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Belladonna compound full time. Barrett “made do”—her mother’s condescending term—with a sublet apartment in Crystal City, across the Potomac from Washington proper. It was all she needed. She rarely set foot in it and had chosen it because it was near the airport. Home had always been an abstract concept to her.
    Standing, Barrett walked over to the mirror and straightened the jacket of her cream linen suit. Her blond, shoulder-length hair held the crisp straightness of its classic cut, a look that required minimal styling. Her throat was pale and unmarked by Powell’s recent bite marks since she always insisted he lick the wounds closed before she left him. She looked subdued. Classy. Nothing like a woman who would fool around with a loathsome pedophile (vampire or not) in order to wheedle information out of him. Nothing like the passionate, uninhibited woman she’d been in Nick Maltese’s arms.
    Carly’s voice crackled on the intercom again, prompting Barrett to return to her seat.
    “I just texted you the info, including email and phone numbers. Nick’s living on a mountaintop in Tennessee.”
    Barrett smiled. The mountains of Tennessee. Yes, that sounded like Nick. Smart and strong and sophisticated, but at heart a good ol’ boy. A man’s man.
    As for emailing or calling him? No. Ascertaining whether he knew about vampires and what he was doing for the FBI? That was definitely something that had to be done in person. Assuming he’d even let her within twenty feet of him, that is. But why wouldn’t he? They’d fucked. They’d parted ways. There should be no reason he wouldn’t want to help her.
    Even so, the thought of having to see Nick face-to-face was a double-edged sword. It would be a lot harder for Nick to refuse her if she was standing right in front of him. At the same time, she’d undoubtedly be swamped by ever-intensifying memories of what she and Nick had once shared.
    Sex, yes, but more than that.
    For her … affection. And intimacy.
    For him … he’d been protective of her, no doubt. Too protective. It had been one of the major things they’d fought about. He’d encouraged her to give up military life and pursue something else she’d been passionate about before Noah had died—art. But even so, once he’d put on his camo pants and returned to being big bad Nick, he hadn’t seemed interested in affection or intimacy. And she hadn’t missed how easy it had been to compartmentalize her in his mind.
    Didn’t change the fact that their connection had been intense, for as long as it lasted. She didn’t want to get close again no matter how much she needed him now. Back then she’d merely been vulnerable. Today, though she’d never admit it to anyone but herself, it sometimes took everything she had not to curl up into a ball and hide from the knowledge of what her life had become. That she was part of a world where the bad guys weren’t just teenage gang members or fanatical dictators with vast armies to do their dirty work. A world where the FBI had authorized the turning of humans into vampires even as it kept that fact a secret. A world where Rogues, some of them the FBI’s former allies, were exploiting humans for blood and sex and she was one of the people responsible for stopping them.
    She was tired down to her bones and so badly needed to share her burden with someone. Why not with Nick?
    She knew why.
    Breaking up with Nick would hurt far worse if she had to do it again.
    Finding Jane might be her first priority, but protecting her heart was a damn close second.

CHAPTER
TWO
    The road up Nick Maltese’s mountain was clearly meant to keep people out, but right now there were two red dots moving on the surveillance scanner he’d patched into a satellite mapping feed. Nick studied them carefully. He wasn’t expecting company, which meant at this very moment he could have two harmless humans, two dangerous humans, two vampires, two supremely dangerous vampires, or