Rapture's Edge (30 page)

He seemed to sense her inner turmoil, because his hand drifted over her shoulder, and he spread his palm flat over her chest, feeling for her heartbeat. It thudded against her breastbone, fast and erratic. She could almost hear him thinking.

But he stayed away from anything too dangerous and said with a hint of a smile in his voice, “So you’re the invisible girl now. Pretty impressive, I gotta say. How’d that happen?”

“By accident, I guess. I mean, living underground in permanent shadow all my life I never really had the need to hide from anything…” She faltered, and D’s arm tightened around her. Eliana guessed they were both thinking of what she had to hide from now. “Anyway, the first time I saw the sun was the day we left Rome. We were walking through an olive tree grove in Mazzalupeto when the sun rose over the horizon, and I was so scared I hid in this ruin of an old barn, in a horse stall. When Mel came to look for me, she couldn’t see me, even though I was standing right there, not three feet away.” She closed her eyes, remembering Mel’s panic and her own. “It took awhile to learn to control it. At first, I had to be scared
to disappear. Then, later, I could just think of something that scared me. And now I can do it at will.”

D lay there in silence for a moment, his breathing even, his chest warm against her back. “But your clothes disappear, too. When we Shift to Vapor, anything we wear or hold just falls to the ground. I don’t understand how—”

“Because I’m not changing my
self
. It’s not a physical thing, unlike turning to panther or mist. I’m changing the light, the way it bends around me. So I keep my clothes. Best of all, I can do it when I’m injured, unlike Shifting. But there has to be shadows. I can’t do it in full sunlight, or even in brightly lit rooms.” She’d tried, she’d tried a million different ways, but there was something about all that light that spooked her, that made her shrivel inside. She never knew daylight could feel so violent.

“Bending the light,” he repeated, his voice softly awed. He slid his hand from over her heart where he’d kept it while she was speaking and cupped it around her jaw. He turned her face toward him. He put his lips to her ear. “Do you have any idea how amazing that is? How amazing
you
are?”

Her heartbeat picked up again. She was grateful he’d moved his hand. She shrugged off his compliment with a wryly spoken, “You already got into my pants, cowboy. You can lay off the sweet talk.”

He chuckled, a deep rumble that reverberated through his chest. “You were always terrible with compliments. I see nothing’s changed.”

Nothing’s changed? God, what she could have responded to
that
. She bit her lip to keep from saying anything. Then with a gentleness that made her stomach clench, D released her jaw and trailed his fingertips over the back of her neck and shoulders, tracing the outline of her tattoos.

“This butterfly is beautiful. Blue and black, like your hair.”

“Like my mood,” she corrected. His fingers stilled, and she amended that to, “My…usual mood.”

She felt his smile. He stroked the place at the top of her spine just beneath the gentle bump of the seventh vertebrae, and she felt goose bumps form in the wake of his touch. “And what does this symbol mean?”

“It’s the kanji character for rōnin,” she murmured, staring at the slender yellow flame across the room as his fingers paused their slow tracery. “They were samurai—”

“Whose masters had died, leaving them adrift.”

She wasn’t surprised he knew about the ancient warrior class of Japan; he seemed to know something about everything. She sighed.

He said, “If a rōnin’s master was killed, the code of the samurai refused to allow their death to go unavenged, though they themselves must then commit ritual suicide for committing the crime of murder.” He was silent for a moment, contemplative, and then his fingers began to trace the pattern again, slow and light and almost…reverent.

“It’s about loyalty,” she whispered into the dark. “It’s about sacrifice. And honor. It’s about living for something beyond yourself and having the courage to die for what you believe in.”

“Yes,” he murmured, and very gently pressed his lips to the nape of her neck. “It is.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. There seemed to be a deeper meaning to his agreement, and she knew the irony would not be lost on him that she wore the symbol of the r
ō
nin on her skin and he was the man on whom she had pledged vengeance, yet here they were, entwined together
in a bed in which they’d slept after making love. She still felt like killing someone, only now she wasn’t sure if it was him, herself, or the next person she laid eyes on. Maybe all of the above.

Irritated now, she said, “How did you find me? At the catacombs?”

Another low chuckle. “Dreamt it.”

Her heartbeat accelerated—did that mean he knew exactly where the rest of them were? About the abbey, the entrance from the catacombs?

D stirred behind her, nuzzling his face into her hair. “Followed a bunch of guys into the catacombs from a manhole cover hidden behind a crypt in the Montmartre Cemetery. Had no idea where I was going, just got a starting point, and then they showed up.”

To hide her sigh of relief, she pretended to yawn. “And those assassins that are after me…who sent them?”

“I told you, they’re a group assembled from the other four colonies—”

“But who sent them, exactly?”

There was a pause, and then D said, “The Queen.”

“Queen?” whispered Eliana, astonished. “They let a woman lead?”

“There have been others before,” he murmured, tightening his arms around her. “Marie Antoinette, Cleopatra—”

“No!”

“It’s rare, but when it happens, an
Ikati
Queen is far more powerful than any male Alpha. They say this English Queen can Shift to anything she likes, not just panther—”

“No!” Eliana sat up in bed, the sheets rucked around her waist, and stared down at him. He stared back, shadowed eyes and corded muscle, heat rising from his naked
body in delicious, heady waves. He reached up and swept his thumb, very lightly, across the apple of her cheek.

“Whether they realize it or not,” he murmured, gazing into her eyes, “women are always more powerful than men. The only reason males are bigger, physically stronger, is because we’re made to protect and serve the more valuable sex: females. Nature bestowed on them the ability to conceive and give birth. Only females grow life inside their bodies. Only females bring it forth. They’re made to create and nurture life. There’s nothing more powerful, more
necessary
, than that.”

Heat suffused her cheeks. When his look became too intense, too probing, she dropped her gaze to the covers.
We’re made to protect and serve
.

“And now this powerful, can-shift-into-anything Queen wants me dead.”

“They haven’t read your father’s journal. They don’t even know it exists, so what you read is for your eyes only. But they know he was the leader of the Expurgari, and they believe you—or your brother—have taken his place. They’ve been hunted by this group for hundreds of years, their leaders have been killed, their people tortured. She herself was apparently tortured. You know now what Dominus planned to do…we’ve been on the brink of war with them since you left. They don’t fully believe none of us knew what your father was doing, but we’ve given them enough concessions to hold them off. For now.”

So because of her, the entire Roman colony was in danger. But why, if the
Bellatorum
wanted to keep peace with the other colonies, hadn’t they let the Queen read her father’s journal, thereby proving Dominus’s guilt and their own innocence?

The serum,
a little voice inside her head whispered.
They want it for themselves.

A chill ran over her skin. She pushed the thought aside, but it kept swimming back in front of her eyes, resolute, damning. She watched D’s face carefully as she asked, “Do they know about the serum?”

His expression did not change. His voice remained neutral. “No. As I said, they never read your father’s journal, and as far as the
Bellatorum
know he never developed it, just tested it successfully.” His eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”

She stared at him for a long moment, her stomach in knots, her heart beating frantically against her breastbone once again. “Why wouldn’t you show them the journal, Demetrius? If it could prove you’d done nothing wrong?”

His head tilted to one side on the pillow. Something changed in his face. A hardening, a slight closure that indicated an awareness of her distrust, perhaps, she couldn’t be sure. There was a new hollowness in his voice when he spoke, a new tightness around his mouth.

“I’ve read that journal, Eliana. Over and over and over, searching for some kind of clue as to where you might have gone when you left. There wasn’t any, of course, but what your father planned for you…your brother…all the terrible things he did and wanted to do…that’s not something I would ever let anyone read. That’s not for anyone else’s eyes. Especially
theirs
. The other colonies can take their threats and go straight to hell—I’d never let you be humiliated like that. Never.” His voice darkened. “There are some secrets we should take with us to the grave.”

Oh, what those words did to her. If she was conflicted and confused before, this was the cherry that topped her
triple-scoop ice cream sundae of confusion. The words seemed sincere, but the tone he spoke them in and the look on his face seemed…what? Odd, if nothing else. Protection is the motivation he claimed,
her
protection, and she might have believed it, but for that final sentence that held a strange ring of prophecy.
There are some secrets we should take with us to the grave
. And for that oddness in his manner, which might have been hurt at her disbelief.

Or might have been
fake
hurt, intended as a diversion.

Killers enjoy creating diversions, Eliana
.

Even now, Silas’s voice echoed in her head.

She slowly lay down and pressed her back against the hard expanse of D’s chest, avoiding his eyes, avoiding the sudden tangle of flying chicken feathers that were her thoughts. “I see,” she whispered, not really seeing anything at all.

He lay behind her, tense and silent, until he let out a breath and dragged the blankets up around them and pulled her tight against his chest once more. They lay like that for a long time, until she felt his breathing grow more regular, his heartbeat more slow. When she was certain he was almost asleep, she whispered into the dark, “Do you really believe males are made to protect and serve females, or is that just pillow talk?”

He mumbled something, and she turned her head to hear him better. “If you hadn’t already worn me out, woman, I’d serve you right now.” He chuckled softly. “But it’ll have to wait ’til morning. I’ll show you exactly how a male should protect and serve his female in the morning.”

But when morning came and D stretched and opened his eyes, the bed was empty, the sheets beside him cold.

Eliana was already gone.

Mel awoke with a start to the feel of a hand clamped over her mouth.

She bolted upright in bed, a scream strangled in her throat, but let out a huge sigh of relief when she saw it was only Eliana, crouched beside her bed in the dark, pale and wild-eyed with a finger to her lips like some kind of mute, blue-haired ghost.

“What are you doing, crazy person?” Mel hissed. “You scared the hell out of me!”

“Get dressed,” came the urgent, whispered response. “Wake up the others and go down to the Tabernacle and wait for me. I’m going to go see Alexi—”

“Alexi? What? You
are
crazy, E, it’s the middle of the night—”

“We need to get everyone out of here, and Alexi’s place is big enough for all of us.” Her voice darkened. “Most of us.”

Mel stared at her, long and hard, through the shadows of the room. She smelled Eliana’s fear and rage like the sour tang of food left out too long in the sun, and something else that surprised and pleased her in equal measure: the dark, spiced musk and masculine power that could only be Demetrius.

“Tell me what’s happened. I know you saw Demetrius.”

Eliana started like she’d just jumped from behind a door and yelled,
Boo!
Mel said, “I spent a lot of time crying on his shoulder, sweetie. I remember exactly what he smells like. Spill it.”

Resigned to the fact that Mel wasn’t going to budge until she knew what was going on, Eliana let out a frustrated sigh and dragged her hands through her hair. She sat beside her on the bed and closed her eyes. “He brought me my father’s journal. I read it, and it was…bad.” Though a whisper, her voice grew hard, harder than Mel had ever heard it. “It was worse than bad. Your hunch was right, Mel. Nothing is what it seems.”

Mel didn’t know what to say. The way she was talking, just the way her lips shaped the words, gave her pause. “And…and Demetrius? What about him?”

Even in the dark, Mel could see the heat suffuse Eliana’s face. She chewed on her lower lip, then, in a motion so out of character it spoke volumes, hid her face in her hands.