Leander sent him a small, sour smile. “Don’t forget who we’re talking about. She doesn’t give a damn what the Assembly has to say. She’ll never live by their rules.” He shrugged, a weary motion of his shoulders. “And I don’t blame her.”
Jenna turned and looked directly at Leander through the window, as if she felt the weight of his stare. Her face was very pale and shadowed within the shining golden mass of her hair, spilling down in waves that lifted and fluttered in glinting locks around her shoulders.
Only her eyes were clearly visible, wide and unblinking, her gaze a level, cool green.
For a moment their eyes clung together. He wanted to leap from the chair and run to her, gather her in his arms, rain kisses over her hair and cheeks and lips—but then she dropped her lashes and turned away. She pulled the silk shawl closer and tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear in a gesture that seemed at once dismissive, indifferent, and entirely vulnerable in its simple, girlish elegance. The rosebud fell in a streak of painted silence to the gravel beneath her feet.
“Well.” Christian rose from the chair. He shot one last glance at Jenna before turning his gaze to Leander. “You never know. It might make a difference. You should tell her.”
Leander felt his brother’s fingers press a light squeeze against his shoulder as he walked behind his chair. He turned to watch him walk slowly from the room, gait heavy, shoulders hunched. When he looked back to the windows, Jenna had moved out of sight.
As the days passed, Jenna retained her silence and the ivory pallor of her skin, and she kept so somber and apart Leander knew he was right. She would leave as soon as she was able.
It was only a matter of time.
He found her early one evening dozing in a rocking chair in an unused bedroom on the second level of the manor. A book was open in her lap. A small fire muttered in the fireplace, lumpy piles of orange and yellow kindling cooling to embers and ash. He watched her gravely from the doorway, her face tinted with the last of the setting sunlight, her chest rising and falling in a slow, even tempo.
Her bare feet poked out from under the edge of the knitted afghan thrown over her lap and legs. Seeing how pale and vulnerable they looked against the dark wood floor sent an unexpected lance of anguish through his heart.
“You do that a lot, you know,” she murmured, rousing. She turned to gaze at him through heavy-lidded eyes, her hair a tousled fall of honey around her bare shoulders.
“What, exactly?” he asked, leaning against the doorframe.
Her lips quirked. She looked him up and down once before answering.
“Stare at me.”
“I do? Well, I beg your pardon. I wasn’t aware that I did.”
A crystal vase of garden roses dropped scarlet petals over a bureau near her chair. Their scent filled the air. He crossed to it, moving casually, and took a blossom between his fingers. He imagined her picking them from the garden, filling the vase with water, bringing it up to liven this deserted, silent room and wondered what—if anything—that could mean.
“Well, you do. You’ve even been watching me sleep,” she softly accused.
He turned to her before he could cover his surprise. She watched him through chocolate lashes, her expression either curiosity or malaise or burning disdain. They stared at each other across the room as the dying sun sent orange and ginger and gold in gleaming bright prisms across the polished floor. She dropped her gaze to her hands, to the book open on her lap. She shut it with a firm snap and set it aside on the rosewood table next to her chair.
“How did you know?” Leander kept his voice even with a monumental effort. “You were awake?”
She smiled, a little sadly he thought, looking off into the fiery horizon, then shrugged. “Awake or asleep, it seems I can always...feel you,” she said softly. She folded her hands together in her lap, then slid them up to clench bloodless against her upper arms.
“Ah. Yes.”
He inched closer to her chair, the rose still velvet soft in his grasp. He rubbed the petals between his fingers and imagined the silken firmness he touched was her skin.
“Morgan told us about your Gift. Your quite...extraordinary Gift.”
He stopped next to the window and looked out at the sky, at her reflected back at him like a ghost dancing in the panes. “You can see all of us, then? You can feel everyone? Everywhere?”
She adjusted her weight in the chair and he turned to look at her. She’d lowered her head so her hair tumbled forward, covering her face in a fall of gilded, shifting light. “Some more than others.”
He didn’t miss the innuendo, but his ego required her to say it aloud.
“Meaning...me?”
She drew her knees up under her chin, her cotton flowered sundress bunching and slipping under the afghan that protected her bare legs from the drafty room, and wrapped her arms around her shins. “Yes,” she murmured to her knees. Then, darker, “Especially you.”
He waited a moment for more, but she remained as she was, lowered eyes and silence and a veil of hair across her face.
“I didn’t kill Morgan,” he finally said.
“I heard,” she said. Her fingers dug deep into her upper arms again. “But you didn’t let her go either.”
Was that condemnation in her soft tone? A fleeting distaste in her half-hidden expression?
“Her betrayal has cost us a great deal, Jenna. Some of our finest men have been lost, our defenses have been breached. Our protected existence is over. Who knows what the future holds for us. And you—”
He stopped himself abruptly. When he spoke again his voice was very low. “She almost cost you your life. What would you have me do?”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about that,” she said quietly and looked up at him. “And to be totally honest...I don’t know.” Her eyes were clear and almost colorless in the light. He could not read her expression. “But I made a promise...a promise I have to keep. Somehow.”
She stopped speaking and he frowned at her, waiting. She said nothing more, only glanced up at him, expressionless.
Doe eyes raked his face and then his chest, where a white bandage peeked above the open collar of his shirt.
“You’re injured,” she murmured.
He gave her a very dry smile. “I’ll live, I’m afraid. It wasn’t very deep, nothing like...” His smile slowly faded. His jaw began to work and he looked away from her, to the petals crushed in his fist. He opened his hand and they tumbled slowly to the floor.
“How is Daria?” she asked softly, after a time. “Christian told me she’s doing well, better than could be expected but...” She swallowed and dropped her lashes. Her arms tightened around her legs. “She looked so bad. I thought he must be trying to cheer me up with a little finessing of the facts.”
Leander raised his gaze to her face. She had her lower lip caught between her teeth and rocked, very slowly, in the chair.
“It’s too early to tell. The probability of permanent injury is there, the doctor tells me. And,” he added, sharper than he intended, “there will be scars aplenty.”
She pressed a pale hand over her eyes. “God. If only I had gotten there sooner,” she whispered. “It took me so long to find her, nearly all day. If I had gotten there faster...” She drew a ragged breath and shook her head. She squeezed
her eyes together. A line of tears beaded her lashes. She swiped them away with the back of her fingers.
“Jenna,” Leander said, his voice roughened. “It’s
not
your fault. If you hadn’t found her, if you hadn’t gone looking for her, she’d be dead. What you did, back there...”
He lost the words.
Staring at her now, so beautiful and fragile and visibly despondent, twilight sliding like a lover’s touch across her face, sent a terrible ache through his body, a fierce burning through his lungs that left him stunned and breathless. He tried to inhale, he tried to catch his breath, but he couldn’t seem to manage it.
How long did he have? How many more days or hours or minutes until she left him behind with a gaping hole in his chest where his heart used to be?
The thought of living without her was like acid in his throat.
“So...” She drew in a long breath, gathered herself, and sat up straighter in the chair, folding her hands primly together in her lap. She gazed down at her hands and spoke in a small, quiet voice. “When are you going to do it?”
The hopelessness in her voice snapped him back to reality. His eyebrows ruched.
“Do what?”
She sent him a dark, resigned look. “Imprison me.”
He stared at her, aghast.
“With Morgan,” she explained, when he still didn’t speak.
“Who...why...
what?
” he sputtered.
She waved a pale hand in the air in front of her face, weakly dismissive. “You don’t have to put on an act for me,
Leander.” She sighed. “I know you think I helped Morgan. You accused me of it, that day in front of the Assembly. On top of that, I ran away—again—and broke the Law—again. That’s your job, isn’t it? Enforce the Law? Protect the colony?” She stared at him, her gaze grim and unflinching. “Punish the enemy?”
“Jenna,” Leander said, choked, his eyes full of shock. His face had gone very pale. He knelt down on the floor in front of her and grasped her hands, pulled them into his. “How could you ever think such a thing? How could you ever think I would hurt you?”
“Because you”—she began slowly, blinking—“you said it yourself, in the Assembly meeting that day. You said—”
“I
asked
if you had anything
to tell me
,” he broke in before she could finish. “You hate bullies, remember? I hoped you would stop hiding from me, stop keeping secrets. I was just giving you a chance to tell me yourself. You were always so stubborn, always so defiant. I wasn’t going to force you into anything, not again, not when you should have just admitted to me then and there what I already knew—”
“What you
already knew
?”
She pulled her hands out of his grasp and stood up. The afghan pooled in blocks of primary color around her feet. She stepped over it, crossed to the bed, and sat down on the edge of the mattress with her back, rigid, to him.
Her voice came strange and unsteady across the room. “What is
that
supposed to mean? What exactly is it that you already knew?”
He came to his feet. His heart pounded against his ribs. “What you are.
Who
you are.”
She turned her head a fraction of an inch and he caught a glimpse of her profile. Pinched lips, flushed cheeks, long,
downswept lashes. Fingers clenched into the glossy fur coverlet.
“And who might that be, Leander?” she said past stiff lips.
He crossed to her in slow, measured steps, never taking his gaze from her face. The scent of roses and
her
was warm in his nose, the glow of the sunset flooded the room, lighting her hair to fire. He stopped just in front of her and put a finger under her chin. Her head came up.
She lifted her eyes and a sunbeam fell across her face. It illuminated her eyes to a fierce, brilliant green, shining and lucent like an emerald held to the light.
“Well...” she whispered. “Who am I?”
“You are Queen of the
Ikati
,” he murmured, holding her gaze. “
My
Queen. My heart and soul...my true love.”
Her lips parted. She didn’t blink. She said nothing.
“You are the woman I’ve waited for my entire life, the woman who makes me want to be a better man, who makes me think I have a
chance
to be the man I’ve always wanted to be.”
He sank down next to her on the mattress, framed her face in his hands, turned her body to his. “You are everything I’ve ever wanted, and the thought that you’re going to leave—that you’re only waiting until you’re well enough—makes me want to die.”
She stared at him, openmouthed, pale as a sheet. The fire popped and sputtered. A log fell through the grate. Somewhere outside, a nightingale began to sing.
“Well,” she finally managed, blinking away tears, “and here I thought leaving wasn’t an option.” She dropped her gaze, but he caught the tiny smile that crossed her lips, fleet and wry.
“On the contrary.” He allowed himself a smile to match hers. “The Queen is allowed quite an astonishing array of liberties.” He gently lifted her wrist to his lips, then spread her hand against his cheek.
She pressed the smile from her mouth. “There’s that word again,” she mused, her eyes still downcast. “I don’t think I want that title.” She paused. “I definitely don’t
deserve
that title.”
“The Assembly thinks you do,” he said. He brushed his cheek down her forearm to the crook of her elbow, inhaling the scent of her skin, then kissed his way back up to her wrist.
Jenna looked up at him, startled.
“They put it to a vote, taking into account several important things. First, there is the matter of your powerful Blood. As your father was the only skinwalker—”
“What the hell does that
mean
?” Jenna pulled her wrist from his grasp and leaned forward to stare at him with piercing eyes. “Edward said that to me before, that day in the Assembly meeting—what does it mean?”
Leander stared back at her with his eyebrows raised. “You must have known,” he said. “You must have seen it before, when you were a child, your mother must have told you...”
Jenna shook her head no.
Leander folded her hands very gently in his own. “It’s a term we borrowed from the Native American lexicon...the only appropriate thing we could think of to describe what he was, what he could do.”
“What could he do?” Jenna breathed.
Leander hesitated. He rubbed his thumbs back and forth over both her hands, stroking, warming. “Jenna, your father could Shift to anything he chose,” he said softly. “Not
just vapor. Not just panther. Any animal on the planet, any human he wanted to resemble, anything organic in nature, anything elemental, anything inanimate. Wind. Water. Fire. A tree. A lamp. Anything.”
She stared at him, breathless, the sound of her pulse banging away in her ears. She made a noise that wasn’t quite coherent as she thought of that night on the lanai so long ago: Her father. The crow. The butterfly.