Jenna couldn’t stop apologizing for her clumsiness, though Daria brushed off her stumbled explanations with an elegant wave of her hand and another sharp look at Leander.
“Your surprise is perfectly understandable, Jenna. I had no idea you’d not been told. I assumed Leander had explained it all to you before you arrived.”
She watched as the footman brushed the last of the crystal shards into the dustpan and moved away behind a recessed door before she turned her gaze once more to Jenna. “It’s only a glass, after all.” She smiled, pushed back in her chair. “I hope you’ll excuse me, but I must be off. My husband, Kenneth, frets if I’m gone too long, especially now...”
Leander stood beside Daria and offered her a hand as she rose in one fluid, elegant movement of slender limbs and rustling skirts. “Dolt,” she murmured under her breath as she accepted his hand with a chilly smile.
“
Merci
,” Leander murmured back, keeping his face carefully neutral. He knew neither of them would be pleased if he allowed himself to smile.
Though he was. Pleased, that is.
Albeit in a wretched sort of way. He felt immensely satisfied he’d finally gotten a reaction from Jenna, and equally mortified by the pain he saw in her eyes when she recognized the portrait of her father. He’d only meant to rattle her enough to peer beneath the icy exterior she’d formulated; he’d chosen this room for their breakfast with a great deal of deliberation.
But she now seemed utterly disoriented and shaken. She had the wide-eyed, startled look of a deer in headlights. A deer just about to be run over by a very large truck.
“I’ll leave you to it then,” Daria murmured as she turned away, glaring at him from the corner of her eye.
She had always been the one with the keenest sense of justice, his older sister. Always the one who insisted they play fair, even if it tipped their hand or gave away their advantage. She was softhearted and kind to a fault, very much like their mother had been.
She turned back to give Jenna a warm smile. “It was lovely to meet you, Jenna. I hope we can spend more time together after the Council of Alphas convenes.”
“The Council of Alphas?” Jenna echoed. She was looking at the table, at the food, at the footmen lined along the wall, but she wasn’t looking at him, and she definitely wasn’t looking at the portrait of her father on the wall.
With a small, hissed exhalation of breath, Daria spoke through her teeth. “I see you have much to discuss with Jenna, Leander. Try not to leave anything out,” she said, her pale eyes like ice above her serene smile.
She released his hand and turned away, gliding past the tapestries and footmen and portraits, the scent of tea roses and hand cream lingering behind her. Her head was held at the stiff angle that told him he’d be in for an earful later.
Leander turned back to Jenna still sitting in her chair, all pink and gold and dreamy, sorrowful distraction, her perfect poise fracturing around the edges.
Daria is right
, he thought with a sudden stab of guilt,
I am a dolt.
“Perhaps a walk in the garden,” he suggested briskly, tossing his napkin onto the table. “It’s a beautiful morning. Maybe you’d like to get outside?”
“Outside...” she murmured, pulling back from her contemplation of the seedless grape she held between her fingers. She dropped it onto her plate and stood abruptly, scraping the chair across the parquet with a screech.
She blinked at him, at last awakening. “Yes. Outside would be...better.”
Through the maze of corridors that led from the gallery to the French doors at the rear of the manor, Jenna remained silent, moving gracefully by his side, ignoring the veiled, speculative looks of the servants as they passed.
Though their heads were always lowered, faces impassive, every one of them was profoundly, instinctively interested in her.
Everyone at Sommerley had felt her arrival by now. She was new, and different, and potent. Even the servants were atwitter with gossip and guesswork. Everyone knew who
she was and why she was here, and he couldn’t stop their instinct to see her, to look at her, no matter how many hard, silent looks he threw.
Twice he felt her glance at him, but when he turned his head, she had already looked away.
They strolled through the French doors into the cool, dewy morning, footsteps striking lightly against the marble slabs. He looked to the sky and the profusion of white and lavender clouds floating gently there like tufted fleece, emptied of their burden of rain. A knot of starlings scored the pale horizon, a skein of silver-gray and black as they rose from the treetops, flashing in the light like quicksilver.
It felt bloody good to get a lungful of fresh air. He’d been confined to the East Room the entire night, arguing strategy and logistics with more than a dozen other sleep-deprived and agitated men, breathing air that had been inhaled so many times it was stale and humid.
Leander had set his guards at the perimeter of their territory. The few who could Shift to vapor floated overhead as small, drifting clouds, patrolling in tandem with dozens of sleek and lethal beasts concealed in the shadows of the forest. His orders were explicit.
If you see anyone new, anyone who isn’t Ikati, kill them.
His gaze slanted to Jenna. He couldn’t take any chances, not now.
She wore a sleeveless dress of pale blush cotton, tea length, cinched around her slender waist, one of the few ladylike things Morgan had chosen for her. It was feminine and soft and lent color to her ivory cheeks.
It made him think of cotton candy and hand-churned strawberry ice cream and a great many other pink and delectable things he’d like to run his tongue over.
“Am I the first human to ever come here?” Jenna asked as a pair of housemaids who’d been watering baskets of scarlet and purple flowers froze, dropped swift curtsies then fled, wide-eyed and whispering, through the French doors Jenna and Leander had just emerged from.
“You’re not human,” Leander corrected, “you’re a half-Blood. Those are two very different things.” They moved down the marble steps of the shaded colonnade onto the green expanse of the lower lawns. The air parted around him, sweet, thick with moisture and the scent of rosemary and garden roses, free of the smog that had choked his lungs in Los Angeles.
“But everyone else here is like you.”
He inclined his head.
“Then how do you decide who’s in charge? How do you decide who’s a servant and who gets to be on the Assembly?”
“When we first settled here generations ago, every-one was assigned a particular job according to his or her Gifts. The most Gifted were members of the Assembly, the least Gifted were servants, with a dozen different layers in between. It’s stayed mostly the same since then. Many of the maids and cooks and footmen here now had great-grandparents who served my great-grandparents.”
“And I suppose no one gets a vote in all this? The Alpha’s word is law?”
Leander’s lips twisted into a smile. “This isn’t a democracy.”
“So I’ve been told,” she said, dark, but didn’t add anything else, and he wondered what Morgan had told her on the ride from the airport. Nothing good, he’d bet.
He paused beside a groomed hedge of rosemary and turned to look at her. “There’s something else you should know.”
“Only one thing?” she replied, staring straight ahead at the wall of the forest that began in dappled sunlight beyond the dells and vales and turned to dusk a few yards in. “How reassuring. I was inclined to think there were several things I might need to know. If there’s only
one
thing, why, I feel so relieved.”
He sighed.
She looked at him and smiled, green eyes bright. “How bad could it be, if there’s only one little thing?”
He studied her. She was remarkably resilient, this iron-willed female who looked about as tough as a frosted marzipan rose.
But then she’d had to be tough
, he thought suddenly,
hadn’t she?
“The
Ikati
are under attack,” he said, drinking in her creamy complexion, the elegant line of her throat, the soft rise of her chest. Her skin was as dewy as the morning, pearl-escent, shining in the sun. “At least we have very good reason to believe we are.”
“Attack?” Jenna repeated, just as calm. She gave him a measured, assessing look before turning to gaze once more at the dark line of forest in the distance. “Well, how very inconvenient for you. I know how you hate to be on defense.”
He looked away and stood with his hands clasped behind his back.
For a long while, neither of them spoke.
“That’s true,” he finally said, quietly and without a shadow of sarcasm. “More true than you know, Jenna. I’ve been groomed to succeed my entire life, expected to
lead and make decisions, trained to
win
. I take neither my responsibility nor my position lightly. I can’t. I’m the Alpha. There are scores of people who depend on me, women and children and families I must protect, at any cost. It’s a privilege, yet also a burden, because I’ve no one to share it with, no one who understands how I fear losing. If I fail, the
Ikati
fail. If I lose...”
He turned toward her. “We all lose.”
“Losing,” she mused, turning back toward the forest, eyes hazy and unfocused. Morning light glowed against the slope of her sculpted cheekbone, caught the tips of her long eyelashes, warming them gold. Her gaze flickered back over him, assessing. “I wonder if someone like you has any idea what it
really
means to lose.”
“We all have things to lose, Jenna, even me. Especially me. My people are in danger, our way of life is in danger.” He angled a step closer, inhaling the soft scent of dew and roses that clung to her skin. “
You
are in danger,” he said, his voice roughened. “And that is something I simply will not tolerate.”
Jenna didn’t protest or step back, as he expected. She accepted his proximity without comment, without moving away, but she turned her head and lowered her eyes.
“You’re right,” she murmured. “We all have things to lose.” A flush crept over her cheeks. “Things like faith, trust, hope—all the things we were taught to believe in. All those make-believe saviors, like knights in shining armor. Like second chances.” Her voice lowered to the barest of whispers and was shaded with sorrow. “Like true love. And as for the danger...” She slowly raised her gaze to his face.
Leander heard everything around them for twenty miles: the air whispering through the pines, the river Avon flowing
swift and deep over granite rock and polished stones, the birds in the sky and the squirrels in the trees and the moles rustling deep in their underground burrows.
But most acutely he heard her heart, beating strong and true, flush with heated blood, a squeeze and thump so compelling he wished he could drown in the sound of it.
All his worry for his people, all his rage at his enemies seemed to melt away, and in their stead there was only Jenna, the drum of her heartbeat, the cool embrace of the morning.
“I’m not afraid of danger,” she said. “Or I never would have come here with you. What I am afraid of...is something only you can give me, Leander. And I hope...” She closed her eyes. “Even though I know it’s going to hurt, I really hope you’ll give me what I want.” She opened her eyes and fixed him with a raw, hungry stare.
He stood mesmerized as an errant breeze lifted a lock of golden hair and sent it fluttering over her bare shoulder and down her back.
“Anything,” he murmured, dazed, his heart clenched in sudden agony.
I would give anything just to have you look at me like that for one second longer.
“The truth,” she said firmly. “Whatever you haven’t told me so far, whatever you haven’t wanted to tell me, that’s exactly what I need to hear. And I need to hear it right now.”
She pinned him in her gaze, the smoky-sweet timbre of her voice sliding like satin into his ears. He could barely breathe with her beauty, with the desire pounding through his veins.
“The truth,” he repeated, still muddled, trying to focus on her words.
She spoke very calmly. “What happened to my father?”
“Your father was...”
executed
, he almost said. He caught himself just in time, bit his tongue to hold the word back. After another, steadying, breath...
“An amazing man.”
Her eyes widened. “You
knew
him?”
“Every
Ikati
across the globe knew him. He was a legend.”
He saw how startled she was, saw how she tried to hide it. “Because he was the Alpha.” Her eyebrows drew together. She pulled her lower lip between her teeth and he wanted to free it with his finger, with his tongue.
“Because he was the most powerful leader our kind has ever seen. His Gifts were unmatched.” Leander looked away, over the vast stretch of ancient forest where his guards prowled, the trees smoky-blue in the morning sun. “And because of the sacrifice he made.”
“Sacrifice,” she repeated, a chill in her voice. “What sacrifice?”
Leander felt her stare though he wasn’t looking at her, felt the way her body became both stiff and still, heard her heart skip first one beat, then another. She was beautiful, and precious, and new to the world of the
Ikati
and Sommerley, though he planned to keep her here—with him—forever.
He was loath to hurt her.
And so he couldn’t say he had watched her father die, as had his father and brother and every other Alpha from all the tribes across the globe, every
Ikati
in his colony. He couldn’t tell this creature staring up at him so rapt and lovely that he had stood by and watched in impotent horror at what had been done to Rylan Moore, how he had been made an example of by the Assembly, so they would all know how outlaws were treated, so they would all see the consequences of breaking the cold and unchanging Law.
His death hadn’t been swift, and it hadn’t been merciful. The Expurgari themselves would have approved of what had been done to the disgraced Alpha.
“
Ikati
Law is immutable, Jenna,” he said softly, still avoiding her gaze. “Adherence to the Law, to the will of the Assembly, is what keeps us together, what allows us to survive in a world that would destroy us. No matter the position of the
Ikati
who breaks the Law, no matter the transgression itself, punishment follows.”