Lucan's dark brows came down in a scowl. "You kill her?"
"No. No, I was out of my head, but it didn't go that far. Far enough, though. I didn't realize what I had done to her until it was too late. When I saw the mark on her hand--"
"Ah, Jesus, Dante." The large male stared at him, those gray eyes lancing into him. "You drank from a Breedmate?"
"Yeah. Her name is Tess."
"Does she know? What have you told her?"
Dante shook his head. "She doesn't know anything yet. I scrubbed her memory that night, but I've been, uh... spending time with her. A lot of time. I have to cop to her about what I've done, Lucan. She deserves to have the truth. Even if she ends up hating me for it, which wouldn't surprise me."
Lucan's shrewd gaze narrowed. "You care for her."
"God. Yeah, I do." Dante's answering chuckle sounded sharp in his ears. "Sure as hell didn't see this coming, let me tell you. And to be honest, I don't know what I'm going to do about it. I'm not exactly premium mate material."
"You think I am?" Lucan asked wryly.
It was only a few months ago that Lucan was fighting a similar personal battle, having lost his heart to a female bearing the Breedmate mark. Dante didn't know the specifics of how Lucan won Gabrielle over, but part of him envied the long future the pair would share together. All Dante had to look forward to was a death he'd been dodging for a couple of centuries.
Thinking about Tess being anywhere near him on that day made his blood run cold with dread.
"I don't know how things are going to shake down, but I need to tell her everything. I'd like to bring her here tonight, maybe help it all make sense." He ran a hand through his damp hair. "Hell, maybe I'm just a pu**y and I need to know I've got my"--he almost said family--"the Order behind me on this."
Lucan smiled, nodding slowly. "You always will," he said, reaching out to clap Dante on the shoulder. "Gotta tell you, I'm looking forward to meeting the woman who can scare the shit out of one of the fiercest warriors I've ever known."
Dante laughed. "She's fine, Lucan. Damn, she is just so incredibly fine."
"At sundown, you take Tegan with you when you head out to question Chase. Bring him back in one piece, we clear? Then you go make things right with your Breedmate." "Chase I can handle," Dante said. "It's the other part I'm not so sure about. You got any advice for me on that, Lucan?"
"Sure." The vampire grunted, his smile filled with dark amusement. "Dust off your knees, brother, because you may damn well end up walking on them before the night is through."
Chapter Twenty-five
Tess had a full day of appointments and walk-ins at the clinic, work she was grateful for because it helped give her something to think about besides Ben's disturbing telephone message. Yet it was impossible to put his call out of her mind completely. He was in some serious trouble--injured and bleeding besides.
Now, it seemed, he had simply vanished.
She'd tried calling his apartment several times, and his cell phone, the area hospitals... but there was no sign of him anywhere. If she had known how or where to contact his parents, she would have tried them too, even though the odds of Ben turning up there were slim to none. As it stood, the only other thing she could think of was to go past his place after work and see if she could find some sign of him there. She wasn't holding out a lot of hope, but what were her alternatives?
"Nora, patient in Two needs a combo test and urine sample," Tess said, coming out of the examination room. "Can you get those for me while I check the X-rays of our collie with the joint inflammations?"
"You got it."
"Thanks."
As she grabbed the films for her next patient, her cell phone went off in her lab-coat pocket, the vibration beating against her thigh like bird's wings. She dug the device out and checked the ID to see if it might be Ben. The number was blocked.
Oh, God.
She knew who it was, who it had to be. She'd been suspended in an awful state between anticipation and dread all morning, knowing that Dante was going to call. He'd called her apartment as she was leaving early that day, but she'd let the blocked call go straight to voice mail. She hadn't been ready to talk to him then; she wasn't at all sure she was ready now.
Tess walked down the hall to her office and closed the door, her spine sagging against the cool metal. The phone trembled in her hand as it rang for the fifth and probably final time. She shut her eyes and touched the talk button. "Hello?"
"Hey, angel."
The sound of Dante's deep, delicious voice sent a slow current through her. She didn't want to feel the warmth that spread along her limbs and pooled in the center of her being, but it was there, melting the edges of her resolve.
"Everything okay?" he asked when she fell silent, an air of protective concern in his tone. "You still with me, or did I lose you?"
She sighed, unsure how to answer that.
"Tess? What's wrong?"
For a long few seconds, all she could do was breathe in and out. She hardly knew where to begin, and she was terrified of where it was all going to end now. A thousand questions crowded her mind, a thousand doubts that had been raised in the hours since she'd listened to Ben's bizarre message.
Part of her doubted Ben's outrageous claims--the rational part of her that knew better than to believe there could be monsters loose on the streets of Boston. Yet there was another part of her that wasn't as quick to dismiss the unexplainable, the stuff that existed with or without tidy logic or conventional science.