She recognized it immediately.
Guilt. It was the cloying, tangible, awful scent of guilt.
Despair gathered into an evil knot in her chest as Jenna’s eyes found the source of the smell. Something clear and terrible dawned over her, sinking into the pit of her stomach. She felt as if she had just swallowed a vial of poison.
“Morgan!”
Her voice echoed off the wood-paneled walls of the room. Its tone of horror startled the gathered men into another abrupt silence. Leander’s fingers tightened into a vise grip around hers as thirty pairs of surprised eyes flickered to her, then over to Morgan, who sat frozen and whey-faced on her chair.
Jenna’s voice dropped to a hoarse, accusing whisper. “What have you done?”
Morgan was silent for one long, endless moment, her eyes wide and staring, her hair spilling in a lovely dark waterfall over her shoulder. Tears welled up in her eyes and began to track down her cheeks.
“It wasn’t supposed to be
her
,” she moaned.
The room erupted into chaos.
A snarl of fury tore from someone’s lips, a tall man Jenna hadn’t seen before. He was pale and gaunt, eyes hollowed with worry. He leapt across the room toward Morgan and barely missed closing his hands around her throat as four other men caught him by his coattails. They pinned his arms and dragged him away as he howled in outrage and twisted like a madman in their hands.
“Kenneth! Get a hold of yourself, man!” someone shouted to the thrashing figure.
Daria’s husband, Jenna realized. Her heart pinged with empathy. How horrifying to lose your mate. How she would bleed if anything happened to Leander, how she would die if anyone ever hurt him...
Mate
.
Her stomach did a painful, twisting freefall. All the breath left her body in a single, violent rush.
Her gaze shot to Leander. He stood taut and menacing by her side, emanating danger and barely checked rage as he stared in cold fury at Morgan. She was weeping openly now, her chair surrounded by a circle of men.
But Jenna couldn’t look away from Leander’s face. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move.
For one long, interrupted moment all she could do was stare at him, frozen, openmouthed. She felt her past and her future slipping away, felt her heart throb and twist as if in its death throes inside the confines of her chest.
If they ever find you...run
. And now she was—what?
Not in love? She couldn’t be in love with him?
A chilled draft from the open windows stole over her skin. It prickled the hair on the back of her neck as if someone had walked over her grave.
She blinked and came back to herself just as two men picked Morgan up by her arms and hauled her out of the chair to her feet. She didn’t fight or protest as they began to drag her toward the door, spitting words like
traitor
and
monster
and
whore
.
With knees weak and trembling, Jenna loosened her fingers from Leander’s grasp. She had to shout over the din of angry male voices.
“Stop!”
Everyone froze. Leander’s head swiveled in her direction. She took a tentative step forward, then another, feeling raw and exposed in Leander’s ill-fitting clothing. The frigid hardwood floor leached the warmth from her bare feet with every step.
“Let me talk to her.”
Alejandro’s dulcet voice floated to her from the other end of the room as if in a dream. “
Meu caro,
please do
not interfere. We have no time for dallying, she must be questioned—”
“I’ll only answer to Jenna!” Morgan sobbed and leaned heavily against the arms that bound her. “None of you bastards will ever make me talk!”
“What the hell is going on here?” Leander’s voice from behind, cutting and hard. “Why will she only speak to you, Jenna?”
Jenna took another step toward Morgan, ignoring him. “Where did they take her?” she asked gently, slowly advancing across the frozen room, feeling every eye on her like brands burning into her skin.
Then Durga’s voice, growling like thunder across the chamber.
“You have not the authority to question this traitor, Lady Jenna, no more than you have the authority to enter this meeting.”
He shouldered through the men to stand before her, swarthy and substantial, blocking her path. His eyes glittered dark and baleful. “You have no authority
whatsoever
,” he sneered. His lips curled back to reveal a row of startlingly even, white teeth. He crossed thick arms over his chest. “In fact, I must insist you take your leave.”
Jenna felt Leander take a step forward behind her, felt his fingers make a possessive span against her shoulder, felt his intention to crush Durga’s windpipe so acutely she imagined it in vivid detail. His gurgling death on the rug at her feet, hot blood coagulating on the cold wood in thick crimson pools, fingers clawing at the air, grasping, finding nothing.
“
I
am the
Alpha of this colony, Durga,” Leander hissed near her ear. “
I
give the orders here. This woman is under my protection.
Choose your next words wisely
!”
Before Durga could form a reply, Morgan’s voice rang out high and clear behind his back.
“The Queen of the
Ikati
has every authority granted under the Law!”
That’s when the air in the room actually turned to ice.
Leander’s fingers spasmed, sunk deeper into her flesh. No one moved. No one spoke. Jenna didn’t think anyone even breathed. Somewhere off in the distance beyond the open windows, a dog began to bark.
She suddenly felt as if she were watching herself from above, floating as a fine sheen of vapor, free and disembodied, hugging the ceiling. She was curiously detached and a bit light-headed. Her blood seemed to have stopped circulating throughout her body and pooled in a great heated mass at her feet. She thought she might actually faint if it weren’t for the pressure of Leander’s hand on her shoulder, the real and painful sting of his nails sinking into her skin.
Out of the frozen, astonished silence, Christian’s voice rose like the chiming of a bell. “I knew it!”
Durga’s eyes, horrified, found her face. “No. Impossible! She’s a half-Blood—”
Viscount Weymouth immediately interrupted, his voice wavering. “Daughter of the most powerful Alpha in all our history,
the skinwalker himself
—”
“A traitor!” Durga shouted. “Who married a
human
! Her mixed blood is impure, she cannot have even one-tenth of his Gifts! She cannot be Queen!”
“Skinwalker?” Jenna murmured to no one in particular, still floating, still free, the shouts of the men bouncing off the walls and the protective bubble of shock that had settled around her.
Alpha.
Half-Blood.
Queen.
“It’s happened before, Durga.” Weymouth’s blue eyes, pale and rheumy, fixed on Jenna, his face ashen. “Cleopatra, the last pharaoh of Egypt, was a half-Blood Queen. You recall
her
, I assume?” His voice dropped lower and lower as he spoke. “The saying is as old as our kind.
Blood follows Blood.
If the Blood is strong, the Gifts are strong.”
He lifted his hand and pointed a shaking finger right at her. “And
her
Blood is the strongest of them all.”
Skinwalker.
Jenna’s protective bubble of shock burst wide open.
Now the blood began to rise up from her legs, rise up under her skin, scorching like fire through her veins as they all stared at her, a roomful of flabbergasted men ahead of her and one furious one behind, his anger growing and pulsing and focused now on her, his eyes like sandbags on her back.
She didn’t even have to look at Leander to feel the burning gaze he leveled her with.
“THIS IS RUBBISH!” Durga roared. He turned blazing eyes toward Leander. “Complete fantasy! How do we know this woman doesn’t have some kind of involvement with the dogs who took your sister! She kept herself locked in her rooms for days with the
other
one—” He jerked his thumb toward Morgan, who had dropped to her knees on the floor as the men who held her stared in shock at Jenna, their anger forgotten. “A
female
who just admitted treason, a
female
you allowed onto your Assembly, a
female
who now knows
everything
about us—our defensive strategies, our logistical strengths and weaknesses—
everything
!”
He leveled Jenna with a look of such pure, unmitigated hatred she nearly took a step back. “She cannot be Queen! She can’t even be trusted! The two of them were probably planning this all along!”
“No,” Christian said flatly. “She knows nothing of this.”
Durga growled, a low snarl of hostility that rumbled through the room. “We cannot know that! They
both
should be taken and questioned and we then can determine what to do with—”
“Jenna.” Leander’s voice came from beside her, spare and hard. “Is there something you need to tell me?”
She turned her head to look at him and saw it like an ugly blemish that marred his beautiful face.
Doubt.
He doubted her. And she had just realized what he meant to her, she had just begun to admit to herself how much she wanted and needed and cared for him and now...now he doubted her.
“Jenna,” he said again, an imperative.
Weak sunlight angled through the high windows, spilling pale across the gleaming floor, falling warm across his features. But there was no warmth in his eyes. They glittered diamond hard and cold.
He waited, silent. For all the gold in the world, she couldn’t find her tongue to speak.
“Just tell them, Jenna!” Morgan sobbed. “Just
show
them what you can do!”
Leander’s hand slipped from her shoulder, he slid one step away. And all the while, one thing hammered in her head, drowning everything else out with a cruel irony that would have made her smile if she didn’t want so very badly to weep.
Mate.
“You can’t possibly think I had anything to do with Daria’s disappearance, Leander,” she said as strongly as she could manage while everything inside of her was weak and floundering. All the new joy she had found in the forest was being sucked away, inch by inch, by a vacuum, a massive black hole of pain. “You
can’t
.”
He continued to stare at her, his eyes assessing and full of swift calculation, his face too savage, too far beyond human touch to be tamed. “You wanted nothing but the truth from me, do you recall?” he murmured. “You demanded that much, and now...” His voice was so soft, ever so dark and controlled, revealing nothing. “Now I must demand it from
you
, love.”
Not a sound was heard in the chamber. Not a muscle moved, not a breath was drawn as the Alpha of the
Ikati
turned to face her fully and pinned her in his green gaze, clear and cold as a dragon’s.
“Is there something you need to tell me?”
It was a curious pain she felt, witnessing the awakening on his face, the way doubt bloomed into something deeper, something darker as she kept her breathless silence while the seconds ticked slowly by. Leander held her gaze without blinking, without smiling. The curious pain burned and burned and yet she could say nothing. She couldn’t speak.
Leander finally turned away, and Jenna felt something within her chest fall and shatter, like the glass she had dropped to the floor. She lost herself then, lost the feeling of completion and satisfaction she knew only a short time ago, wrapped in his arms, his body filling hers, their forms fitted together as perfectly as if they were made one for the other.
She lost the only fleeting happiness she’d ever known.
She controlled her breathing. She controlled her shaking legs. She even controlled the bile that wanted to rise up into her throat as she turned to Morgan, who knelt pitifully on the floor, still surrounded by stunned, gaping men.
“Tell them what you know, Morgan. Tell them where she was taken.”
“I don’t know!” she wailed. “They didn’t tell me anything—I was only contacted once—they promised me they would just take the Keeper of the Bloodlines, just him and no one else!”
Viscount Weymouth gasped, then took two swift steps toward Morgan and slapped her very hard across the face.
Her head rocked with the impact of his blow, but she whipped it back and glared at him, her face streaked with tears and mascara, her pride not yet defeated.
“How did they get to you?” he demanded, trembling in fury. “
Why would you betray us
?”
Morgan smirked, her lovely face twisted into a mask of hatred. “
Why
would I betray you?” She let out a cold, mirthless laugh. “When every decision about my life is not my own? When even who I should marry is determined for me,
by the Keeper of the Bloodlines
, forced upon me and every other woman of our kind so we make a proper Blood match? We’re nothing more to you than
breeders
!”
Viscount Weymouth slapped her again, this time so hard she fell back to the floor on one elbow. A drop of blood welled up on her lower lip. She licked at it, then wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. The blood smeared over her chin.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Weymouth shouted. The other men began to advance around Morgan,
staring down at her with flexed fists and faces black with fury. “
They’ll kill us all
!”
“Then let us die!” she screamed back at him. A dozen hands reached out for her, closed hard around her wrists and arms and waist. She was hauled to her feet. “We live on our knees as it is, shackled by your precious, goddamn
LAW
—”
Weymouth reared back to slap her once again, but his arm was caught in midswing.
“Do
not
,” Leander said very softly, his fingers closed in an iron grip around the other man’s wrist, “do that again.”
The viscount wrenched his wrist away and began to step back, panting and wide-eyed, rubbing his other hand over the spot where Leander’s fingers had dug into his flesh.
“You will take Morgan to the holding cell to be questioned,” Leander continued, his tone still soft and infinitely dark. He motioned to Morgan with his head but did not remove his gaze from the viscount. “And you will wait for me there. You will not begin without me. She will not be touched again without my express permission. Is that perfectly clear?”