Ashes of Midnight Read Online Free PDF

it, Claire closed her eyes. “I know, Andre. I heard, of course. Everyone in the region was stricken when the news of it reached us from Berlin. It was an awful, unimaginable tragedy—”
     
“It was a fucking bloodbath,” he barked, the sharp, raw scrape of his voice cutting her off. “Fifteen innocent lives wiped out at Wilhelm Roth’s command. All of them murdered, shot like dogs on his orders.”
     
“No, Andre.” Claire shook her head, confused. Appalled that he could think such a thing. “There was an explosion. The Enforcement Agency investigators concluded there had been a rupture in the estate’s gas main. They ruled it an accident, Andreas. I don’t know where you got the idea that Wilhelm—”
     
“Enough,” he growled. “You can’t protect your mate with lies. Nothing can protect him from the justice he deserves. I will avenge them.”
     
Claire swallowed hard. She wasn’t so naive that she believed Wilhelm Roth’s honor to be without a blemish or three. He was a cold male, distant but not cruel. He was a ruthless politician who’d never made a secret of his driving ambitions. But a murderer? Someone who could be capable of the kind of death Andreas accused him of? No, she couldn’t reconcile that.
     
As difficult as it was to consider, Claire wondered if it was Andreas, not Wilhelm, who was the true monster here. She need only look past his broad shoulders to see the smoke and fire still rising from the carnage he’d left on the road. And there was yet more death and destruction in Hamburg, at the Darkhaven where Wilhelm Roth and his smattering of kin and staff had lived.
     
Death and destruction not so unlike the kind that had visited Andreas’s own Darkhaven three months ago. The fire in Berlin had been immense. The annihilation had been merciless, complete. Nothing had been left of the mansion or its inhabitants when the smoke had finally cleared. The flames had consumed them all.
     
Oh, God…
     
Claire stared at Andreas, a sickness swelling to ugly life in her heart as the heat rolling off his body warped the air around him. Maybe there was an explanation for what had happened at his Darkhaven. Maybe he had snapped somehow. Had something occurred to send him over the edge, to bring out this terrifying side of him?
     
“Andre, listen to me.” She took a step closer to him, her hands held out before her in a gesture of peace, of calm. “I don’t know what’s happened to you, but I want to help you if I can.”
     
He growled a nasty curse. The heat coursing over him seemed to intensify, putting a sharp electrical tang in the air.
     
Claire went on, hoping she might be able to break through whatever madness it was that gripped him. “Talk to me, please. Tell me how to help you and let’s sort this out together. I’m willing if you are.”
     
Although she’d forced a fearlessness into her voice, she couldn’t help jumping a little as a crackle of illumination—as intense as white-hot lightning—began to arc off his body. He grunted through his teeth and fangs. His already thinned pupils narrowed to the barest vertical slits of black in the center of his fiery amber eyes. He was Breed, a predator by nature, but the vampire in him had never scared Claire. It was this other side of him—the side she’d never known he had, let alone seen firsthand—that made her blood run cold in her veins.
     
Uncertain now, horrified by all that had occurred tonight and wary of this stranger she no longer knew, Claire took another step toward him. “Please, you must know that you can trust me. Will you let me help you, Andre?”
     
“Goddamn it, stop calling me that!”
     
At his bellow, a tree to the immediate right of her burst into flames. Claire threw a nervous glance at the fire suddenly climbing the trunk of the tall pine. Heat blasted toward her from the instant conflagration, hitting her face as though she were caught in a furnace.
     
Had he intended that as a warning, or a threat?
     
Was he able to control this part