It wasn't until after he'd said it that Rio realized he was using the word "we" when talking about the warriors and their goals. He was including himself in his thinking about the Order. More than that, he was actually starting to feel a part of the whole again - a functioning, valid member - as he stood there with Lucan and the others, making plans, talking strategy.

It felt good, in fact.

Maybe there still could be a place for him here after all. He was a mess and he'd made some mistakes, but maybe he could get back to what he was before.

He was still reaching out for that hope as a little beep started up on one of Gideon's monitoring stations for the compound. The warrior wheeled over to the computer, frowning.

"What is it?" Lucan asked.

"I'm picking up an active cell phone signal here in the compound - not one of ours," he replied, then looked over at Rio. "It's outbound, originating from your quarters."

Dylan.

"Holy fuck," Rio ground out, anger spiking - at himself and at her. "She said she didn't have one on her."

Goddamn it. Dylan had lied to him.

And if he'd had his eye on the ball like he should, he would have body-searched her from head to toe before he so much as thought about taking the female at her word.

A reporter with a cell phone in her possession. For all he knew she could be sitting in his apartments phoning in everything she'd seen and heard to CNN - exposing the Breed to the humans and doing it right under his fucking nose.

"There was nothing in her bags to indicate she had a cell with her," Rio muttered, a feeble excuse and he knew it. "Damn it, I should have checked her over."

Gideon typed something on one of his many control panels. "I can throw up some interference, shut down the signal."

"Do it," Lucan said. Then, to Rio: "We've got some loose ends that need to be snipped, my man. Including the one down the hall in your quarters."

"Yeah," Rio said, knowing Lucan was right. Dylan had a decision to make, and time was getting crucial now that the Order had other things to contend with.

Lucan put a hand on Rio's shoulder. "I think it's time I should meet Dylan Alexander personally."

"Janet - hello? I didn't get Mom's room number. Hello...Janet? Are you still there?"

Dylan pulled her cell phone away from her ear. Signal failed.

"Shit."

She held the device out in front of her and started pacing the room, looking for a spot where she might get a stronger signal. But...nothing. The damn thing was dead, just cut out on her even though the battery hadn't quite choked yet.

She could hardly think straight for the panicked drum of her pulse.

Her mom was in the hospital.

Relapse...Oh, God.

She narrowly resisted the urge to pitch the dead cell phone into the nearest wall. "Damn piece of shit!"

Frantic now, she headed out to the living room to try the call again -

And nearly jumped out of her skin when the apartment door flew inward like it had been blown open by a storm force gale in the corridor. Rio stood there.

And good Lord, he was pissed off.

"Give it to me."

His flashing amber eyes and emerging fangs put a knot of fear in her stomach, but she was pissed off too, and torn in pieces over her mother's turn for the worse. She needed to see her. Needed to get the hell out of this unreality she'd been kidnapped into and get back to the things that really mattered to her.

Jesus Christ, she thought, on the verge of losing it. Her mom was sick again, and alone in some city hospital room. She had to get there.

Rio strode into the room. "The phone, Dylan. Give it to me. Now."

It was then that she noticed he wasn't alone. Standing behind him in the corridor was a tank of a man - easily six-and-a-half feet tall, with a mane of black hair and an air of menace that belied his calm exterior. He hung back as Rio stalked inside and approached Dylan.

"Did you do something to my phone?" she demanded hotly, more than a little terrified of Rio and this new threat but too worried about her mom to care what might happen to her in the next minute. "What did you do, make it stop working? Tell me! What the hell did you do!"

"You lied to me, Dylan."

"And you fucking abducted me!" She hated the tears that suddenly ran down her cheeks. Almost as much as she hated her captivity and cancer and the cold ache in her chest that had opened up during her call to the shelter.

Rio put his hand out as he walked up to her. The man in the corridor prowled into the apartment now too. No question about it, he was a vampire - a Breed warrior, like Rio. His gray eyes seemed to penetrate her like blades, and in the same way an animal sensed a predator on the wind, Dylan sensed that where Rio was dangerous, this other man was exponentially more powerful. Older despite his youthful appearance. And more deadly.

"Who were you calling?" Rio demanded.

She wasn't about to tell him. She clutched the slim cell phone in her fist, but at that very instant she felt an energy force pulling at her fingers, prying them open. She couldn't keep them closed no matter how hard she tried. Dylan gasped as her cell phone flew out of her hand and onto the palm of the vampire now standing beside Rio.

"There's a couple of messages here from the newspaper," he announced darkly. "And several outgoing calls to other New York numbers. Residence of one Sharon Alexander, a cell number for the same, and a connected call to a blocked number in Manhattan. That's the one we shut down."

Rio swore vividly. "Did you tell anyone about us just now? Or about what you've seen?"

"No!" she insisted. "I haven't said anything, I swear. I'm no threat to you - "

"There is the matter of the pictures you distributed, and the story you sent to your employer," the dark one reminded her, the way you might remind the condemned of why they were heading for the gas chamber.

"You don't have to worry about any of that," she said, ignoring Rio's harsh scoff as she spoke. "That message from the newspaper? That was my boss, letting me know I was fired. Well, technically it was an involuntary resignation, on account of the fact I no-showed an appointment in Prague because I was busy being abducted."

"You lost your job?" Rio asked, slanting her a scowl.

Dylan shrugged. "It doesn't matter. But I doubt at this point my boss is going to use any of the pictures or the story I sent him."

"That's no longer a concern." The grim one stared at her like he was measuring her reaction. "By now the virus program we sent him should have wiped out every hard drive in his office. He'll be putting out that fire for the rest of the week."

She really didn't want to feel the least bit happy about that, but Coleman Hogg up to his quivering jowls in hard drive crashes was one tiny bright spot in an otherwise unbearable situation.

"The same virus went out to everyone you distributed those photos to," he informed her. "That takes care of any hard evidence leaks, but we still have to deal with the fact that several people are walking around with knowledge we can't afford to let them keep. Knowledge they could, willingly or unwittingly, pass on to others. So we need to remove that risk."

Something icy settled in Dylan's gut. "What do you mean...remove the risk?"

"You have a choice to make, Miss Alexander. Tonight you will either be relocated into one of the area's Darkhaven sanctuaries under the protection of the Breed, or you will be returned to your residence in New York."

"I have to go home," she said, no decision at all. She looked at Rio and found him staring at her, his face unreadable. "I have to get back to New York right away. Do you mean I'm going to be free to go?"

That hard gray gaze turned to Rio now, without giving her an answer. "Tonight you leave for Miss Alexander's home in New York. I want you to handle things with her; Niko and Kade can scrub the other folks she's been in contact with."

"No!" Dylan blurted. The ice in her stomach suddenly turned into a glacial sort of fear. "Oh, my God - no, you can't...Rio, tell him - "

"End of discussion," the dark one said, directing his attention at Rio, not her. "You'll leave at dusk."

Rio nodded solemnly, accepting the orders like it didn't faze him at all. Like he'd done this sort of thing a hundred times before.

"As of tonight, Rio, no more loose ends." The flinty eyes slid pointedly to Dylan, then back to Rio. "Not one."

As his terrifying friend departed, Dylan turned shakily to Rio. "What did he mean, remove the risk? No more loose ends?"

Rio glowered over at her darkly. There was accusation in that piercing topaz gaze, a scathing coldness and very little of the wounded, tender man she'd been kissing in this very room just a short time ago. She felt cold under the blast of that hard glare, like she was looking into the face of a stranger.

"I'm not going to let you or your friends hurt anyone," she told him, wishing her voice didn't falter as she said it. "I'm not going to let you kill them!"

"No one's going to die, Dylan." His tone was flat, so detached it was hardly reassuring. "We're going to take their memory of what they saw in your photographs, and of anything you might have told them about the Breed or the cave. We're not going to hurt anyone, but we need to scrub their minds of any recollection of those things."

"But how? I don't understand - "

"You don't have to understand," he said softly.

"Because I'm not going to remember either. Is that what you mean?"

He looked at her for a long moment in silence. She searched his face for some hint of emotion beyond the stony resolve he projected. All she saw was a man fully prepared for the task he'd been given, a warrior committed to his mission. And none of the tenderness she'd seen in him before, or the need she thought he'd felt for her, was going to stand in his way. She was a captive at his mercy. An inconvenient problem he intended to eliminate.

Rio's brows came together slightly as he gave a vague shake of his head. "Tonight you go home, Dylan."

She should be happy to hear it - relieved, at least - but Dylan felt oddly bereft as she watched him leave the room and close the door behind him.

Chapter Twenty-one

He came back for her after a couple of hours and told her it was time to go. Dylan wasn't surprised that her next conscious memory was waking up in the backseat of a dark SUV as Rio brought it to a stop at the curb outside her Brooklyn apartment building. As she sat up drowsily, Rio met her gaze in the rearview mirror.

Dylan scowled at him. "You knocked me out again."

"For the last time," he said, his voice low, apologetic.

He killed the engine and opened the driver side door. He was alone up front, no sign of the two others who were supposed to be riding along. The ones who'd been ordered to take care of the other "loose ends" while Rio personally took care of her.

God, the thought of her mom coming in contact with the kind of dangerous inpiduals that Rio was apparently associated with made her shake with anxiety. Her mother was dealing with enough as it was; Dylan didn't want her anywhere near this dark new reality.

Dylan wondered how fast Rio would catch her if she tried to bolt out of the SUV. If she could get a large enough lead, she might be able to make a run for the subway station into Midtown where the hospital was. But who was she kidding? Rio had tracked her from Jicin to Prague. Finding her in Manhattan might prove a challenge for him...for all of about thirty seconds.

But damn it, she needed to see her mom. She needed to be with her, at her bedside, and see her face so she could know for certain that she was okay.

Please Lord, let her be okay.

"I thought you were going to have company for this trip," Dylan said, hoping by some miracle there had been a change of plans and Rio's friends had stayed behind. "What happened to the other guys who were supposed to come with you?"

"I dropped them off in the city. They didn't need to be here with us. They'll report back to me when they're finished."

"When they're finished terrorizing a bunch of innocent people, you mean? How do you know your vampire buddies won't decide to take a little blood donation along with the memories they're going to steal?"

"They have a specific mission, and they'll adhere to it."

She looked into the smoky topaz eyes staring back at her in the mirror. "Just like you, right?"

"Just like me." He got out of the vehicle and came to the back to grab her backpack and messenger bag from the seat beside her. "Come on, Dylan. We don't have a lot of time to wrap this up."

When she didn't move, he reached in and startled her with a gentle stroke of her cheek. "Come on. Let's get inside now. Everything's going to be all right."

She climbed out of the leather seat and walked up the concrete steps with him to her building's front door. Rio handed her the keys from out of her bag. Dylan turned the entryway lock and stepped inside the stale-smelling, robin's egg blue vestibule, feeling like she hadn't been home in ten years.

"My apartment's on the second floor," she murmured, but then Rio probably already knew that. He followed close behind her as the two of them climbed the stairs up to her hole-in-the-wall place at the back of the common hallway.

She unlocked the door and Rio walked in ahead of her, keeping her in back of him as though he were accustomed to entering dangerous places and doing it at the front of the line. He was a warrior, all right. If his cautious demeanor and immense size didn't confirm it, the big gun he was concealing in the back waistband of his black cargo pants would have done so in spades. She watched as he checked out the place, pausing next to a computer workstation that sat on a small writing desk in the corner.