Free The Midnight Breed Series Companion by Adrian Lara Page A

run from danger. Yet he knows that a swift relocation is the only responsible choice if he wants to keep the compound’s residents safe—his family, as he’s reluctantly come to think of them all over the course of the series. Kellan’s Gen One grandfather, Lazaro Archer, offers one of his properties in the Maine woods as a temporary base of operations, but just as the Order begins making plans to move to safer ground, Tess, who’s been pregnant since Midnight Rising, goes into labor.
    But I’m getting ahead of myself.
    Deeper Than Midnight is Hunter and Corinne’s story. Hunter, the emotionless Gen One assassin born and raised to be a soldier in Dragos’s personal army, and Corinne Bishop, the Breedmate kidnapped from under Brock’s watch in Detroit decades ago and recently freed from imprisonment in Dragos’s breeding lab. Both victims of Dragos’s evil, Hunter and Corinne are thrust together in an unexpected alliance, when he’s tasked with escorting her home to her family, only to discover that Corinne had been secretly surrendered to Dragos all those years ago by her Darkhaven father.
    And Corinne is keeping a secret of her own too. A thirteen-year-old secret, born to her in the breeding labs and snatched away from her when he was just minutes old to become the same kind of expert killing machine that Hunter is. As soon as she was released from captivity by the Order, Corinne’s driving purpose is to find her son and rescue him from Dragos’s control.
    I thought it would be interesting to pair up Hunter (my first virgin hero!) with a woman who shared his background of abuse and manipulation by Dragos. Even more interesting, a woman whose personal quest will bring Hunter face-to-face with his own history—revelations that tear down the walls he’s had to build around his emotions in order to survive.
    As a writer (and a woman) I’m fascinated by a stoic, strong, fearless man who comes from a background so destructive and poisonous that it would reduce most other men (rightly so) to quivering pools of weakness and self-pity. As the saying goes, the strongest steel is forged in the hottest fire. That certainly sums up Hunter, but it also sums up Corinne as well.
    While Hunter and Corinne set out to uncover more of Dragos’s lieutenants and find her son, Nathan, back in Boston the Order has its hands full too. Aside from the sudden vulnerability of the compound to Dragos and the birth of Dante and Tess’s son, Xander Raphael, another of the Order’s inner circle is caught in a downward spiral that threatens to have catastrophic consequences.
    Sterling Chase, once the uptight, by-the-book Enforcement Agent, has over time begun to slip perilously toward Bloodlust. But despite the grip of his consuming disease, he uncovers a stunning link to Dragos through an ambitious human senator who’s somehow allied with the Order’s chief adversary. And in Chase’s quest to learn more, he crosses paths with the senator’s assistant, Tavia Fairchild, a beautiful young woman whose very existence will change the course of the series and alter Chase’s own future with a single gunshot.
    So, about that cliffhanger ending….
    I’ve never written a cliffhanger before. While I don’t mind them as a reader, so long as the book doesn’t end mid-sentence or without wrapping up the main story I’ve been invested in for the past four hundred pages, when I chose to end Deeper Than Midnight with Chase’s voluntary surrender to human law enforcement in an effort to spare his friends at the compound, I did so with the intention that the next book, Darker After Midnight , would be coming out very soon afterward. As in a few months afterward.
    But Darker After Midnight proved to be a bigger book than I anticipated. It took longer for me to get it just right. When I finally turned it in to my editor, she told me it was the best one in the series so far. It was a big book, she said, with a big book feel. And because of that,