“The Law is nothing more than control and oppression, especially for a woman, and if Jenna has any sense she’ll keep as far away from this shining prison as she possibly—”
“Whether she likes it or not, this is her home, this is where she belongs—”
The huge wood door at the far end of the room swung open and hit the wall with a muffled boom. Two of Leander’s guards stepped forward with a scullery girl in tow.
“Forgive me, my lord.” One of them gave a quick bow before righting himself and motioning to the girl next to him, her arm held aloft in the firm grip of the other guard. “We thought you should hear this straight away.”
“What is it?” Leander leapt from his chair and strode toward them, his back ramrod straight. “You’ve found something? You saw something? Speak up, girl!”
The guard gave the scullery girl a little nudge with his elbow and jerked his head toward Leander.
The girl curtsied and chewed her lower lip.
“I was in the kitchen, my lord,” she began, meek as a mouse. Strands of her lank brown hair fell over one downcast eye. Her small hands fluttered over a striped apron until they settled, trembling, around her waist. She cleared her throat.
“Polishing the silver as I always do on Tuesdays.” She twisted the apron in her fist, over and over, working the rough cotton into a knotted bunch. “It’s a lovely silver set, my lord, all dotted about with tiny roses and vines and wee little birds. I love to work on the silver, it’s really very—”
“Yes,” Leander said. The word fell between them like a block of cement.
The scullery maid stopped speaking, looked up at him, and paled.
“It is a lovely silver service. I’m pleased to hear you enjoy working with it.” He gazed down at her, his right hand flexing open and closed.
The scullery maid opened her mouth, then snapped it shut.
“But perhaps you could tell us—quickly—exactly what it is you saw.”
“Just...just the blood, sir,” she stuttered.
Christian rose from his chair in one swift unbending of limbs that produced not a single sound. Morgan cut her gaze to him. He stood stock-still, eyes trained like gunsights on the girl.
“The blood?” Leander repeated, aghast. “What on earth are you talking about? What blood?”
“Little splatters on the stone floor, sir. I only noticed because I’d bent down to reach a fresh polishing cloth we keep in a little bin below the cupboards next to the laundry. It’s kept just so, sir, very neat and clean, the housemistress herself makes sure the kitchen and laundry are always in such good repair, so organized and run nearly like the military itself, sir, never a thing out of place. You can always find just what it is you might be looking for, whether it’s polishing cloths or hand towels or just the right spice for the dish the cook is making for dinner—”
“The BLOOD!” Christian boomed, his face red. “What about the BLOOD?”
The guard held onto the scullery maid’s arm as she leaned back in a half-swoon, her face round and white as the moon.
“Christian,” Leander spat. “Enough!”
Christian kicked the chair away with the heel of his boot, pushed roughly by the girl and the guards, and strode out the open door, cursing.
“What the devil’s got into him?” the viscount muttered to Morgan. His fingers were wrapped so hard around the fragile coffee cup the handle looked ready to snap in two.
“The exact same thing that’s gotten into Leander,” Morgan murmured back. She dropped her gaze when Leander’s head turned sharply. He stared at her over his shoulder, eyes black with rage.
For one long moment, Morgan felt the burn of his stare on her face. If he hadn’t been so unstrung, she’d have met his gaze head on, but now...now he was ready to snap. And that made him very dangerous.
He turned his eyes back to the girl. “Tell me all of it. Tell me now,” he growled.
“There was blood on the floor, sir, in the laundry,” she whispered in terror. “Blood that led through the kitchen, up the backstairs to the lady’s chambers—”
Leander pushed past her before she even finished speaking.
“Leander! Wait!” Morgan shouted.
She leapt from her chair and crossed the room. She moved quickly to match his long stride, which had already taken him past the door and into the hallway. He shouldered past her, walking stiff-legged and stone-faced down the long corridor toward the curving staircases that led to the second floor. She had to almost break into a run to keep up.
“If Jenna’s back, and she’s hurt, she is not going to want to see you.” She moved in front of him just as he placed one foot on the carpeted first step.
“Goddammit, Morgan—”
“No,” she interrupted. She pulled him to a stop and stared right in his eyes. “Just this once, trust me. I’ll go up first. You can follow in a few minutes if you like, but believe me on this, your face is not going to be the first thing she’s going to want to see, not after the way your last conversation ended.”
“If she is bleeding, if she is hurt—”
“Then I will come right out and get you.”
Through the fabric of his shirt, Morgan felt the tremor beneath his skin. Tension that flexed tendon and bone into pieces of hardened flesh, poised for action, strained so taut she thought he might Shift to panther under her hand and fly up the stairs six at a time.
“Just a few minutes,” Morgan said, more softly, realizing Leander was almost past the point of reason. His eyes, blazing unearthly green, were trained on the landing at the top of the curving staircases, the landing that led to another long corridor that led directly to Jenna’s rooms. “I’ll go in first,” she persisted. “Just let me see her first. You can wait right outside the door.”
He hesitated, breathing hard, still looking up the stairs. When he finally spoke, his voice was harsh, as if his vocal cords had been strained with silent screaming. “You have one minute before I break the door down.”
He turned back to Morgan and she could see how much it took for him to grant her even this much. “One. I’m right behind you. Go.”
He pushed her up ahead of him.
Morgan didn’t have to look back to see him follow. She felt him at her heels, more beast than man, the song of his blood pounding hard in her ears.
16
The cut on the sole of her foot was small, at least at first.
Produced after she’d stepped on the atom-thin edge of a piece of broken obsidian outside the cottage, its edges were clean and razored: it wasn’t deep. It bled more than it actually hurt. But it was the effect it produced that was most terrifying.
Since she’d cut herself, Jenna was unable to Shift.
She tried in every conceivable way to force the Shift, although before it had seemed to appear of its own will, if she was upset or frightened, or if she merely willed it, a single word in her mind to flee from the things coming out of Leander’s mouth—vapor.
There was a glimmer of power, but the Shift wouldn’t come.
She had no plan when she’d run away into the forest, nothing more than escape. The cottage seemed a good place to stay while she gathered herself to consider her next move. Clear, cold water ran from a little brook just twenty paces beyond the cottage, there was wild mustard and raspberries, and even a patch of morel mushrooms poked their pale heads through a scorched patch of earth from some recent fire. She had shelter, she had food, she had water.
What she didn’t have was any sense of what she should do next.
The first day she spent choked in a kind of anger that felt outside of her, as if it followed her around as she moved, a thick haze of fury she was barely able to see through. She didn’t feel anything inside of herself, no light or hope, nothing solid or substantial. It was as if the enormity of her emotions couldn’t be contained within her body and had needed more space in which to breathe.
But she couldn’t breathe. She spent long, panicked minutes gasping for ai
r, sure she was having a heart attack, the pain in her chest was so great.
Twilight falling into the forest brought with it a loosening of the pain. A dull ache took the place of raw and hopeless anguish. The sky turned a brilliant shade of fuchsia as the sun began to sink below the horizon. Pink and violet and vast above her, she stared at it and thought of her home, her tiny apartment on the beach half a world away from this place. She missed it with a sudden, wrenching pang of melancholy. She missed Mrs. Colfax and Becky and her job at Mélisse and even felt a bit nostalgic for the hysterics of Geoffrey. At least those people were real and reliable, those things were home.
This wasn’t her home. It could never be. And these people...Christian was right. These people were animals.
She fell asleep slumped against the cold stone hearth, shivering like a dog, listening to the small creatures of the forest come awake with the dark.
When she awoke in the morning, her neck was stiff and pinched but her head felt clear, as clear as the dawn breaking over the smoke-purple hills in the distance. There were no more answers to be had, at least nothing that would set this right or help her understand.
She decided understanding the past was less important than embracing the future.
She would leave. She would leave this place and its mythical beasts and the horror of all the secrets they held and find a new life for herself somewhere else in the world.
Somewhere they’d never find her.
She knew the ways to hide, taught well as a child by one of their own. She would disappear into the wind and be done with it all. She would finally be free.
But just as she’d made her decision and squared her shoulders to take to the air, she’d stepped on that damn rock. No matter how she tried, she couldn’t Shift. She couldn’t escape.
Jenna was now faced with two choices: live in the forest as long as she could, foraging for food, exposed to the elements, or walk back into the den of beasts. It took a full hour of debate with herself on the pros and cons of both situations before she’d made a decision.
Death by starvation and exposure was only slightly less appealing.
She’d spent the last two days trudging through the woods back to Sommerley, nude, starving, the coarse blanket around her shoulders filthy with a layer of mud from when she’d had to stop and sleep on the ground.
The cut on her bare foot worsened as she walked, tearing open ever wider over the undergrowth of fallen logs, rock, and stone she’d had to traverse. And now it was infected.
“How is it, I wonder, you were able to evade all Leander’s guards in the forest and around the manor and walk right in without a single soul getting wind of your arrival?”
Morgan raised her gaze from the sole of Jenna’s left foot, which she washed in a basin of warm, soapy water while Jenna sat, stoic and silent, biting her lip against the pain.
She shrugged, a defeated motion of her shoulders underneath the pale blue silk robe Morgan had thrown around her. “I could feel them. Where they all were, when they were close, and when their attention was elsewhere.”
Except for her clean left foot, the rest of her body was still covered in grime from her trek across miles of woodland. Her shins were bruised, her ankles covered in scratches. Her hair was snared into an unholy mess of knots. She had snuck in through the kitchen, stolen up the long, curving staircase, and simply collapsed naked atop the bed in her room, falling asleep instantly when her head hit the pillow.
She’d been so exhausted she’d forgotten to lock the door.
She awoke with a start moments ago to find Morgan standing at the edge of the bed, clucking her tongue like a mother hen, covering her naked body with the robe.
“All of them?” Morgan looked startled. Her hand stilled in midair, the wet washcloth dripping into the silver basin in her lap. “You could feel all of them?”
“What difference does it make?” Jenna pulled her foot from Morgan’s grasp. She set it down on the carpet, tightened the belt around her waist, and brushed a lock of grimy hair away from her eyes. “I’m back here now, I’m sure I’ll be under lockdown—it won’t matter who I can feel and who I can’t. From what I understand of your Law, I’ll never be able to leave this room again.”
Morgan looked at her, green eyes pensive, head cocked to the side. “Actually it makes a great deal of difference,” she said quietly and set the basin on the floor.
Morgan had already been to the bedroom door three times. The first to whisper something to someone standing outside, the second to lock it, the third to stop the pounding of a very strong fist with a hissed command.
The pounding started up again, louder than before. It shook the heavy door in its frame.
“Let me guess,” Jenna said. She glanced wearily at the door. “Everyone knows I’m back.”
“If they didn’t before, they definitely do now,” Morgan muttered. She stood and started toward the door again.
“Can’t you just ignore him?” Jenna fought the pull of exhaustion, unwilling to face the owner of the pounding fist.
Morgan looked at her. “Him?”
“Yes, him. Leander.”
She knew it was him. She smelled him, felt his particular brand of pulsating energy all the way across the room. Even the locked door did nothing to diminish the feral current it sent scorching across her skin. She hated that even in her current state of bedraggled fatigue, he still affected her so strongly. And his heartbeat...
She was beginning to realize she recognized the sound of it anywhere, as if it were a voice that spoke her name, over and over.
Morgan looked at her askance. “So you can feel each one of us specifically? Not just the general sense of an Ikati close by, but you can identify specific individuals?” She glanced back toward the closed door. “Without laying eyes on them?”
Jenna sighed. “No. Just him, specifically. With the rest of you I just feel this...presence. You’re different from anything I’ve ever sensed before, so it’s easy to pick you out from your surroundings. But with him...” She sighed again, annoyed with herself for even admitting it. “It’s like this pulse, like the charge of electricity before lightning strikes. It was so strong the first time I felt it I passed out.”
Morgan’s mouth made an O of surprise. Her eyes were so wide Jenna could see the whites both above and below her irises.
“What?”
She glanced at the door again, looking confused. “That’s why you fainted—at the store? Are you sure?”
“Well, yes. I felt it before I even saw him. And then when I finally did see him, that energy knocked me on my ass. I tried to pretend it wasn’t him at the time, but unfortunately it appears it was.”
Morgan made a sound of amused amazement. She lifted a hand and covered her mouth; Jenna could see the smile she tried to hide.
“Please don’t make me guess what you’re thinking, Morgan. I have no energy for guessing.”
“No, it’s nothing,” she said airily, waving her hand in front of her face. “Really, it’s probably nothing.”
Jenna glared at her.
“Well, it’s just that...” She trailed off, pressing her lips together.
“What?”
“It’s just that only an Alpha can sense another Alpha like that. Specifically.” She giggled, a lighthearted, girlish sound that seemed distinctly out of place for the circumstances. “And only with the Alpha to whom they’re mated.”
Jenna wished she wasn’t so tired. She thought she could probably throw Morgan a good twenty feet across the room on any other day.
“If you ever say anything like that to me again, I won’t be responsible for my actions.”
Morgan made a gesture of acquiescence with her shoulders and hands, though her smile still wasn’t helping Jenna’s peace of mind.
The pounding on the door started up again, louder than before.
“All right. We’ve got about five seconds before he breaks down the door. I can’t ignore it. What do you want me to do h
ere?”
“Just tell him I’ll come out later, for dinner. If I’m allowed to eat.” Her upper lip curled.
Morgan’s smile faded. She regarded Jenna with a look of peculiar, intense concentration for a long moment. “That I’m sure they’ll let you do. As for the rest of what you’ll be allowed to do...” She pursed her lips. “That’s going to depend entirely on you.”
Jenna closed her eyes and let her hair fall over her face as Morgan went again to the door. This time she stepped through it and closed it behind her for a moment before she came back in and slammed it shut.
“That ought to do the trick.”
When Jenna opened her eyes, she saw Morgan standing with arms akimbo at the end of the bed. “I just told him if he didn’t stop the pounding you were going to fly out the window, never to be seen again.”
“That was the original plan,” Jenna murmured. She stifled a yawn behind her hand and eyed the pillow, the fluffy duvet, the layers of satin sheets below. The soft bed called to her like a siren’s song, lush and succulent and oh so inviting. This place might be a prison, but at least it was a sumptuous one.
“Well, little bird, you’re grounded until that foot heals anyway,” Morgan said.
Jenna came instantly alert. “Why?”
“Because we can’t Shift when we’re wounded. Even a little cut will do the trick. You’re not going anywhere until that foot heals.”
Something inside her stomach eased and softened, then bloomed into a tiny flower of hope. A shallow cut like this would heal quickly. A few days, maybe a week...
She turned away so Morgan wouldn’t see her surprise. She stood, putting most of her weight onto her right foot, and hobbled over the plush carpet toward the bathroom.
“So you’re saying I’m stuck here until this heals completely,” she threw over her shoulder.
“I’m saying, my dear,” Morgan said, utterly neutral, “you’re stuck here permanently.”
That stopped Jenna dead in her tracks. She turned slowly back to Morgan, holding a hand out at waist level for balance. Panic sprawled over her chest. “I knew it,” she said, her mouth gone bone dry. “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted him. He never planned on letting me leave, did he?”
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