Then he lifted his head. “She’s gone.”

“We have to cut the umbilical cord. Now,” Maya said and reached for the knife again.

Thomas snatched her wrist and stopped her. “It’s silver. The baby will feel it.”

“What then?” She let her gaze wander around the room.

“Your claws, cut it with your claws,” Thomas suggested.

The baby girl cried again, and Thomas stroked his hand over her head, soothing her while Maya cut the umbilical cord with her claws. Lifting the baby off its dead mother’s chest, Thomas looked up.

“Do we have anything to wrap her in? A towel? Anything clean?”

Oliver came running from the store, two large sheets of paper in his hands. “Here, that’s all I could find.”

Thomas stared at him. “Gift wrap?”

Oliver shrugged. “It’s clean, and it’s almost as soft as tissue paper.”

Having no choice, Thomas took the paper from Oliver’s hands and wrapped the baby in it, then pressed her to his chest, rocking her.

When he heard hasty footsteps coming from the shop, his head whirled to the door. A moment later, Samson rushed in, his eyes darting to the body on the floor, then to the baby in Thomas’s arms.

“Sergio?” he asked.

Gabriel pointed to the dust on the floor. “We have to assume that he was staked. His mate said that they made him watch.”

Samson closed his eyes. “Oh God.”

It was easy to see what he was thinking: being a blood-bonded vampire himself, the father of a small child, the horror of what Sergio must have felt was written on Samson’s face. When he opened his eyes, he issued his orders.

“Gabriel, call the mayor. This can’t be made public. Scanguards will deal with the cleanup and the investigation. We need our own forensics team here. Get the mayor to clear the way for us and use his powers to keep the police out of this. We need to find out who did this.”

“We already know,” Cain announced.

Samson’s head whipped toward Cain. “Who?”

“Four of those newcomers. Oliver and I saw them enter earlier in the evening.”

“And you didn’t stop them?” Samson barked.

Thomas rose. “They weren’t doing anything suspicious. Cain and Oliver aren’t at fault. I am.”

“Explain!”

“I saw those four last night, out on patrol. I didn’t get a very good look at them. But I knew something wasn’t right. I didn’t enter them into the database until earlier tonight. Cain and Oliver didn’t know they were already on our list of people to watch.”

“I would have expected better from you!” Samson bit out.

Eddie took a step forward. “If this is Thomas’s fault, then it’s mine too. I was on patrol with him. And it’s true, we didn’t get a good enough look at them. Only their voices.”

Surprised that Eddie stepped up to defend him, Thomas looked at him.

“Be that as it may, you know the procedure. Both of you.”

Eddie nodded, dropping his head.

“What did you overhear?” Samson asked, looking back at Thomas.

“Talk about takeovers. And of a boss. Only fragments. Not much to go by.” But it had sounded suspicious, particularly since he now suspected them of being Kasper’s disciples, even though he couldn’t tell the others that. Samson was right about chastising him. He should have reported it immediately. And as the more senior bodyguard at Scanguards, it was his duty, not Eddie’s.

“We’ll put a team together to search for them,” Samson announced. Then he looked at the baby in Thomas’s arms. “What are we going to do with the baby?”

“I have an idea,” Maya said, her eyes locking with Gabriel’s. A second passed, then her mate nodded. She smiled and announced, “She’ll have a good home with parents who will love her like their own.”

19

By the time the forensics team arrived at Sergio’s bookstore and collected all the evidence there was, Thomas had replayed his decisions a hundred times in his mind. Could he have prevented this tragedy?

He stepped onto the sidewalk and inhaled the cool night air. The bar across the street had closed and his and Eddie’s motorcycles were now the only ones parked there. When he heard steps next to him, he turned his head and saw Cain join him.

“They would have done it either way,” Cain said.

“What?”

“Those four vampires. If not tonight, they would have gotten them on another occasion. It looked deliberate. Planned. And we can’t be everywhere at the same time. Even if those descriptions had been up earlier, there’s no guarantee that Oliver and I could have stopped them or been close enough to them to know what they were doing until it was too late.”