Jordana held tight to her resolve, but his low voice still had the power to make something inside her melt. He glanced at Zael briefly as the Atlantean relaxed his stance with his blade, then settled back on his heels to remain, at Jordana’s request.
“Are you all right?” Nathan took a step toward her, emerging into the light of the villa’s living room. “You haven’t been hurt?”
“No. Not by Zael.” Sharp words, but she couldn’t bite them back. She steeled herself as Nathan took another few steps inside. “Where’s my father? What have you and the Order done to Martin Gates?”
“He’s at the command center in Boston. He’s worried about you, Jordana. The Order is very concerned for you as well. So is Carys.” Nathan’s cool gaze slid to Zael in unspoken warning. “Everyone wants you returned home safe. I mean to ensure that happens. And make no mistake, I’m not leaving without you.”
She bristled at the idea that he expected to dictate any aspect of her life. Especially when he was doing it on behalf of a committee: her father, her friend, the Order.
Everyone except him.
She raised her chin, hoping he wouldn’t see through her to the sting she was feeling all over again. “And if I decide I don’t want to go with you? What then? Do you mean to physically force me into custody, the way you did my father?”
Beside her, Zael tensed with palpable menace. Nathan’s brows furrowed as he looked at her and gave a slow shake of his head.
“Jesus.” He uttered the low, ripe curse. “Do you think I would do that to you?”
“I don’t know what to think, Nathan. Last night, I thought I knew you. Not the warrior or the Hunter—I thought I knew you. I thought I could trust you. I thought that you and I—” She stopped herself before the confession—the dashed hope—could escape her. “It doesn’t matter what I thought last night. Today nothing is the same.”
“That’s right. Today everything is different,” Nathan agreed. “Last night, we took Martin Gates into custody because we discovered he’d secretly been in business for years with Cassian Gray.”
“In business with him? How?”
“La Notte belongs to Martin Gates, not Cass.”
The news came as a surprise, but she was beyond the capacity to be shocked. A club like that, with its illegal sporting arena and gambling operation, to say nothing of the BDSM dens, would be the last kind of business her father would be involved in. Then again, if it had been a front for Cass, what was to say her father hadn’t been secretly holding the club as some further means of protecting Cass and his secret?>It was tempting to think there was somewhere she could go. It was a relief to think there was a place for her to get away from the kind of enemies who had killed Cass and were now on the hunt for her.
A place where she could be with others of her kind—her true kind. Somewhere she wouldn’t have to hide who and what she was. Where her very existence wouldn’t jeopardize the lives of the people who loved her and wanted to protect her.
Selfishly, there was a part of her that craved the asylum Zael described.
But could she really go without even a word of good-bye?
Could she leave her father? Could she leave Carys or her other friends? Could she abandon the job she adored and the colleagues and community she’d worked with for years?
And what about Nathan? Could she imagine any kind of life that didn’t somehow include him in it?
Of all the people she loved and would miss so terribly, it was this last thought that twisted her heart the most.
And she had to face the fact that whatever she thought she had with Nathan might already be gone.
But could she really walk away without knowing for certain?
“I realize this is an impossible choice, Jordana.”
She slowly shook her head. “No, you can’t know that. You’re asking me to walk away from the only home I’ve ever known. To never see the people I love most in this world ever again. Is my safety worth that? Is anything worth all of that?”
Zael’s handsome face was solemn, a dark, private pain swirling in the depths of his Caribbean blue eyes. “I will need your answer soon. If we mean to leave before you’re discovered, we must do it tonight. Make no mistake, Selene’s soldiers will come for you here. It’s not a question of if, Jordana, but when.”
26
NATHAN SAT BEHIND A PANE OF UV-BLOCKING GLASS IN THE BACKSEAT of a dark sedan that idled in the dusk on a narrow street in the coastal village of Amalfi. The driver, Salvatore, was human, a discreet, proven ally, hired to meet Nathan’s flight earlier that afternoon by the Order’s district commander in Rome, Lazaro Archer.
Nathan had been airborne from Boston within three hours of Jordana’s disappearance. The fly time on the Order’s private jet and the wait for sundown once he arrived in Italy had been maddening. Each second had crawled by in agonizing slowness. He wasn’t sure how he would have endured any of it if Martin Gates hadn’t been certain Jordana was in friendly hands, in a place that had once been a private sanctuary for Cass.
Knowing that Jordana was in any other man’s hands, particularly those of an Atlantean, hadn’t made the delay in reaching her any less torturous.
Now, finally, Nathan found himself looking up the steep, tree-choked hillside, to the secluded villa perched high above the serpentine little street.