Because of her.
He didn't say it, but there was no mistaking his meaning.
"I need to get out of here," he tossed back at her curtly. "High time I add a few more suckheads to my tally."
"The night's already half over. Maybe you should get some rest instead. You don't seem well to me, Lucan."
"I need to fight."
She heard his footsteps stop, heard a shift of fabric somewhere ahead of her in the dark, as if he'd paused and was stripping out of his clothes. Gabrielle kept moving toward the sound of him, her hands searching, trying to get her bearings in what was an endless pitch blackness. They were in another chamber now; there was a wall to her right. She used it as a guide, sidling along with careful steps.
"In the other room, your face looked flushed. And your voice is... strange."
"I need to feed." The words were low and deadly, an unmistakable threat.
Did he sense that she shrank back as he said it? He must have, because he chuckled, brittle with wry humor, as though amused by her unease.
"But you did feed," she reminded him. "Just last night, in fact. Didn't you take enough blood when you killed that Minion? I thought you said you only needed to feed every few days?"
"An expert on the subject already, are you? I'm impressed."
Boots hit the floor with a careless thump, one, then the other.
"Can we turn on some lights in here? I can't see you - "
"No lights," he snapped. "I can see you just fine. I can smell your fear."
She was afraid, not so much for herself right now, but for him. He was worse than on edge. The air around him seemed to pulse with raw fury. It came at her through the dark, an unseen force pushing her back.
"Have I done something wrong, Lucan? Should I not be here at the compound? Because if you've changed your mind about that, I have to tell you that I'm not sure it was a good idea for me to come here, either."
"There is no other place for you right now."
"I want to go back home to my apartment."
She felt a blast of heat skating up her arms as if he had just turned a deadly look on her. "You just got here. And you can't go back there. You'll stay until I decide otherwise."
"That sounds an awfully lot like a command."
"It is."
Okay, now he wasn't the only one bristling with anger. "I want my cell phone, Lucan. I need to call my friends and make sure they're okay. Then I'm going to call a cab, and I'm going to go home, where I can try to make sense out of the mess my life has become."
"It's out of the question." She heard the metallic clink of weaponry, the rough scrape of a drawer opening. "You're in my world now, Gabrielle. I am law here. And you are under my protection until I deem it is safe to release you from it."