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Black walked into the jump station, and didn’t bother to announce himself. He glanced over the rows of seers and humans, frowned at glimpses of monitors and projections, including some that were augmented reality and depicted in three dimensions.

Next to each of those human-type recordings, a seer sat paired.

He didn’t see Nick, Mika, or Ace.

Good. That meant they were still at the Gorren house.

He knew they’d do a thorough job, but it was still reassuring to know it was being taken care of, and by three of his better agents, especially now that Dalejem was essentially worthless.

Black sent them to Gorren’s to give them options for that night, assuming they were still going forward with the raid on Prometharis. He didn’t like the idea of kidnapping the lead counsel for Rucker Enterprises right out of her own home, but he wanted this thing done, and hewoulddo it, if he had to.

Like Miri said, the girl was more important.

He’d do it to get the implant out of Aura.

But he wanted to know risks, and the collaterals. He wanted to know who else lived in that house with her. He wanted to know if she had kids, a husband, a bunch of yappy dogs. He wanted to know everything about her security system, including cameras.

Nick understood the assignment perfectly.

He’d also seemed more than a little grateful for the job, not like Black was surprised after that shit-show earlier. Nick could hardly be blamed for wanting to put a few miles between himself and the girl, and probably his mate, as well, at least until he’d cooled down, assuming that was even possible at this point.

Whatever Nick thought was going on with Jem, the vampire practically thanked Black for giving him an excuse to leave the building for a few hours.

As Black scanned through faces, he didn’t see Dalejem in there, either.

Good,he thought again. That better mean the seer had gone to see Miri. Jem turned off his damned comms after he first left the room, likely to avoid him, Black, but also possibly his mate. That, or Jem had tranq’d and kidnapped Nick, taken them both on the run, and now they had a whole other nightmare on their hands.

That last thought was mostly dark humor.

Mostly.

Gaos,it better be.

The main thing that made it unlikely was that, mated or not, Nick was still a vampire and still stronger than Jem. The only way Jem could kidnap Nick was if he managed to hit him with a dart full of that special vampire horse-tranquilizer, then smuggle him down the elevators without anyone noticing, then lock Nick into a cage strong enough to restrain a vampire before Nick woke up. Which, incidentally, would happen in about twenty minutes, no matter how big of a dose Nick was given.

You couldn’t just pump that drug into vampires over and over again, either.

You had to wait a good hour before a dose worked on them again.

All of which meant Jem kidnapping Nick was unlikely in the extreme, and not only because Nick weighed a friggin’ ton. Like all vampires, his bones weighed as if they were made of steel and cement.

Black focused on the monitors and exhaled.

The problems and delays around the op that night seemed to be mounting.

He’d really wanted both NickandJem with him when they entered Prometharis that night. Now it looked like they were going with a scaled-down team. Black’s seers managed to work out that Prometharis had scientific crews working on staggered, twenty-four hour shifts at the research building on Oyster Point, so that was something, at least.

It was also the reason Black had Nick looking into possibly kidnapping Gorren out of her house wearing a bathrobe and her fuzzy slippers.

Black grunted, unable to not find humor in the image.

He cleared his throat when no one had looked up, despite how long he’d been standing there. He pinged the seers with hisaleimiwhen he realized they all wore headphones.

About half the people sitting there looked over sharply.

The humans, seeing the seers turn, followed their eyes.

“Anything?” Black asked, once they were all looking at him.