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He stalked across the wide open space, taking his time, taunting her with his confident swagger. “A smart warrior knows his enemy,” he lectured deliberately. “You didn’t even bother to discover the true nature of my power. Klemens knew. Why do you think he refused to take the field if I was there?”

He came within five feet of her and stopped, the blue gleam of his eyes casting her in foggy color. “You thought your slavish minions would guarantee my defeat, but the only defeat tonight will be yours.”

Her eyes narrowed in rage, their copper-penny glow making her look sallow and sickly. But for all her glare of defiance, she was afraid of him. She kept rubbing her arms, as if trying to scrape away the clinging webs of his power, kept reaching with her mind for her dead minions, becoming frantic all over again when she discovered they were gone.

She didn’t even try to surrender, seemed to understand at last that she had come too far, had caused too much bloodshed for him to accept her submission.

But she was still a vampire, still driven by the power of her blood. She made a final, desperate bid for survival, marshaling all of her remaining strength into a single knife-blade of energy. With a gesture far more disciplined that Aden would have credited her with, she thrust it at Aden, a killing blow aimed at his heart.

Aden was not so easily taken in. He’d been fighting vampire challenges a century before Silas had even been born. He’d sensed her desperation, felt her gathering power. When she launched her surprise attack, he was ready for her. With a gesture, he deflected her conjured knife blade, turning all of that energy back on her and blasting her across the floor to slam against the far wall while she wailed in both anger and pain.

Aden was silent as he crossed the few feet to where Silas lay choking on her own blood, her power drained, her body damaged beyond her current ability to heal. Had Aden been willing, he could have saved her.

But he wasn’t willing. Silas needed to die. The only question was how much pain she would endure first.

Sinking to one knee, he studied her dispassionately. She’d known the risk she was taking and had taken it freely. She wasn’t the first vampire to die this way, and she wouldn’t be the last. It was the lot of those who were made Vampire, especially those who were driven to climb the ladder of power.

Reaching down almost idly, he stroked his fingers over her chest where her heart still beat frantically. In another context, the gesture could have been sexual. But there was nothing sexual about this.

“One way or another, Silas,” he murmured, “you’re going to die tonight.” He shrugged. “I can make it easy, or—” He bent his fingers slightly, and his power squeezed her heart. Silas cried out, her eyes going wide with shock at the intense pain“—I can make it very painful,” he finished.

She blinked up at him, her breathing reduced to harsh gasps for oxygen.

“Tell me where Sidonie is,” he said, his voice hard and uncompromising, “and I’ll make it quick.”

“I don’t,” she began breathlessly, struggling for enough air to speak. Her head rolled from side to side in denial. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Aden’s gaze went flat, and his eyes lit up, bathing her in their cool glow.

“Wrong answer,” he growled.

She shrieked as he ripped her mind apart, as he dug for knowledge of Sidonie’s kidnapping and found nothing. And when he was finished, he dug his fingers into her chest and squeezed her heart like an overripe tomato, feeling the bloody flesh squish through his fingers like some gruesome puree.

When it was all over, when Silas had become part of the bloody mud on the floor of the warehouse, Aden stood. If she’d had any power left, he’d have absorbed it willingly, but by the time he’d killed her, she’d been drained of every ounce. He closed his eyes against the inevitable adrenaline crash and felt Bastien and the others gathering around him, offering their protection and their strength.

“She didn’t know anything about Sidonie’s kidnapping,” Aden said quietly.

Bastien gave him a worried look. “Then where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“We should go, my lord. There will be enough light through the windows in the morning to burn away this mess, and we can leave her vehicles out back. Local scavengers will strip them far more efficiently than we could.”

Aden glanced around the nearly empty warehouse. “If any of her minions—” He didn’t bother finishing the sentence. There’d been no one left to survive Silas’s death.

“It’s late, my lord,” Bastien reminded him. It was late, much later than he’d planned. The business with the dead doorman and its follow-up had taken far too much of his time. And he wondered if someone had planned it that way, someone who had Sidonie in his clutches even now.

It did no good to curse the rising sun and its implacable effect on his vampire nature, but he did it anyway, swearing long and fluently. Sidonie was out there somewhere. Alone or worse. She wasn’t dead. He’d taken enough of her blood that he’d have known if she died. Unfortunately, there were far worse fates than death. He had experienced many of them personally.

Did she know he was looking for her? That he wouldn’t stop until he found her?

He drew a deep breath as they exited back onto the street, grateful for the fresh air. As cold and wet as it was, it was an improvement over the warehouse, which had become oppressive with the stink of drying blood and ash.

“Is it over, my lord?” Bastien asked, pausing to look at Aden as he opened the SUV’s door.

His lieutenant was asking if the night’s battle concluded the challenge. If Aden was now Lord of the Midwest.

Aden nodded, but waited until they were in the SUV and on their way home before going into detail. “Silas was the last major challenger that I know of. It’s possible some unknown contender is out there waiting in the wings for the rest of us to kill each other off, but I haven’t heard of any.”

“But then, how do you claim the—”

“That’s Lucas’s call. He’s the current Lord of the Midwest in fact, if not in spirit. I’ll notify him of my intention to claim the territory. He has the option of fighting me for it, but I think we both know he won’t do that. Although,” he added thoughtfully, “if Silas had tried to claim the victory, he would have made her fight for it.”

“Or simply sicced Raphael on her,” Bastien muttered.

Aden chuckled. “You’ve met Raphael, Bastien. Does he strike you as a vampire who can be sicced on anybody?”

Bastien’s face brightened in a rare grin as he looked over the seat at Aden. “I think Cyn could get away with it.”

They shared a tired laugh, and Bastien said, “So, you inform Lucas, and then what?”

“Then we travel to that godforsaken ranch of his in the middle of nowhere, and he formally transfers the Midwest to me. We spend a night in drunken revelry, and then we come back to Chicago and start working. But before we do any of that, I need to find Sidonie. It wasn’t Silas who kidnapped her, so who was it? And what do they want?”

“Could it be that unknown challenger you talked about?”

Aden frowned, shaking his head. “Maybe. It doesn’t sound right, though. It took manpower to take Hamilton and his people down that way. If there was a challenger in town with the numbers to do that, I’d have heard about it. Damn it!” he swore, pounding the armrest in frustration, feeling the rippling heat inside his skull that warned him the rising sun was nearly to the horizon.

“I can have some our daylight people put out feelers tomorrow, my lord. It will give us a head start in the search for her.”

Aden nodded, his mood grim. “He used humans for the assault, and humans talk. They can’t seem to help themselves. Someone will be bragging about taking down a vampire, even though that’s not what happened. We simply have to root him out.”