The dream was the worst he’d had yet.
Fighting panic, he dropped his head into his hands and concentrated on getting himself under control. Images still battered him relentlessly—gunfire, blood, men with weapons descending on the naked, terrified figure of Eliana crouched against a wall like a cornered animal. There was
nothing he could do, but every nerve ending in his body screamed for him to do
something
.
Because like the others before it, this dream was a harbinger of things to come.
He swung his legs over the side of the cot and pushed off. Naked, he went to the footlocker at the end of the bed and pulled on the pair of black cargo pants and shirt he’d tossed there hours earlier. He laced up his boots and crossed to the dresser on the other side of the room that held the various weapons he always carried, laid out in a careful row on top. He strapped them on in the same order he did every time: Glock nine-millimeter on his right hip, kukhri—tip dipped in poison—on his left, push daggers in each of his boots, folding knives tucked into pockets in his pants. He was a walking arsenal and, as one of the king’s elite guards, had been most of his adult life.
Not that there was a king to guard any longer, but that hadn’t reduced the threats to their colony. If anything, the king’s death increased the threats tenfold.
He ran a hand over his head, his dark hair shorn so close to his skull it couldn’t accurately even be called a haircut, and grabbed the keys to his Ducati from the small wooden bowl where they were always kept. He needed a ride. He needed a drink, as well. Ignoring the fact that they were all basically under martial law and forbidden to leave the catacombs without express permission from Celian—once the king’s main enforcer, now the leader of the
Bellatorum
and de facto ruler of the colony—D had been making clandestine reconnaissance trips ever since Eliana had disappeared.
He groaned aloud. Even
thinking
her name hurt.
With a curse, he spun on his heel and made his way from the Spartan sleeping chambers the
Bellatorum
used into the chilled gloom of the main corridor of the catacombs.
Fifteen minutes later he emerged in the shadows of the subterranean basilica of Domitilla that the
Bellatorum
used as their own special entrance and exit to the catacombs and came face-to-face with a pair of nasty-looking guards lounging against the ancient Doric columns. Young, muscular, and glowering, they sprang to attention and trained the sights of their automatic rifles on the center of his chest. D noted with no small satisfaction he was at least a head taller than both of them.
Then again, at over six foot five, he was at least a head taller than almost everyone.
“Gentlemen,” he said calmly, looking first at one, then the other.
One of them cleared his throat, a froggy sound that echoed softly off the crumbling stone walls. “Can’t let you pass, D.”
D’s brows rose. “That so?”
“Celian’s orders,” the other one offered apologetically. Restless, he shifted his weight back and forth between his feet. D smelled his anxiety, both acrid and musky, a hint of spice on the air, and made the instant assessment that these two were all sizzle and no steak.
In other words, easy pickings.
“You were at the training session the other night,” said D, eyeing the more obviously nervous one. He nodded, a curt affirmative, and adjusted his grip on his rifle. Little beads of sweat had broken out on his upper lip. “Enjoy it?”
The guard glanced at his companion, and D continued. “Heard that soldier I knocked out is doing better.”
“Which one?” said the other guard, smiling grimly. He was the bigger of the two, also nervous but determined not to show it, standing there with his legs spread wide and his square chin jutting out like a dare.
Okay,
thought D.
You first, then
.
Before either one could react, D Shifted to Vapor, shed his clothes in a pile on the ground, reappeared behind the cocky guard, and tapped him on the shoulder. The guard spun around, right into the unleashed power of D’s fist. He dropped like a stone, and his rifle went clattering over the cracked marble.
The other guard took one look at D’s massive, naked, tattooed form and promptly dropped the rifle. He held up both hands. “Just make it quick,” he said. “And do me a solid—tell Celian I put up a good fight, will you?”
D almost smiled. He liked this kid. So instead of punching him in the face—which would leave him with a bruise blooming blue and purple over one side and probably a few crushed bones like his friend lying at their feet—he used an old standby…the sleeper hold. Steady, applied pressure to his carotid artery, and after a few twitches, the kid was out like a light.
Just as D finished getting dressed again, he heard a noise behind him. He spun around and saw Constantine leaning against a marble column on the other side of the basilica, slowly clapping in mock applause. His expression was one of amused disbelief. He pushed away from the column and walked toward D.
“Great show. I think Celian really needs to rethink his containment strategy.” When D didn’t answer, he said with exaggerated sarcasm, “Going somewhere?”
D shrugged and crossed his arms over his chest. “Stir-crazy. Needed to get out.”
“Figured as much.”
“You spying on me again, grandma?”
Constantine chuckled. “Something like that. Mind if I join you?”
D paused, examined the expression on Constantine’s face, and then said, “Not really a question, is it?”
Now Constantine’s chuckle was wry, as was the smile that split his face. “You’re pretty sharp for a blunt instrument, you know that?”
“Got all the looks in the family, too.” At that, they both chuckled. “Ladies first,” said D, gesturing toward the hidden door that led to the outside world and freedom. “And if I hear one word about a curfew, I’ll smack that movie-star smile right off your face.”
“Good to know you haven’t lost your sense of humor, D. The thought of you landing a punch on me is seriously hilarious.”
Constantine gave D a friendly shove, and D shoved him back, grinning. Then they both walked out into the starlit Roman night.
Three hours and two bottles of Glenlivet later, D’s mood had sunk a notch below black.
“You want to talk about it?” asked Constantine, watching D stare blankly at the empty glass in his hand.
“When have I ever wanted to talk about it?” D muttered. The camaraderie from hours earlier had evaporated along with the scotch, and D was surlier than ever. He knew from experience that drinking only dulled the pain but didn’t numb it, and that ache beneath his breastbone would need
something stronger to kill it than an eighteen-year-old single malt. A machete might do the trick.
“So we’re just going to sit here all night and stare at the walls?”
D glanced up at Constantine, and a hot flash of anger lit through him when he saw the pity on his face. “I seem to remember it was you who insisted on coming,” he snapped.
“If I’d known your little pity party was going to be this much fun, I wouldn’t have.”
D bristled and sat up, glaring at Constantine. “I’m not feeling sorry for myself!”
“Right, you’re just drinking this much because you’re
happy
.”
“Screw you, Constantine.”
“Get real, D. You need to get a grip on yourself, brother. This can’t go on forever…”
Constantine kept talking, but D didn’t hear the rest because his attention was diverted by the flat-screen television hung above the pool table across the room. It was tuned to a news station, and the picture on the screen froze his blood to ice.
Eliana. Good God, it was
her
.
Hands cuffed behind her back, dressed only in a man’s wrinkled white button-down shirt, she was being hauled out of a police car by a pair of uniformed gendarmes sporting enough weaponry to outfit a small army. Though her head was turned, he saw her clearly in profile, and the image instantly seared itself into his mind. The proud lift of her chin, the elegant line of her neck, the elongated limbs that lent her the look of a ballerina, pixie-like and delicate. She was exactly as he remembered, except for hair dyed the
color of lapis lazuli and an ominous bloodstained bandage wrapped around one bare calf.
The television was muted, but the caption on the screen screamed, “French police apprehend notorious thief!”
Everything around him vanished.
Gone was the dim, smoky room with its rickety tables and tacky décor, gone was the humid fug of cigarettes and stale beer, gone was the flickering neon Peretti sign in the window and the empty scotch bottle on the table next to his left hand. There was only her. Every nerve, every cell and atom of his body came into brilliant, throbbing focus and began to roar:
Eliana! Eliana! Eliana!
Frozen, he stared at the television and watched as the two gendarmes swiftly maneuvered her—limping—past a crush of shouting reporters and up a wide flight of marble steps toward the double glass doors of the entry to an enormous brick building. Just before she disappeared through the doors, she glanced over her shoulder and looked directly into the camera.
Wide-set doe eyes, liquid soft and black as midnight, stared at him.
Through
him. D’s heart stopped dead in his chest. He shot out of his chair and at the top of his lungs shouted the only word that came to mind.
“Shit!”
Despite this outburst, none of the other bar patrons chanced a glance in his direction. He came to this dive bar fairly regularly, and they’d more than once seen the huge, glowering, tattooed male beat someone to a pulp for no discernible reason and had learned to keep their eyes averted or risk a beating of their own.
“Nice,” said Constantine dryly as he drummed the fingers of one big hand on the scarred, sticky tabletop between
them. His back was to the television. “Is that just a general observation, or are you experiencing some kind of emergency with your bowels?”
“It’s her! On television! It’s
her!
” D sputtered past numb lips.
Constantine closed his eyes for a second longer than a blink and sighed. “You’ve had about a liter of scotch, D. You’re seeing things. Why don’t you take a seat and we’ll—”
“
Turn it up!
” D shouted at the skinny bartender, silencing Constantine and launching the bartender into motion. He leapt over the counter and flung himself at the television as if his life depended on it. His shaking fingers found the volume knob, and as Constantine, frowning, turned in his chair to look, a female reporter’s modulated voice filled the dim, smoky room.
“…eluded authorities for the past several years in what has become the most infamous string of art thefts in France’s history. Some of the country’s wealthiest citizens and political figures have been victimized, including the prime minister himself, Francois Fillon, whose personal collection of original Picassos valued at more than five million euros was stolen from his home last year while he and his wife were sleeping.”
The picture changed to a scene of a grinning, middle-aged man standing shirtless and tanned with a glass of champagne on the glistening deck of his massive yacht.
“At this point it isn’t known if she was working alone,” the reporter continued as the picture switched back to the crowd milling around the front of the brick building, “but for now the thief known simply as
La Chatte
is in custody, and we imagine Paris’s beleaguered police chief is heaving a very loud sigh of relief that this protracted chase is over and
the elite’s personal fortunes are, once again, safe. Reporting live from the Paris prefecture of police, this is Lisa Campbell with CNN International News. Back to you, Bob.”
D stood staring at the television long after Bob-the-balding-reporter had segued into another story. His breathing was erratic, his heartbeat was wild, and his hands twitched by his side, but all that was secondary to the storm of howling white that raged in his skull.
La Chatte
. The Cat. Infamous, elusive thief.
Eliana, love of his life, source of his joy and his pain and three years’ worth of the kind of soul-searing agony he wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy, was
La Chatte
. Now in police custody in France.
D’s big hands curled into fists at his side.
In spite of his bulk and the array of weaponry hidden beneath his long black coat, Constantine rose gracefully and soundlessly from his chair. “D,” he said sternly, reading what was plain on his face, “don’t even think about it.”
D’s gaze narrowed. Though most of their kind were beautiful to the point of being meaningless, Constantine—he of the glossy black hair and glorious cheekbones and long, feminine eyelashes—outshone them all. At the moment, D had a mind to wreck that perfect face with a devastating punch to the middle of it.
“Don’t
you
even think of trying to talk me out if it,” he snarled. He took a step back, and his chair skittered back across the faded checkerboard linoleum with a nerve-scraping screech.
“Celian won’t allow it,” answered Constantine. The subtle adjustments in his stance and the calculation in his eyes signaled he’d made the instant shift from brother to sparring partner. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d gone toe to
toe, and it likely wouldn’t be the last. “And she’s wanted by the Council of Alphas—”
“Fuck the Council!” D bellowed. Two humans sitting at a booth in the back stood up and made their way quickly toward the back door.
Constantine set his jaw and leveled him a steely, intense look that would have drained the blood from anyone else’s face. D, however, didn’t bat an eye. Very quietly Constantine said, “Think about this for a minute. If we’ve seen her on television, they’ve seen her, too, and they’re on their way. None of us are authorized to act on this, especially not you. And you know what happens if you go rogue, brother. They’ll take you out before the
Bellatorum
can even blink. You saw how serious they were. You do
not
want to get in the way of The Hunt.”
The Hunt. A group of eight of the deadliest hunters picked from the four other
Ikati
colonies, tasked with one thing: find the missing
principessa
, her brother, and the small group of loyalists who’d vanished with her three years ago, and bring them in to face the Council.