He couldn't speak for a second, caught off guard by her frank question and unwilling to consider where it might lead. He had no experience with that particular emotion. The way his life was going currently, he didn't want to get close to anything resembling it, either. "Love is for the males who choose to lead soft lives in the Darkhavens. Not for warriors."

"Some of the others in this compound might argue that with you."

He met her gaze with a level stare. "I'm not them."

Her chin dropped at once, long lashes shuttering her eyes from his view. "So, what does all of this make me? Am I just a way of passing time for you between killing Rogues and trying to pretend you've got everything under control?" When she looked up, tears were swelling in her eyes. "Am I just some little toy that you turn to whenever you need to get off?"

"I haven't heard you complain."

Her breath caught, a tiny gasp snagging in her throat as she gaped at him, clearly appalled and having every right to be. Her expression fell, then hardened into something as brittle as glass. "Fuck you."

Her contempt for him in that moment was understandable, but that didn't make it any easier to swallow. He would never take such a verbal beating from anyone. Before now, no one had ever had the nerve to try him. Lucan, the aloof one, the stone-cold killer who tolerated weakness in no form whatsoever - least of all in himself.

For all the conditioning and discipline he had mastered in his centuries of living, here he stood, being torn wide open by the only woman he had been foolish enough to let get close to him. And he cared for her, too, far more than he should. Which made hurting her now seem all the more repugnant, regardless of the fact that last night made it clear to him that it was necessary he push her away. It was unavoidable, and he would only make it worse by trying to pretend she would ever fit into his way of life.

"I don't want to hurt you, Gabrielle, and I know that I will."

"What do you think you're doing right now?" she whispered, a slight hitch in her voice. "You know, I believed you. God, I actually believed every lie you've fed me. Even that bullshit about wanting to help me find my true destiny. I really thought you cared."

Lucan felt helpless, the coldest kind of bastard for letting things get so out of hand with her. He strode over to a bureau, took out a fresh shirt and put it on. Heading for the door that led to the hallway outside his private apartments, he paused to look back at Gabrielle.

He wanted so badly to reach out to her, to try to make things better somehow, but he knew that would be a mistake. One touch and he would have her in his arms again.

Then he might not be able to let her go.

He opened the door, about to walk out.

"You have found your destiny, Gabrielle. Just like I said you would. I never told you it would be with me."

Chapter Twenty-four

Lucan's words - all the astonishing things he'd told her - were ringing in Gabrielle's ears as she came out from under the steaming water in his bathroom shower. She cut the tap and toweled off, wishing the hot water could have melted away some of the hurt and confusion she felt. There was so much to deal with, not the least of which was that Lucan had no intention of being with her.

She tried to tell herself he hadn't made any promises to begin with, but that only made her feel like a bigger fool. He had never asked her to put her heart under his boot heels; she'd done that all on her own.

Leaning in toward the mirror that ran the entire width of the bathroom suite, Gabrielle moved her hair back to have a closer look at the crimson-colored birthmark below her left ear. Or rather, the Breedmate mark, she corrected herself, peering at the little teardrop that appeared to be falling into the bowl of a crescent moon.

By some twisted sort of irony, she was connected to Lucan's world by the tiny mark on her neck, and yet, it was also the very thing preventing her from being with him.

Maybe she was a complication he didn't want or need, but it wasn't like meeting him had made life a bowl of cherries for her, either.

Thanks to Lucan, she was involved in a bloody underworld war that made the worst inner city gangbangers look like playground bullies. She had all but abandoned one of the sweetest condos in Beacon Hill and would lose it altogether if she didn't get back and get to work so she could pay her bills. Her friends had no idea where she was, and telling them now would probably only put them in danger of losing their lives.

To top it all off, she was half in love with the darkest, deadliest, most emotionally closed-off man she'd ever known.

Who just so happened to also be a bloodsucking vampire.

And, what the hell, since she was being honest, she wasn't half in love with Lucan. She was full-on, flat-out, head-over-heels, never-going-to-get-over-this-one, in love with him.

"Way to go," she told her miserable reflection. "Just frigging brilliant."

Yet even after everything he'd said to her, she still wanted nothing more than to go to him wherever he was in the compound and wrap herself in his arms, the only place she'd ever found any kind of comfort.

Yeah, like she really needed to add public humiliation to the very personal one she was still trying to deal with. Lucan had made it pretty clear: whatever they had together - if they'd ever truly had anything beyond the physical - was over.

Gabrielle walked back into his bedroom and retrieved her clothes and shoes. She dressed quickly, wanting to be out of his personal quarters before he came back and she did something really stupid. Well, she amended, glancing at the mussed bedsheets still in disarray from their lovemaking, something even more stupid.

With the idea that she would look for Savannah and maybe try to find a phone line out of the compound, since Lucan hadn't seen fit to return her cell, Gabrielle ducked out of his bedroom. The corridor was confusing, no doubt by design, and she had taken several wrong turns before she finally recognized her surroundings. She was near the training facility, judging by the sharp staccato crack of rounds hitting targets.

She cleared a corner and was stopped abruptly by an unyielding wall of leather and weapons standing in her path.

Gabrielle looked up, and up some more, and met with a chilling blast of menace coming at her from a narrowed green gaze. Those cool and calculating eyes locked onto her through a careless fall of tawny hair, like a jungle cat lurking behind golden reeds as it sized up its prey. She swallowed hard. A palpable danger radiated from the vampire's large body and from within the depths of his unblinking predator's eyes.

Tegan.

Her mind supplied the name of the unfamiliar male, the only one of the compound's six warriors she hadn't yet met.

The one with whom Lucan apparently shared a barely concealed contempt.

The vampire warrior didn't move out of her way. He hardly reacted at all to her crashing into him, except for the slight quirk of his mouth as he stared down to where her breasts were mashed against the plane of hard muscle just below his chest. He was wearing about a dozen weapons, the threat reinforced by no less than two-hundred pounds of hard-hewn muscle.

She backed up, then sidestepped him just to be safe. "Sorry. I didn't see you there."

He didn't say a word, but she felt as if everything going on inside of her had been laid bare by him in an instant - in that split-second brush of contact when her body had collided with his. He stared down at her with a chilling, emotionless gaze, like he could see her from the inside out. Although he said nothing, expressed nothing, Gabrielle felt dissected.

She felt... invaded.

"Excuse me," she whispered.

When she moved to step by him, Tegan's voice stopped her.

"Hey." His voice was softer than she expected, a deep, dark rasp. It was a peculiar contrast to the starkness of his gaze, which hadn't moved even a fraction. "Do yourself a favor and don't get too attached to Lucan. Odds are real good that vampire's not gonna live much longer."

He said it without a speck of emotion in his voice, just a flat statement of fact. The warrior walked past her, stirring the air of the corridor with an apathy that seeped, cold and disturbing, into Gabrielle's bones.

When she turned to look after him, Tegan and his unsettling prediction were gone.

Lucan tested the heft of a sleek black 9mm in his hand, then raised the weapon and squeezed off a series of rounds into the target at the far end of the firing range.

Although it felt good to be back on familiar ground around the tools of his trade, his blood seething and ready for a decent fight, part of him kept straying back to his encounter with Gabrielle. Damn, but the woman had his head in knots. Despite everything he had said to push her away from him, he had to admit that he was in deep with her.

How long did he think he could carry on with her without falling? More to the point, how did he ever think he was going to handle the thought of letting her go? Of sending her away with the idea that she would be paired with someone else?

Things were getting too goddamned complicated.

He hissed a curse. Fired off another bunch of rounds, relishing the blast of hot metal and acrid smoke as his target's chest exploded from the impact.

"What do you think?" Nikolai asked, his crisp wintry eyes glittering. "Sweet little piece, isn't it? Responsive as hell, too."

"Yeah. Feels good. I like it." Lucan flipped on the safety and gave the new handgun another look. "Beretta 92FS converted to full auto with a drop-in unit? Nice work, man. Real nice."

Niko grinned. "I haven't even told you about the custom rounds that bad boy's carrying. I tricked out some hollowpoint polycarbonate-tipped bullets. Took the shot out of the poly tips, added titanium powder in its place."

"That ought to make a nasty mess when it hits a suckhead's blood system," Dante added from where he sat sharpening his blades on the edge of a weapons cabinet.

No doubt, the vampire was right about that. In the Old Times, the cleanest way to kill a Rogue was by separating its head from its body. That worked fine while swords were the weapon of choice, but modern technology brought new challenges for both sides.

It wasn't until the early 1900s that the Breed discovered the uniquely corrosive effect of titanium on the overactive blood systems of Rogue vampires. Thanks to an allergy that was amplified by cellular mutations in their blood, Rogues reacted to titanium the way Alka-Seltzer reacted to water.

Niko took the weapon back from Lucan and pet it like a prize. "What you got here is one kickass Rogue blaster."

"When can we test it out?" Rio asked.

"How about tonight?" Tegan strode in without making a sound, but his voice cut through the room like the growl of a coming storm.

"You talking about that location you scouted down by the harbor?" Dante asked.

Tegan nodded. "Probable lair, housing maybe a dozen individuals, give or take. I'm guessing they're still green, just turned Rogue. Be no big thing to take them out."

"Been a while since we cleaned house on a raid," Rio drawled, his smile broad and eager. "Sounds like a party to me."

Lucan passed the weapon back to Niko and gave the others a scowl. "Why the hell am I just hearing about this?"

Tegan slid a flat stare his direction. "You need to do a little catch-up, man. While you were holed up with your female all night, the rest of us were topside doing our jobs."

"That's a low blow," Rio said. "Even for you, Tegan."

Lucan considered the slam in measured silence. "No, he's right. I should have been up there taking care of business. I had some things to handle back here. And now they're handled. It's not going to be an issue anymore."

Tegan smirked. "Is that right? Because I gotta tell you, when I saw the Breedmate in the hall a few minutes ago, she was looking pretty upset. Felt like someone had torn the poor girl's heart out. Felt to me like she needed someone to make things better for her."

Lucan roared up on the vampire in a furious, black rage. "What did you say to her? Did you touch her? So help me, if you did anything to her - "

Tegan chuckled, genuinely amused. "Easy, man. No need to come off your chain about it. Your female's none of my concern."

"You remember that," Lucan said. He whirled around to meet the curious gazes of the other warriors. "She's no concern for any of you, are we clear? Gabrielle Maxwell is under my personal protection while she is in this compound. Once she leaves for the Darkhavens, she'll no longer be my concern, either."

It took him a minute to simmer down and not give in to the urge to go head-to-head with Tegan. One day, it was probably going to come to that. And Lucan couldn't totally blame the male for holding a grudge. If Tegan was a mean-ass soulless bastard, Lucan was the one who helped make him that way.

"Can we get back to business now?" he snarled, daring someone to stoke him further. "I need to hear facts about this harbor location."

Tegan launched into a description of what he'd observed about the likely Rogue lair, and offered his suggestions for how the group of them could go about raiding it. Although the source of this information bothered Lucan somewhat, he couldn't think of a better way to cap off his black mood than with an offensive strike on their enemies.

God knew, if he ended up anywhere near Gabrielle again, all his tough talk about duty and doing what was right by her would be scattered like dust. It had been a couple of hours since he'd left her in his bedroom, and she was still foremost in his mind. Need for her still tore through him when he thought about her soft, warm skin.

And thinking about how he'd hurt her made a space like a cold pit open up in his chest. She had proven herself a true ally in covering for him with the other warriors. She had held him through his own bit of personal hell last night, standing by him, as tender and loving as any male could ever want in a cherished mate.