Free A Dark Kiss of Rapture by Sylvia Day Page A

head—”
    There was a split second in which she
registered the gun in his hand. And then there was nothing.
     
    * * *
     
    Raze studied the baroness’s slumped head
with icy detachment. She remained upright courtesy of the
ingeniously heinous chair he’d found in her home—a chair with
silver-plated spiked manacles at the wrists and throat, and a
bottom and back with blades that protruded or retracted via a
handle on the backside.
    Turning away, he looked around the warehouse
loft and considered what she’d left behind. There was an entire
bookcase of recorded atrocities stored in jeweled cases. It was a
collection that could never fall into a Sentinel or lycan’s hands,
or questions would be raised that had no good answers. Some of what
he’d seen would haunt him for years to come, minions who’d
succumbed so completely to bloodlust that they were little more
than ravening beasts. Raze wasn’t certain there was anything—even
the Creator’s command that the Fallen live endlessly with their
vampiric curse—that could prevent a war if Adrian believed vampires
were a threat requiring complete eradication.
    After all, Adrian had broken other
commandments without punishment.
    “This place is a house of horrors,” Crash
muttered behind him, tossing the disks into a crate to be
destroyed. “And they were proud of it. They could’ve kept all this
shit in a cloud or on a hard drive, but they wanted the visual of
how many kills they had under their belt.”
    Raze’s phone vibrated in his pocket and he
pulled it out. “Raze.”
    “How extensive is the infestation in
Chicago?” Adrian asked without preamble.
    His back stiffened. “I’m taking care of
it.”
    “If you think that’s going to be enough to
put me off, you haven’t learned anything about me in the last
several eons.” The smoothly modulated tone of the Sentinel’s voice
only made his words more disturbing. “Discovering a few hundred
armed minions in a heavily populated metropolis is a big fucking
problem. Tell Syre if he can’t get a handle on his ranks, I’ll take
the necessary steps to manage it myself.”
    “Why don’t—”
    “You and the six minions who arrived today
have forty-eight hours to wrap it up and clear out.”
    The line died, leaving Raze cursing at an
angel who couldn’t hear him.
    There were times when he thought there was
no way to clean up the mess the Fallen had made, times when he
thought even damage control was out of their reach. There were tens
of thousands of vampires policed by less than four hundred combined
Fallen and Sentinels plus a few thousand lycans. The odds were
against them in every way.
    He’d felt helpless before, but now he had
something he couldn’t bear to lose. He would hunt down the ones
whose names he found here in Baron’s safe house, but that wouldn’t
make Kim any safer. As long as they were connected in any way, she
would be a target.
     
    * * *
     
    Back in his hotel room, Raze looked into the
video feed of Vash’s office on his brand-new iPad and caught her
up. “I got the list of Baron’s followers off his laptop and most of
the team is out hunting them now. They had me tailed from the
moment I arrived at the airport. While I was killing Baron at the
ballpark, the baroness was here in my room planting bugs.”
    “So now we know why she wasn’t there that
night.”
    “Right. That’s what I couldn’t get: why the
hell did they draw my attention? If they hadn’t dumped that body on
my porch, we wouldn’t be on to them now. Reviving Grimm’s doctrine
was a ruse. They used it to round up enough minions to put on that
show at Wrigley Field, but their real agenda was to get those bugs
on me for future intel gathering. We found them in every room of my
suite and on my iPad. They planted tracking devices on my bags.
They knew every move I made and would have continued to know, if
she hadn’t fucked up and gone after Kim this morning. The baroness
hadn’t planned on my being