Kai (A Dark Assassins Novel Book One) Read Online Free Page B

warred inside him.   He wanted to protect her, find the truth, and explore the heat that flared each time she was near.   But according to the files he received, she could have created the ultimate way to kill him and others of his kind.   Until he found out the truth, he would keep her at a distance.
    “You’re in danger,” she said.
    Tensing, he tried to sense whether there was anyone nearby.   When he was unable to detect anyone other than the two of them, he glanced back at her.
    “What are you talking about?”
    She reached into her jacket pocket, removed a USB drive and held it up.   Something on that drive drained the color from her cheeks, and he heard her pulse quicken.
    With a sudden clarity, he knew that whatever was on that drive had everything to do with the text he’d received earlier.   If she was so willing to show him, he figured it was the first mark of trust between them.
    “You need to see the video, but I want to warn you that it’s…disturbing.”
    Words stuck in his throat, and he nodded at her as he held his hand out for the drive.   She dropped it into his hand as if it were diseased, and he kept his eyes on her as he rounded the coffee table, opened his laptop and inserted the drive.   With a few clicks, he opened the file.
    “Holy shit,” he cursed.
    He had no clue who the man was, but he knew what he was.   A shifter, a lion-shifter by the look of his long blond hair and his massive size.   With each second that passed on film, a rage that he’d never experienced before built in his chest, and he forced himself to concentrate on memorizing the faces of the scientists on the film, even though most of them were dead by the end.   The more he knew, the faster he could find the people who were behind it.
    But the more he watched, the angrier he became.   He was used to violence—hell, he committed violence against others as a profession—but there was something unsettling about watching a shifter rip his own fucking throat out.
    As soon as the video finished, he slammed the laptop closed and glared at her.   “What the fuck were you researching there?”
    A shiver passed over her, but it wasn’t fear from his anger.   Her eyes were glazed over, as if she were remembering, over and over again, what she had witnessed.   Fuck, no one should have to watch that horrific shit, least of all her.
    She must have pieced together the similarities between the shifter and him, and knew the one place where she could find him.   Her bravery was tantamount to career suicide and most likely, at the risk of her own life, but she did it to warn him and other immortals.
    As the legends stated, vampires and shifters were created when venom was passed to a human through a bite.   Their specific lineage couldn’t be traced, so there was no real understanding whether shifters and vampires shared ancestry, but similarities between the two were immense.   Both species were fast, stealthy, and demonstrated heightened endurance and enhanced senses—although, shifters had a better sense of smell and thus that made them better trackers.  
    Ghost, a wolf-shifter, understood the unique qualities and talents in both species and created Dark Company.   They were contracted and paid well by the government for specialized cases, after normal human methods of tracking and assassinating targets had been exhausted.   Not all shifters and vampires were part of Dark Company, as evidenced by the shifter on the video.   Their main goal was to remain undetected, because if known, their presence would cause panic.   The scientists must have realized the differences and hunted the shifter, because both shifters and vampires were close to impossible to capture and extremely hard to kill.
    He ran his hand through his short hair, and sighed.   “Sorry, I’m not blaming you.   That was…”
    “I would never do that,” she choked out.   “They used my name, but I had absolutely nothing to do with that.