Forget About Midnight (Alexa O'Brien, Huntress #9)(89)

“She just left town without her phone? No questions asked? Did she know you were luring me into a trap?” I ran a hand through his hair and nipped at his bottom lip.

Through glazed eyes, he regarded me with hostile desire. “No. She was instructed to gather her team and leave immediately without a word to anyone, especially not to you. I told her I would let you know she was away on assignment.”

I thought of my sister in Las Vegas, spying on Jenner and Kale. Then I considered what Jenner would do if he caught her. He’d made no secret of his interest in her.

“Las Vegas is not safe. I want you to get her back here. Like now.”

He shook his head and mumbled something that I had to coax him to repeat. He was falling a little too far under my thrall. “I can’t. I ran the assignment order through head office. She’s scheduled to be there until the Vegas FPA is running smoothly again.”

“Too bad. Send someone else. Bring her home, Briggs.”

“It doesn’t work that way. Every agent is considered equally capable and equally at risk. Juliet can take care of herself.” The fact that he said it while under my spell meant he really believed it. Still, it didn’t make me feel any better.

I smacked him again, a closed fist this time. Some people might say abusing an unarmed man with his hands cuffed behind his back while mind f*cking him was sadistic and evil. Well, some people were wrong.

“If I have to go there and drag her home myself, I’m going to make sure that Shya makes what’s left of your pitiful life a living hell.” My tongue darted out to catch the next bead of blood that welled up from his lip. His blood was rich and strong, thrumming with vitality.

Briggs turned his head to kiss me, caught himself mid-action, and pulled back as far as the couch would let him. He was a fighter. I liked that.

“I sent her there to keep her from ruining her career,” he said, as if he couldn’t hold the confession back. “If she got caught helping you, her entire life would be ruined. I care about her. Would be nice if you acted like you did as well.”

I grabbed his face and forced him to meet my eyes. “I made the mistake of trusting you because of how much I care about her. I turned myself in when I thought she was in trouble.”

Briggs laughed, but it was a drunken sound. “So you did. Maybe you have a heart after all.”

“You have no f*cking idea.”

Because I was infuriated and insulted, I turned up the heat and flooded Briggs with the drug-like force that would make him mine. And just when he’d begun to murmur, “Please,” over and over, I targeted the unblemished side of his neck and bit deep.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t f*cking love feasting on Agent Briggs. Though he lacked the power rush I craved, his rich, strong blood and virile lust more than sated my bloodlust. It appeased my personal need to victimize the stuffy Fed too.

My dark side wanted to take this all the way, to leave him a bloodless corpse with a smile on his face. The dragon on my forearm reminded me why that wasn’t the plan.

The softer side of me was disappointed that giving Briggs to Shya would mean some new agent to take his place and be a royal pain in my ass. There was a gamble in what I was doing. The new agent could be much worse than Briggs, if that were possible.

I sat back and regarded him with the appraising stare of a predator admiring its catch. His expression somehow conveyed both pain and pleasure. That injured wrist of his couldn’t be feeling too great.

“You should not exist.” His breath came in gasps. The man was hovering on the edge of climax, my bite mirroring the one from Arys he still bore, and somehow he still managed to muster a vicious remark.

I smiled. “You know what? To show you I’m not a total *, I’m going to heal that wrist for you. And while I do it, you’re going to tell me what kind of things you’ve got going on in that lab.”

With a little push of power, it was easy to heal the damage Jez had done to his wrist. As I’d commanded, he began to talk, telling me tales of study and experimentation right out of a horror film. The FPA was studying us, all of us. Not a surprise in itself, I’d expected that.

The way Briggs told it, he’d learned early on that it was better to be the one studying than the one being studied. They wanted to know what made us different. They sought to isolate it and find a way to use it. But their biggest priority was finding a way to control us. As Arys had said, they wanted to turn us into weapons.

“What about you, Briggs?” I asked, breathing in his masculine human scent. Spending the day with him while waiting for Shya was going to be fantastic. “Do they use you as a weapon? Do you do a lot of walking in the dreams of others for the greater good?”

“I do what I have to do. Just like you.” There was a defiant glint in his eyes.

Oh yeah, it was definitely going to be a good day.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The day passed quickly. Much of it was spent tormenting Briggs. As sunset approached I eased off, freeing him from my thrall. He reminded me that in just a few hours that video would be leaked when he didn’t show up for work.

I watched the sun drop beyond the horizon from a shuttered window. Jez and Shaz hadn’t returned, which I found strange. I needed a ride.

“Do you have your phone handy?” I searched Briggs, finding it shoved into the back pocket of his pants. In a cheeky move, I squished close to him on the couch and took a photo of the two of us. Then I sent it to my own phone. “That one is for Juliet.”