Dark Operative: The Dawn of Love (The Children Of The Gods Paranormal Romance Series Book 19) Read online

  Dark Operative

  The Dawn of Love

  I. T. Lucas

  FOLLOW I. T. LUCAS ON AMAZON

  THE CHILDREN OF THE GODS

  Series Reading Order

  Kian & Syssi’s story

  1: Dark Stranger The Dream

  2: Dark Stranger Revealed

  3: Dark Stranger Immortal

  Dark Stranger Trilogy + Goddess part 1

  Amanda’s story

  4: Dark Enemy Taken

  5: Dark Enemy Captive

  6: Dark Enemy Redeemed

  Kri & Michael’s Story

  6.5: My Dark Amazon Novella

  Andrew’s Story

  7: Dark Warrior Mine

  8: Dark Warrior’s Promise

  9: Dark Warrior’s Destiny

  10: Dark Warrior’s Legacy

  Bhathian & Eva’s Story

  11: Dark Guardian Found

  12: Dark Guardian Craved

  13: Dark Guardian’s Mate

  Brundar & Calypso's Story

  14: Dark Angel's Obsession

  15: Dark Angel's Seduction

  16: Dark Angel's Surrender

  Turner’s Story

  17: Dark Operative: A Shadow of Death

  18: Dark Operative: A Glimmer of Hope

  19: Dark Operative: The Dawn of Love

  Annani’s Story

  Goddess’s Choice

  Anandur’s Story

  20: Dark Survivor Awakened

  TRY THE SERIES ON AUDIBLE FOR FREE!

  Books 1-19 are narrated by the incredible

  Charles Lawrence.

  As of 4/26/2018, books 1-17 are available for download.

  Books 18 & 19 are coming out on Audible soon.

  Copyright © 2018 by I. T. Lucas

  All rights reserved.

  Dark Operative: The Dawn of Love is a work of fiction!

  Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any similarity to actual persons, organizations and/or events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Prelude

  1. Kian

  2. Sharon

  3. Turner

  4. Bridget

  5. Turner

  6. Julian

  7. Eva

  8. Bridget

  9. Kian

  10. Turner

  11. Bridget

  12. Anandur

  13. Eva

  14. Nick

  15. Turner

  16. Bridget

  17. Anandur

  18. Losham

  19. Bridget

  20. Turner

  21. Bridget

  22. Ruth

  23. Robert

  24. Bridget

  25. Turner

  26. Bridget

  27. Roni

  28. Turner

  29. Anandur

  30. Turner

  31. Bridget

  32. Losham

  33. Kian

  34. Eva

  35. Kian

  36. Jackson

  37. Bhathian

  38. Turner

  39. Tessa

  40. Kian

  41. Bridget

  42. Turner

  43. Bridget

  44. Turner

  45. Bridget

  46. Turner

  47. Bridget

  48. Turner

  49. Bridget

  50. Kian

  51. Bridget

  52. Kian

  53. Bridget

  54. Kian

  55. Bridget

  56. Turner

  57. Bridget

  58. Turner

  59. Turner

  Epilogue

  Also by I. T. Lucas

  Sneak Peek at my next book

  Prelude

  “You should join in,” Mordan huffed between one push-up and the next. “We need to keep up our strength.”

  Sitting on the thin, dirty mattress and leaning his back against the iron bars of his cage, Grud watched the guy going through his fourth set. “What for? We are never getting out of here.”

  Mordan was stupid, working out and sweating like a pig on a hot day when there was nowhere to wash up. He was just adding another layer of stench to that of unwashed bodies, and the dump Shaveh had dropped on the grate at the far end of his cage.

  There were no windows to open and let the stink out, and their prison didn’t have air conditioning, or if it had, it was never turned on.

  After his many days in captivity, Grud was still trying to figure out where they were being held, and what had been the original purpose of the place. At first, the rows of large cages lining both sides of the chamber had made him suspect that it was an interrogation facility. The examination table and other pieces of discarded equipment piled against the room’s narrower side only contributed to that impression.

  But a few odd features made him rethink his original assessment. Like the plastic tube that supplied drinking water to each one of the cages and was activated by pressing a lever. Or the grate in the floor for hosing down excrement and other refuse.

  Those two items made him suspect that large animals had been kept in those cages. For what purpose, though, he didn’t know. Except, there was no residual smell to indicate the type of animal that had been caged there, suggesting that the facility had been closed for a long time, probably decades.

  But that didn’t make sense. Why keep the property for so long and not convert it into something else? After all, he was pretty sure they were still somewhere in San Francisco, where even the most crappy building was worth millions. Like the one he and his fellow soldiers had been housed in. Or at least that was what Gommed had said to explain why four soldiers had to share one small room. There was no budget for something better.

  Except, what if he was wrong and they’d been taken further away?

  Grud’s immortal body should have repaired the damage from a blow to the back of the head quickly enough, but what if he’d been hit again while still unconscious?

  Shaveh, who’d been thrown into the cage next to him a few days later, believed that he’d been transported in a trunk of a car. He based this on the type of bruises he’d woken up with. His other theory was that the facility had been used for training circus animals.

  Mordan, who’d been the last addition, had said something about experiments, but he had no idea what kind or for what purpose.

  It wasn’t as if warriors at the Brotherhood’s training camp were taught anything other than fighting. Hell, most of them used to be illiterate until not too long ago. At some point Lord Navuh, in his infinite wisdom, had decided that it was time for his soldiers to learn how to read and write so they could handle modern weaponry.

  Right now, Grud would have given anything to be back at the island. The training was grueling, but at least he could enjoy the outdoors and have access to as many hookers as his free time and money allowed.

  He was losing hope of ever getting out.

  Gommed probably assumed they had defected or that they had been taken by Guardians. In either case, their commanding officer was not organizing a search party for them. No one was coming to rescue them.

  In a way, it was good tha
t no one was coming. The shame of being captured and held prisoner by a female would have been too much to bear. They would have been stripped of their warrior status and sent to do some degrading work not worthy of men, like cooking or cleaning.

  Grud would rather die with honor than live in shame.

  Oh, dear Mortdh, the shame.

  The woman had disabled him with a fucking Taser gun, and instead of wasting time searching him for weapons, she had stripped him naked while he’d been twitching uncontrollably on the ground. She’d then slung him over her shoulder as if he weighed no more than a sack of potatoes and carried him to her vehicle.

  A blow to the back of his head had knocked him out until he’d woken up in the cage.

  At first, Grud had thought she was a Guardian even though it was a preposterous idea.

  Who ever heard of female Guardians?

  But the woman was a freak, strong as an immortal male. She could’ve easily been one.

  For days she’d kept him caged naked, with only a thin blanket to cover himself.

  When his two comrades had arrived, much in the same way he had, she’d brought them clothes—filthy ones that she must’ve stolen or pulled out of the trash. Nevertheless, he was grateful to finally be covered. Even men who were not ashamed of their bodies felt stripped of their dignity when kept nude by a female. She’d reduced them to animals.

  Who was she?

  When she’d started asking them questions, he’d realized that the female knew nothing about anything. It was either that, or she was pretending ignorance to get them to talk. She’d kept asking where they came from, and if there were other immortals out there, but of course they’d told her nothing.

  Doomers were forbidden to talk to outsiders. It was considered treason. The punishment for revealing the Brotherhood’s secrets was worse than any torture their capturer might put them through, which Grud was sure she was going to do at some point.

  The woman had tried to starve them a couple of times, but never for more than two days in a row. She was either too softhearted to keep it up for longer, or maybe she’d been playing mind games with them, demonstrating her power over them. When there was no rush, starvation was a very effective form of torture.

  “When is she going to bring food?” Shaveh asked. “It’s already noon time.”

  It was hard to tell time in the windowless chamber, but when she brought them food, she usually called it lunch. It was the same thing every day, except for the days she’d brought them nothing. Once every twenty-four hours or so, she shoved a big bowl of beans and rice through the small opening at the bottom of the cage. They had to stand against the far wall while she did it, or they didn’t get any. Their drinking water came from the plastic tubes in their cages.

  Mordan finished his last set and got to his feet. “That was a good workout.” He walked over to the tube, pressed the lever with his foot, and splashed water on his face, then dried himself off with his filthy T-shirt.

  Grabbing the iron bars separating his and Grud’s cage, Shaveh said, “We need to escape. Between the three of us we can overpower her. What kind of warriors are we that we can’t take on a single female?”

  “She is smart,” Grud said. “And careful.”

  And merciful, but he kept that one to himself.

  She’d known what they had been about when she’d caught them.

  Grud’s story was exactly the same as that of the other two. He’d picked up a human female in a club, walked out with her to look for a secluded corner, and had gotten busy fucking. The moment he’d flashed his fangs, though, their jailer had come out of nowhere, Tasered his ass, and then set the human free. He’d been too busy twitching and shaking and trying to keep his heart going to notice if she’d thralled the human, but he’d figured she must have.

  Later, when he’d accused her of trying to kill him, she’d said that it had been her intention and that he’d been lucky she couldn’t bring herself to cut out his black heart.

  An immortal going around and killing human females had to be taken out.

  She referred to them as murderous scum, letting them know she thought of them as the lowest of the low. And yet she was feeding them, even hosing down their cages once a day. She could’ve treated them much worse.

  Which was proof that females were too softhearted to be warriors.

  The starvation tactic would’ve eventually worked. Maybe not on him, but Shaveh and Mordan’s characters were not as strong. They would’ve broken down after a few weeks with no food and told her whatever she wanted to know.

  Not that he had any idea what she could’ve done with the information. It wasn’t as if they could tell her where the Brotherhood’s home base was, or where the clan was hiding.

  She would have gained no useful knowledge.

  Letting them go, however, was not an option, she’d told them that multiple times. She couldn’t bring herself to kill them, but she would never allow them to harm another woman again.

  Would it help their cause if he told her that he was actually grateful for her stopping him from doing so? Or that killing females was not something he and the other two wanted to do?

  They were simple soldiers, and Doomers did not refuse orders.

  1

  Kian

  “Anything else?” Bridget asked as she typed Kian’s last comment on her tablet.

  “No, we are good.”

  Well, he was, but Bridget wasn’t.

  The doctor should have been soaring on cloud nine, celebrating her success. Instead her expression was pinched, and her hair, which usually hung in soft waves around her shoulders, was all messed up and frizzy as if she hadn’t bothered brushing it after getting out of bed.

  Perhaps heading a project of that magnitude was too much for her. It wasn’t like her research, which she could conduct in a leisurely manner with no timelines to stress about and with no one monitoring her progress. In contrast, her new job put her in the spotlight, required endless hours of work, and was stressful in the extreme. And that was before the rescue missions even began.

  “You look troubled,” he said.

  Bridget sighed. “I’m sorry. You have enough on your plate without wondering why I’m in such a shitty mood.”

  “Be honest with me, Bridget. Are you overwhelmed? Is this project too much for you to handle?”

  She shook her head. “It’s not about that.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “It’s personal.”

  “Is Turner misbehaving? Do you need me to beat him up?”

  Meaning it as a joke, Kian expected Bridget to smile and retort with something witty. Instead, her eyes misted with tears.

  What the hell?

  Bridget wasn’t an overly emotional female, the opposite was true. What he admired the most about her was her no-nonsense attitude.

  “I wish it was as simple as that. It’s the chemo. He is not reacting well to it. In fact, it has gotten so bad that he stopped taking the meds without telling me, but frankly, I can’t blame him.”

  “Is he going back on them?”

  “I made him promise that he would resume the treatment once all his current files were closed. One of the reasons he stopped was that he couldn’t think clearly and was afraid to mess up.”

  She smiled, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. “It’s not like he is an office clerk. If he botches up a mission, people die.”

  “Understood.”

  Taking a deep breath, she raked her fingers through her messy hair, wincing when they hit a snag. “On the remote chance that it might work, Victor wants to attempt transition before going back on the meds.”

  “Are you okay with that?”

  “Yes. I’m terrified of losing him, and I would’ve preferred to drag it out for as long as I can, but I can’t. It’s not fair to Victor.”

  “You love him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Does he love you back?”

  “In his own way, he does. Victor has a limited
range of emotions, but I know him well enough by now to realize that what he feels for me is as close to love as he’ll ever get.”

  Kian tapped his fingers on the surface of his desk. Bridget’s torment was making him uncomfortable. Seeing her like that and not being able to come up with a solution was aggravating. The best he could offer her was to volunteer to induce Turner, which, providing the guy was indeed a Dormant, would give him the best chance at transitioning.

  “We should send Turner to Amanda for testing.”

  Avoiding his eyes, Bridget flicked a speck of dust from her tablet’s screen. “I thought about that. But what’s the point? He either is or is not. And he either transitions or not. Unlike the others, Turner already knows about us, so why not go for it? We know that paranormal abilities are not the only indicators. By the same token, we need to consider that not all who have them are Dormants either.” She tried to sound matter-of-fact, but the quiver in her voice betrayed her emotions.

  Kian hadn’t considered that possibility, but Bridget was right. Not every human with paranormal talent was necessarily a Dormant.

  Still, he felt that Turner should get tested, even if the only benefit would be satisfying Kian’s need to ensure that every possible avenue had been explored. “Nevertheless, I want him to go through the tests. What’s the harm in him doing so?”