You will feel the very heartbeat of the earth, someone wise had once told her not so long ago, and he was right. Being Ikati meant being alive and attuned to the symphony of nature as no other creature on Earth was.
Behind her, back and forth across the marble floor and hand-woven Turkish rugs, that wise someone paced, silent as only a nocturnal predator can be.
“You didn’t tell me,” came his gentle accusation, low and faintly amused.
She didn’t turn from the window. “I didn’t know until this morning,” she replied truthfully.
She’d been dreading this day for weeks. Over and over, she had turned it in her mind, working on it in the same stubborn, steadfast way a termite chews through wood. What was she going to do? Because she had to do something, obviously. She wasn’t going to just sit by and let Morgan die. But what?
What?
It was a problem that defied solution. Pardon was out of the question. Execution was out of the question. Indefinite imprisonment was out of the question, because she knew that would be worse than death for someone like Morgan, so fierce and proud.
But her betrayal had cut Jenna to the bone, both literally and figuratively. And Leander’s sister, Daria, was still in grave condition, most likely to be maimed for life.
There was the undeniable fact, however, that Jenna, though angry and betrayed and quite wounded herself, understood exactly why she’d done it. Which left her right back where she had started, pondering what was to be Morgan’s punishment.
It hadn’t come upon her until she’d caught herself staring blankly at one of the gilt-framed oils in the Gallery of Alphas. She’d gone nearly every day to stare at it, drawn by a combination of curiosity, nostalgia, and the faint, nagging feeling of something obvious that was being missed. It was a portrait done with care and precision, the image of a handsome, unsmiling man with a sharp jaw and a wide forehead, done in severe umbers and charcoal, lit from above. His blistering green eyes stared down from the canvas, just as feral and canny as her own.
Because they were. The portrait was of her father.
He’d been an outlaw to the tribe, too, and paid the ultimate price.
“She reminds me of my father, in a way,” Jenna mused aloud, watching a skein of swallows rise from the tree line beyond the windows. They scattered in quicksilver flashes of gray and black, melting into the sky.
“Really?” Leander’s murmured response was wry, not a question at all. The pacing stopped for a moment, then started up anew.
She turned to face him in a rustle of taffeta and satin, reminding herself to change out of this ridiculous dress as soon as possible. The Assembly inevitably required formal dress for these occasions, though she hated it. Even her wild Leander was dressed formally in a beautifully cut suit of navy so deep it was almost black, gleaming Italian loafers, cuff links, and a starched shirt and silk tie. Only his hair remained untamed, a glossy jet tangle that brushed his shoulders, always appearing windblown even just after it had been combed.
Naked. He looked far better naked. Though she supposed he needed to wear something, clothes only served to mask his true glory.
The formal-dress problem would soon be remedied, she told herself firmly. She was fully healed now from all her wounds, and it was time to step up to the plate and begin revising the old rules.
The first item of business was Morgan.
“They’re both rebels—”
“With very different motives,” he interrupted, still wry, still pacing with his hands clasped behind his back. He shot her a measured, heated glance from beneath sooty lashes.
Her mouth quirked. “One for love, one for freedom. Both noble ideals—”
“Noble?” He came to an abrupt halt and gazed at her from across the room. His expression bordered on severe. “Jenna.”
He said her name in that particular way he did when he thought she was being unreasonable, chiding yet stroking, tender yet reproachful, and she was abruptly angry. She pushed away from the window, crossed her arms over her chest, and went to stand in front of the massive, unlit hearth. She kicked at the foot of the scrolled iron screen that shielded it and was rewarded with a black smudge of ash across the toe of her ivory satin slipper.
“You couldn’t understand, Leander. You’ve had your freedom your entire life. She’s been locked up, locked away, denied the most basic rights—”
“For her safety. For our safety,” he reminded her.
When she didn’t answer, he came up behind her and stood with the broad expanse of his chest pressed against her back. His hands lifted to gently encircle her shoulders. He brushed aside the gold mass of her long hair and pressed a soft kiss to the bare nape of her neck. She scowled down at the ashen, chunky remnants of some long-dead fire and refused to turn around and wind her arms up around his neck, though she wanted to with a desire so strong it still took her by surprise.
Always, always this need for him. For his body and his heart and his proximity, even when she was irritated with him, even when he was driving her mad with his cold, calculated logic. She simply could not imagine being without him, for one second of one day. Just the thought of it caused her physical pain.
Love, she had learned, was its own kind of prison. With chains and locks invisible but just as real and unyielding as those of steel.
“You know what’s out there,” he murmured. His lips brushed her skin with a gentleness that left gooseflesh in their wake. “You know better than most.”
She closed her eyes and inhaled, letting him draw her nearer, letting his scent of spice and smoke and virile man envelop her. His lips slid down her neck; the soft press of his teeth against her jugular made her shiver in delight. But she was still angry with him. Definitely.
“Everyone deserves a second chance,” she said, leaning into him. She let her head drop back and rest against his shoulder. He turned his lips to her cheek.
“Hmmm,” he murmured, unconvinced. He wound his arms around her in a gentle, possessive embrace and nuzzled his face into her neck. She had to press the smile from her lips. He sensed the shift in her mood and pressed his advantage. “Compromise,” he whispered near her ear, “can be a beautiful thing.”
Her eyes blinked open. Instantly on guard, she stiffened. “Compromise?”
He breathed a low laugh down her neck that sent warmth surging through her entire body. It softened her, made her think of pillows and sheets and their very fine bed, of him ardent and warm and naked beside her.
Inside her.
Angry, she reminded herself. Angry.
“I know this is important to you,” he said in that soft bedroom voice, stroking his palms up and down her arms, slowly rocking her back and forth in his strong embrace. “And I know once you have your mind made up, well...” He lowered his lips to her neck again, opened his mouth over the column of her throat, heat and softness and a gentle suck that fluttered her eyelids. “...I might as well try and stop the north wind.”
“Exactly,” she said, scowling now at the carved figurines that decorated the long mantel, row after row of obsidian and porcelain and glass panthers in miniature, crouching, leaping, lazing in the limbs of a tree.
His muffled laughter shook them both. He turned her in a practiced, fluid motion, his hands gently coercing her hips, his palms flattening against the small of her back, drawing her in again. In spite of herself, her arms reached up and twined around his shoulders. He bent his head and pressed his lips to her temple, her cheek, one corner of her mouth.
“But perhaps, great Queen, you might allow me one or two conditions of my own,” he murmured, spreading his hand around the back of her neck. He tilted her head up and rained feathered kisses over her eyelids, her brow.
She made a wordless noise of protest and kept her eyes closed, frowning, feeling the heat and muscle of him burn her straight through their clothes. “Stop trying to bribe me.”
“Never bribing,” he breathed, skimming his lips over hers, lightly, oh so lightly, just
enough to make her pulse jump and have her rising on her toes to better meet them. Her lips parted and she felt the fleet, electric shock of his tongue against hers. His arm tightened around her so she felt his heartbeat drumming against her chest, staccato and strong, to match her own. “Only asking.”
With one hand still cradling her head and the other wound hard around her body, he covered her mouth with his and kissed her deeply, making her forget all about the difference between a bribe and a simple question, making her sorry there was a manor full of restless, feral-eyed Ikati waiting for their decision, making her regret the terrible inconvenience of their fine and formal clothes.
She pulled away first, breathless and flushed, and gazed up at him from beneath her lashes. “One or two,” she said, still stubborn, alight in the dark, glowing burn of his eyes. “But we agree she can try?”
A figure tottered by outside the sun-hazed windows, glassy-eyed and slack-jawed, stumbling blindly over the manicured lawn, headed toward the dark line of trees in the distance where the forest began. Without looking she knew it was Viscount Weymouth, wandering aimlessly in his mustard waistcoat and old-fashioned cravat, completely naked below the waist.
Leander smiled down at her, wolfish, and the flush spread over her cheeks and down her neck. “She can try,” he relented, tilting his head to hers again. “And when she wakes up from that shock Weymouth gave her, maybe you can get her to Suggest to him that he put back on his pants.”
“He’s lucky. If I had her Gift and he’d shocked me with that thing, he’d be naked and lying in a pool of his own blood.” Jenna sighed, leaning into Leander, pressing her lips to his again. “Shall we retire to the bedroom, my love?” she murmured, fingering the knot of his silk tie. “I find myself in need of...a change of clothes.”
The assassin stood gazing out the same tall expanse of Tudor windows in the East Library that Jenna had looked out the day before, watching the mass of black thunderclouds that hulked overhead, ominous and opaque. Rain sheeted down in a silver, sideways slant in the wind and smeared the view of the fields and misted forest beyond to plots of muted gray and brown and green. A flash of lightning forked through the clouds, brilliant white, and illuminated the hills and trees in spare, pagan lines before dissolving again to smoke and shadow. A low rumble of thunder shivered the glass.
The storm had broken just as he’d disembarked from the Earl of Sommerley’s private plane at Heathrow this morning and showed no signs of letting up. It reminded him of the monsoons that drenched his own colony in Brazil every summer. But this squall, vigorous and lusty as it was, seemed somehow less primal. More predictable. More...restrained.
Everything in this sophisticated, sprawling English colony was so restrained. The architecture, the people, the land—even the weather. Only their Law was the same, he mused. He’d seen the evidence of that in the medieval-looking device still standing in the great hall. It exuded an animal hunger all its own, just as the machines kept by his tribe did.
“I don’t follow,” he said to the windows. “If you know where they are, why not send a garrison? Why not send a full force to wipe them out?”
“We don’t know exactly where they are. And until we do, we can’t mount a direct assault. We can’t risk the exposure or the manpower. Most of our forces are readying the tribe for the move to Manaus. And since they know about all the colonies except yours, moving the tribe to safety is our first priority. Once everyone is settled we can focus on strategy, but in the meantime we can’t just strike out blindly. We need more information.”
Leander’s tone was just tight enough to reveal his irritation. Xander had known the earl for decades and knew how he hated questions, hated explanations. Which meant that in addition to needing information, Leander needed him.
“More information.” Xander turned from the window and looked at Leander with one eyebrow cocked.
Kill first, ask questions later—that was his own motto, and it had served him well. But this man who reclined so casually against the back of his elaborate chair in his elaborate drawing room within his even more elaborate manor house couldn’t live by the simple creed of an assassin. He was Alpha, which meant careful decisions, careful questions, careful plans.
Politics. He loathed it. Thank God the role of Alpha of Manaus had gone to his half brother.
“Yes,” said Leander, gazing at him now with unveiled irritation in his sharp green eyes. He shifted in the chair, restless, and something in his expression suggested he had his own, unspoken problems with this plan. “Exact location, exact numbers. How they live. What, exactly, they know about us.”
Xander studied him, wondering what he was missing. “If you’re looking for that kind of information, you don’t need an assassin. You need an infiltrator. A mole.”
“As it happens, we need both.”
Apparently no longer content to sit, Leander rose from his chair and moved to an elegant sideboard of polished cherry that displayed a variety of cut crystal bottles filled with amber and gold and clear liquids, set out on a silver tray. Xander watched in mild surprise as his host poured a generous measure of scotch into a glass, threw back his head, and quaffed it in one swallow.
According to the long case clock in the corner, it was barely past noon. The vague feeling of something being off solidified into surety.
“Both?” he prompted when Leander didn’t continue.
There was silence in the room for several moments, unbroken except for the thrum of rainfall against the windows and the ticking of the clock. Then Leander spoke, low, to the empty glass in his hand.
“Have you ever been in love, Alexander?”
The assassin, trained from childhood to act and not to feel, was caught completely off guard. Against his will the fleeting image of a pair of chocolate-brown eyes, liquid dark and smiling, flared in his memory. He blinked and the image vanished, leaving behind a ghost of dull pain that throbbed and mewled in his chest before he ruthlessly smothered it.
“No,” he answered flatly.
“Neither had I, until recently,” he went on, still low, still to his empty glass. Xander knew he spoke of his new wife. The Diamond Queen, they called her; just as beautiful, just as rare. She was famous in all four Ikati colonies, as famous for her Gifts and charm as she was for her past and her parentage.
The only freeborn Ikati, daughter of an outlaw Alpha and his fated, forbidden love.
A human, of all things. The enemy.
“It’s more powerful than I ever would have guessed,” Leander mused, almost to himself. “Elemental. Transformative. And painful.” He gave a soft, humorless laugh. “Like fire.”
“Like death,” Xander rejoined, still in that flat, emotionless tone.
This conversation was headed down a very dark path, a dangerous path, one he didn’t care to follow. Love was an element, he knew too well, as cruel and violent as hurricanes or tornadoes or floods. Even speaking about it invited disaster.
Another rumble of thunder rattled the windows, and Leander seemed to snap out of his reverie. He set the empty glass down on a beaded coaster and turned abruptly, his face wiped clean of emotion.
“We want you to accompany a member of our colony to Rome to hunt the Expurgari.”
Xander’s eyebrows shot up. “They’re in Rome?”
“I know,” Leander said. “I always imagined the Expurgari lived in the worst places in the world, the desolate or diseased places. Somewhere like Calcutta or Death Valley.”
“Or Chernobyl,” Xander added, very dry.
“But perhaps they never left Rome. It all started with a Roman emperor, after all. One of his descendants might be their leader now.”
“But why me?” Xander persisted. “I’m not a bodyguard, as you well know. In fact, I’m quite the opposite. If your tribesman needs muscle, there are far better choices than I—”
“No,” Leander interrupted, gazing askance at Xander. He inhaled a slow breath that lifted his shoulders, then walked across the room
and sank back into the plush comfort of his ornate, high-backed chair. He trained his gaze on the storm outside the windows. “It’s not a bodyguard we’re after. Your particular skill set is exactly what’s required. For our tribesman.”
There was something ironic in the way he pronounced the last word, something mocking. Xander waited, knowing he’d get the answers he was looking for if he waited long enough. His patience was legendary, almost as much as his precision and efficiency, his total lack of emotion.
“Once in Rome,” Leander said quietly, still gazing out the window, “you will stay two weeks, not one day more. And if in that time period the exact location of the Expurgari headquarters is not determined by the person you will accompany, if the detailed information we seek is not gathered, you will do what you do best.” He turned his head and his gaze flicked over Xander once in keen, cold assessment. “You will kill her.”
“Her?” Xander echoed, shocked, though his expression remained stoic as ever.
But before he could say more, there was a sharp knock on the library door. When it opened to Leander’s curt “Come,” Xander was shocked once again, this time into silence.
“That’s the best I can do,” Jenna said, her voice strained, and released Morgan’s fingers. She fell back into the riot of scarlet and pink peonies that decorated her overstuffed silk chair and rested a pale, shaking hand over her eyes.
Morgan sank back into the spine-numbing chill of her own metal chair set across from Jenna’s and tried very hard not to vomit. She still fought against that sideways, lurching pull, that disorienting loss of gravity, those vivid images that had popped and flared and drunkenly reeled from the first moments Jenna had grasped her hand.
Edge of Oblivion: A Night Prowler Novel, Book 2 Page 3
