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in the two-hundred-year-old mahogany beneath it.
    Tess flinched, but there was an unwavering resolve in her blue-green eyes. “You are not useless. Healing takes time, that’s all. You can’t give up.”
    Rio growled something nasty under his breath, his hooded eyes throwing off amber light in warning. But not even a half-mad vampire’s ferocious bluster was going to dissuade Tess from helping him if she could. No doubt she’d seen this sort of snarling behavior before from Rio—and possibly even her own mate—and hadn’t run away in terror.
    Tegan watched Tess stand firm, calm, steady, tenacious. It wasn’t hard to imagine why Dante adored her so much. But Tegan could see that Rio was in a particularly unstable, volatile state. He may not mean anyone harm—least of all, Tess, whose extraordinary healing skills had nursed him out of near psychosis—but rage and anguish made for one powerful emotional cocktail. Tegan knew that fact firsthand; he’d lived it once, long ago. Add to that the lingering aftereffects of a traumatic brain injury like Rio had suffered, and the warrior was a lit powder keg just waiting to go off.
    “Let me,” Tegan said when Tess started to move toward Rio again. “I’ll take him down to the compound. I’m heading below anyway.”
    She gave him a wary smile. “Okay, thanks.”
    Tegan approached Rio with deliberate movements and carefully guided him away from the female and out of the field of debris around their feet. The big male’s steps were heavy, lacking the grace that used to come so naturally to him. Rio leaned heavily on Tegan’s shoulder and arm, his bare chest heaving with every deep breath he hauled into his lungs.
    “That’s it, nice and easy,” Tegan coached him. “We good now, amigo ?”
    The dark head bobbed awkwardly.
    Tegan glanced to Tess as she knelt down and began collecting the shattered glass and porcelain from the foyer tiles. “Have you seen Chase around tonight?”
    “Not for a while,” she said. “He and Dante are still out on patrol.”
    Tegan smirked. Four months ago, the two males had been ready to tear out each other’s throats. They’d been tossed together by Lucan as unwilling partners when Darkhaven agent Sterling Chase showed up at the compound with info about a dangerous club drug called Crimson and to solicit help from the Order in getting the shit off the streets. Now he and Dante were almost inseparable in the field, had been ever since Chase left the Darkhavens and came on board officially as a member of the Order. “The pair of them are a regular Mutt and Jeff, eh?”
    Tess’s eyes held a trace of humor as she looked up from the mess in front of her. “More like Larry and Curly, if you ask me.”
    Tegan exhaled a wry laugh as he steered Rio into the hallway. He brought him to the mansion’s elevator, walked him inside, then pushed the code to begin the journey down to the underground headquarters of the Order.
    After dropping Rio off in the warrior’s compound apartments, Tegan headed back to the tech lab to check in. Gideon was at his post, as usual, the blond vampire rolling back and forth on a wheeled office chair, working his magic on no less than four computers at the same time. A wireless cell phone headset curled around his ear and he was giving a string of coordinates over the small mic that arced toward his cheek.
    The consummate multitasker, Gideon looked up as Tegan entered the lab, gestured him over, and brought up a set of satellite stills on one of the monitors. “Niko’s got a possible lead on that Crimson lab,” he informed Tegan, then went back to his conversation as his fingers flew over the keyboard of another machine. “Right. I’m running a check right now.”
    Tegan stared at the images Gideon had called up on the screen. Some were known Rogue lairs—most of them former lairs, due to the efforts of the Order—and others showed Rogues and Minions coming and going from various locations in and around