Rapture's Edge (28 page)

“You were sitting with your father and brother at the main table. I was standing behind you, against the wall, on duty as always. The
Bellatorum
had drawn straws to see who would stand guard during the feast, and I was the one who drew the short straw. It didn’t matter anyway; the rest of them had women they wanted to go to, but I had no one, so I didn’t mind.

“But you kept glancing back at me, with this worried look on your face. I didn’t dare look at you, but I couldn’t figure out why the king’s daughter, the precious
spem futuri
, would be paying the slightest attention to me.”

Hope for the future: that’s what the elders had called her, though she never knew exactly why. He went on and his voice grew softer, tinged with something close to awe.

“Then when your father was distracted by someone who’d come to speak with him, you called one of the servants to you and passed her something. You whispered something to her, and I could tell she was trying to talk you out of whatever you’d said. She looked very angry, but you insisted, and eventually she made some pretense to walk by me and hand me what you had given her.”

D glanced down at her. “An apple. You gave her an apple to give to me.”

“You looked hungry,” Eliana whispered. “You looked miserable, standing there alone. I thought you might like something to eat.”

“You kept sending her back, every chance you could, too, didn’t you? Pieces of fruit and cheese, bread, candy.”

“You wouldn’t eat any of it. I had to keep trying until I found something you liked.”

He turned to her, staring down at her with all the intensity from before still burning in his eyes. “I liked
all
of it. I couldn’t eat it because I was on duty, but I liked all of it. You were the only person in that room of thousands who gave a damn about me, the one person with the least reason to. You were kind to me. You noticed me. You
looked
at me, when everyone else went to great lengths to avoid doing that. Everyone else was terrified of me, and yet you never were. You smiled at me whenever we passed. You said hello.” His voice dropped. “You said my name. Said it like you liked it…like you liked
me
. That was the beginning for me. Just like that apple, you were this perfect, delicious thing I hungered for with every cell in my body, but was forbidden to eat.”

“Stop,” she whispered, frozen in place. “Please. Stop.”

They stood like that, not moving, a foot apart, his gaze searing, hers trained on some spot in the distance because she couldn’t bear to look at him.

Finally, around the lump in her throat, she said, “You brought it?”

From the corner of her eye she saw him nod. She held out her hand. He placed the paper-wrapped bundle in it, and she closed her fingers around it, hard. “I’m leaving now.”

“If—afterward—I’ll be at the same place I brought you after the police station. The safe house. You remember where it is?”

She glanced at him, her eyes as freezing as the wind. “I won’t come. Don’t wait.”

He said nothing, just looked at her. She slowly backed away, clutching the parcel to her chest. “I won’t come,” she said again, but he didn’t even nod.

Eliana turned and fled.

D did wait, though. His heart gave him no other choice.

He managed to convince Celian and Lix and Constantine that it was best if they left the safe house and returned to Rome. She’d mistake their presence if she did show up, and leaving the Roman colony unprotected for longer than absolutely necessary at a time like this was unthinkable. Celian had brought the journal and gotten him the few days’ reprieve from the confederate colonies that he’d petitioned for, and all he had left to do was see if she would come to him. In only a few hours, his reprieve would expire.

If Eliana didn’t come, he would turn himself in to the Council and let Fate have its way with him. If she didn’t come, nothing mattered anyway. Let them do their worst.

In the meantime, he’d have to find some other way to convince them she was innocent of her father’s treachery. Because he knew she was. He knew it to the marrow of his bones.

He was pondering that, lying on the couch in the dark subterranean living room of the safe house with his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling, when he heard a noise.

The sound of knocking, angry and loud.

Two stories above, in the furnished and unused house that hid three levels of secrets below, someone was pounding on the front door.

With his heart in his throat, he leapt to his feet, took the stairs four at a time, and ran, literally flat-out
ran
to the door. He didn’t even bother looking through the peephole to see who was there—he didn’t need to. Now he smelled her, he
felt
her, and his blood scorched through his veins like liquid fire.

He threw the door open, and a shock of cold night air, sucked in from outside, hit him in the face.

Then a fist hit him in the face.

“You knew!” Eliana shrieked, loud as a banshee. “You knew and you never told me!
How could you not tell me?
”

She’d caught him square in the jaw with the punch. It snapped his head around but didn’t budge him, but now she gave him a shove with both hands on his chest that actually set him back on his heels. He stepped back to regain his balance, and she was on him before he could, another fist in his face, wild swinging punches that were all fury and no control, snarling like a lion sprung from a cage.

He spun away and managed to kick the front door shut before she was on him again, pummeling him, cursing him.
He thought she might actually cause more damage to herself than to him, so he grabbed both her wrists and pinned them behind her back.

“Settle!” he growled, having to use a surprising amount of his strength to keep her contained as she twisted and fought him. He pulled her up hard against his body and said it again, into her ear. After a second, she did settle, though her breathing remained wild, her heartbeat loud enough for him to hear in the silence of the room. She leaned her head against his shoulder.

“You knew,” she panted, halfway between a whisper and a sob. “You knew all along what he was really like, and I…I…God, I was so blind. I was so
stupid!
”

He let go of her wrists and crushed her to him. Her body shook against his. “You weren’t stupid. He didn’t let you see. He controlled all of us. There was no way you could have known—”

“But you did!” Her voice rose to a near-hysterical pitch. “And you didn’t tell me! I went around in ignorance for my entire life, and you knew he was a monster, and I’ll never forgive you for that, never, never,
never!
”

She broke away from him and began stalking around the room, wild-eyed and enraged. She tore a picture from the wall and threw it with a scream across the living room. A lamp met her wrath next, destroyed in an explosion of flying ceramic and splintered wood as it was slammed against a desk.

“Everything was lies! My entire life—
lies!
”

She was beyond herself, beyond rational thought, beautiful and violent like an avenging angel, a whirlwind of destruction. D watched her tear through the room with a calm that didn’t match the circumstances, because he knew
on some basic level that this was exactly what she needed at this moment. She needed to get it out. All that rage and betrayal and pain needed to come out.

He’d fix the house later.

She swung around and faced him, breathing raggedly, fixing her livid black gaze for the first time on his face. “Did you kill him?”

His answer was swift and emphatic. “No.”

She took a step closer, eyes unblinking. “Did you and the others plan to take over the colony?”

“No.”

Her lips twisted. She took another step closer. “Did you make fun of me, behind my back? Knowing what a fool I was?”

He took a step toward her, and his voice grew dark. “No, Eliana. No.”

“How can I believe you? How can I believe anything? I can’t trust anyone—I can’t even trust myself. I can’t trust my own judgment!”

She was distraught, working herself up again, her voice rising where only moments before it had fallen. He closed the distance between them, took her roughly by the arms, gazed deep into her eyes, and said, “You can trust this.”

And he kissed her.

She didn’t fight him as he expected. She melted against him with a low sound in her throat and her mouth soft and warm against his. Her arms came up around his neck, and his arms wound around her body, and they stood there like that, tasting each other, fused together in the darkness of the ruined living room, wreckage all around them. It went on and on until his breath was short and his body was hot and inflamed. His fingers dug into her hips, her waist, her
bottom. Beneath the cold leather she wore, her flesh was soft and yielding, and imagining it beneath his fingers, beneath his tongue, made him moan into her mouth and kiss her even harder.

She broke away with a horrified look. Then she slapped him, hard and stinging, her palm open against his face.

He sent her a ruthless smile that drained the color from her cheeks. He said, “You know what you need, baby girl?”

She stared at him, breathing erratically, her dark eyes huge.

His smile grew darker. “You need to fuck it out.”

She blinked, huffed a little astonished breath, and said, “I really hate you, you know that?”

“You hate me because I’m right.” He fisted a hand into her hair at the base of her neck and pulled her back to him. He kissed her again but she struggled, she pushed against his chest. He ignored it and deepened the kiss. It was hard and rough and greedy, their teeth clashing. She bit him on the lip, and he tasted the salty tang of his own blood.

“That’s it,” he whispered against her mouth, and kissed her again, deep and demanding.

She pulled back and stared at him for a beat, panting, a strand of blue-black hair caught at one corner of her mouth, a smear of his blood across her full lower lip.

Then she leapt on him.

He caught her around the waist as she locked her thighs and arms around him, kissing him with an unchecked hunger that took his breath away. He staggered, knocked into a table, the desk she’d broken the lamp over, until finally one leg hit the couch set in the nook of the bay window and he dropped them both to it.

She rolled on top of him, tore off her leather jacket, tore off his shirt, tossing it all to the floor in between frantic kisses. She was as starved as he was, heat and shadow above him, their ragged breathing matched. He shoved a hand beneath her shirt and cupped one breast in his hand, pinched her hard nipple, and thought he would come when she moaned into his mouth and rocked her pelvis against his. She sat up and moonlight from the paned window above them painted her ghostly pale, banded in checkerboard shadow. She looked down at him, her cheeks flushed, her lips red with his blood and swollen from his kisses, and his breath caught in his throat.

He’d never seen anything so lovely.

She lifted her arms and pulled her shirt over her head, dropping it to the floor. She wore a black lacy bra, delicate and feminine, which ripped apart like tissue paper when he took it between his teeth. He cupped her breasts in his hands and nuzzled them, reveling in her little mewls of pleasure as his lips closed over one nipple and he drew it into his mouth.

He was rock hard, throbbing, and she ground against him, her hips rocking in a rhythm that had his heart pounding. She bent down and took his earlobe between her teeth, and he thought his heart might fail when he heard the words he’d longed for so many years to hear.

“Yes,” she whispered, her lips against his ear. “Demetrius,
yes
.”

He flipped her over so her back was on the couch and she was stretched out beneath him, squirming. He shucked off her boots and peeled her out of her pants and then she was naked, gloriously naked except for a pair of panties. He leaned down and kissed her again, sucking on her lips,
running his hands all over her heated skin. She felt like silk and velvet and nothing else he’d ever touched, and he was so greedy for her he didn’t know if he was bruising her or hurting her, and he couldn’t stop himself in any case.

He was on fire. Every cell, every muscle, every nerve. Every breath he took was fire.

He kissed her breasts, drew his tongue down to her stomach, bit her there because she was so tender, her flesh so soft. She shivered and arched against him, her hands at his shoulders, nails clawing into his skin. He put his face between her legs and inhaled deeply and she gasped, shocked.

She gasped even louder when he shoved aside her panties and slid his tongue inside her.

Musk and salt and woman, already soaking wet, she tasted incredible. They moaned at the same time. His erection twitched in his pants, aching to be set free.

He pressed her thighs apart and began to stroke her with his tongue, licking and sucking greedily, swallowing her taste, learning what made her twitch and what made her moan. He slid two fingers inside her, and she arched sharply against the couch and cried out.

“Not yet, baby girl,” he whispered, stroking his thumb where his tongue had just been. “You don’t get to come yet. Not until I say so.”