Her answer was swift, cool, and unequivocal. “No.”
Outside, the rain picked up. It began to beat against the windows in staccato bursts, smearing the city beyond into plots of wavering black and yellow.
“I don’t like it,” Gregor declared and tossed the note onto his desk.
Eliana didn’t even blink. “You’re a businessman. This is business. You might not like it, but you’ll do it.” Her head tilted to the side in a birdlike motion he’d seen a million times before when she was puzzling something out, and he knew that something now was him. When she spoke again her voice had softened to the consistency of warmed butter, and he knew she had his number: flattery and female helplessness were a potent combination for him, even if both were patently insincere. “Won’t you, old friend? For me?”
“Stop trying to dazzle me, Eliana, this is serious!” Truly aggravated now, he leapt from the chair and began to pace behind it.
“Why are you lecturing me, Gregor?” she said, harder now. “If I were a man, would you even hesitate?”
He swung around and stared at her. His gaze swept the lovely landscape of her body, her bare crossed legs, the perfect oval of her face. “You’re not a man. Obviously.”
By the way her face flushed and she stiffened, Gregor knew he’d offended her. At last, we’re getting somewhere, he thought. Maybe that wall would come down after all.
“So my lack of a penis is the only problem here?” The bitterness in her voice was unmistakable, and surprising. Eliana stood and drew on her gloves, all the while shaking her head and making little noises of disgust. “My entire life I’ve had to deal with that crap from my family. I will not tolerate it from my business associates.”
She looked at him and drew herself up to her full height, which, for a woman, was substantial. At six foot three, he didn’t tower over her nearly as much as he did everyone else.
“Thank you for all your help in the past, Gregor. I wish you the best. Good-bye.”
She briskly began to roll up the oil painting still laid flat on his desk.
He leaned over and grabbed her hands. She lifted her gaze to his, all cold fury and steel, and he met her steely look with one of his own.
“Nay, girl, I’ll not have you walkin’ out on me in such a snit.”
Whenever he was really emotional, his speech always reverted to the cadence of his childhood, rolling r’s and dropped g’s and the slow, musical lilt of a native Scotsman. Because he lived in France where everyone looked down on him because of his country accent, even the housemaids, he’d improved with years of practice but couldn’t be bothered to concentrate on the properness of his speech at times like these.
“If it’s guns you’re needin’ it’s guns you’ll have, but I’m tellin’ you I don’t like it, and if you get into trouble I need you to promise me you’ll let me know so I can help.”
She recoiled against his grip with a sinewy strength that surprised him for one that looked so delicate, but he pulled back and refused to let her go until she relented. “Promise me, princess,” he insisted, his voice very low in his throat.
Finally, after long moments of staring at him in livid, unblinking silence, she quietly said, “I like you, Gregor. I always have. But if you don’t take your hands off me in the next five seconds, you’re going to see a very ugly side of me. A side I can’t guarantee you’ll survive seeing.”
Then she murmured something in Latin, which he understood, because the Catholic mass his mother dragged him to every Sunday when he was a child had always been in Latin.
“Nec mala te amicum. Placered non faciunt me.”
Translated: “I don’t want to hurt you, old friend. Please don’t make me.”
She lowered her head a fraction of an inch, and he imagined her eyes silvered against the light, like a cat’s. A tingle of fear—something Gregor had not felt in many, many years—raised the hair on the back of his neck. Before he could form a reply, there came a loud knock on his closed office door. He and Eliana broke apart as the door swung open to reveal his girlfriend, Céline, clasping her teacup Yorkie to her ample chest.
As it always did when it caught sight of Eliana, the dog began first to growl, then to tremble violently in Céline’s arms. She shushed it and sashayed toward them, weaving across the rug in a slinky red Dior dress she looked sewn into and a pair of Louboutin sandals he knew had cost him an arm and a leg. The monthly bill for her black American Express card was more than the GDP of some small countries.
“Daddy, I want to go out!” she implored him in pouty French. She gave Eliana a quick, sour once-over, which Eliana wholeheartedly returned, and then turned her attention back to him and tossed her long, platinum blonde extensions over one shoulder with a practiced flick of her wrist. “How much longer are you going to be?”
“We’re actually done here,” said Eliana flatly, her face drained of emotion. She turned and moved to the door, abandoning the painting on his desk.
“Eliana,” Gregor entreated.
He wanted so badly to say, “Don’t go,” or “Please stay,” or some version thereof, but under the shrewd, watchful eye of Céline, he didn’t dare. He might have been the gangster in the room, but between these two goddamn women he was as helpless as a newborn kitten. Each of them had one of his testicles gripped firmly in a delicate, ruthless hand.
At the door Eliana paused. She looked back at him over her shoulder, and something in her face softened. She glanced down at the painting she’d left on his desk, and he realized she’d done it on purpose, as an offering. If she’d taken it with her, he’d never have seen her again.
“Gregor,” she said.
His heart leapt at the unexpected softness in her voice, and he held his breath, waiting. She smiled, and Gregor thought he’d never seen anything quite so sad in his entire life.
“I’ll send the courier by for the…” She trailed off and glanced at Céline, then back at him. “Packages. Does next Monday give you enough time?”
He nodded, and she nodded back. She glanced down at the carpet and then quickly back to his face. Her expression now was unreadable, her voice cool, but he imagined both held the palest echo of relief. “Thank you.”
Then she turned and disappeared through the door, leaving him with a curious emptiness resounding through his chest.
“There’s something so bizarre about that girl,” snapped Céline when she was gone. She cooed at the still-terrified dog, stroking its little bearlike head until it stopped trembling and licked her hand. “Even Gigi can tell. I wish you wouldn’t let her come around anymore. She really gets under my skin.”
Mine, too, Gregor thought as he stared at the empty doorway. Mine, too.
“He’s getting worse, Constantine.”
It was a statement of fact, not an accusation, but for Constantine the two were indistinguishable when the subject was Demetrius. Guilt made him hyperaware of every nuance of voice; even the most innocuous comment regarding their brother Demetrius—universally called D—set him on edge.
“He’ll be fine,” Constantine snapped, folding massive arms across a broad chest. “He’s just having a bad day.”
Lix snorted his opinion of that.
They stood together in the cool blue shadows at the back of the low-ceilinged sparring chamber, observing the crowd of young Legiones—the lower caste of soldiers—gathered in a cheering circle around two men who stood in the middle of an elevated boxing ring. One of the bare-chested men in the ring was now spread-eagle on the mat, unconscious. The other—a beast of a male with chest and arms covered in tattoos that rippled with every movement of impossibly huge muscles—stood over his opponent, panting, looking down at the still body with crazed eyes, bared teeth, and all the geniality of a shark in a feeding frenzy.
“You can’t deny his dreams are getting worse,” Lix persisted as they watched D wave another opponent into the ring. He’d already been through three, and the training session had only started twenty minutes ago. Two Legiones dragged the unc
onscious male out of the ring, leaving a long smear of crimson on the white tarp. Another young male took his place, a tall, sinewy soldier nearing his twenty-fifth birthday who the Bellatorum were considering inviting to join their ranks if he survived the Transition. Which most likely he wouldn’t; less than one percent of them ever did.
The Transition hung like a hangman’s noose over the head of every half-Blooded Ikati. When fused with its human counterpart, Ikati blood was warped from the initial purity that allowed their unique characteristics to flourish. Twenty-five years to the minute from birth, and the half-Blood lived…or didn’t. Just like a clock ticking down to zero hour.
Constantine remained silent. He knew what Lix had said about D’s dreams was true because he’d heard the screams with his own ears. An almost nightly occurrence, D’s dreams—more correctly nightmares, though he never said what they were about—weren’t the dreams of ordinary people.
D was Gifted with Foresight, a talent he’d had since birth that had of late been torturing him with visions of which he refused to speak. It had everyone on edge, and not just because his screams echoed eerily through the winding corridors of the catacombs, fading to silence around dark corners while the children in bed pulled the sheets over their heads.
The things D dreamed came true. And if his terrified screams were any indication, something awful was headed their way.
“Does he ever talk to you about her?” Lix murmured, watching as D’s new sparring partner began to circle him in the ring. D stood still, hands with taped knuckles lowered to his sides, tracking his opponent’s every move with only his eyes. They shone with a murderous light.
“He barely speaks to me at all anymore,” replied Constantine. Then, lower, “Not that he was much of a talker before, but now he’s perfected the silent treatment into an art form.”
Lix nodded his agreement. Then, as D threw a vicious punch that slammed his opponent into the ropes where he clung, wavering for a moment, before he fell face-first onto the tarp and lay still while the crowd went wild, he said, “He’s going to kill one of them, Constantine. He’s supposed to be training them, but it’s like he wants to kill them. We have to do something about this. We’ve got to get Celian involved.”
Constantine watched as D, who’d apparently had enough of beating trainees senseless for the moment, jumped the ropes and leapt down from the ring. The crowd, still cheering, gave him a wide berth as he stalked away into the gloom of the far corridor and then broke into a run. After only a few long strides, he was swallowed by blackness.
The gathered Legiones began to disperse and make their way out of the sparring chamber and into one of the dozen winding tunnels that fed it. The catacombs where the Roman colony made their home included miles and miles of those tunnels, deep beneath the city, dark and chilly and scented faintly of mold and more strongly of the incense that burned everywhere in gold censers to mask it.
“Maybe it’s not anyone else he wants to kill, Lix.”
Even in the semi-gloom that was the constant of the catacombs, he saw Lix blanch. He turned to Constantine, his long hair falling, as always, into his eyes. “He would never…do that,” he said, scandalized. “It’s forbidden.”
“You know as well as I do that D doesn’t give a damn about rules. Ours, the gods’, anyone’s. I hope you’re right, though, brother.” He sighed, feeling a lead weight settle into the center of his chest. “I really hope you’re right. But we’re going to have to do something about him soon—before we find out the hard way.”
The therapeutic waters that fed the underground baths of the thermae were bubbling hot and faintly salty, as always, but for D they provided little relief. His muscles would be helped, but that wasn’t where the real ache lay. He settled his heavy bulk lower into the water, dragged his hands across his face, and closed his eyes.
Eliana.
Her image sprang to life beneath his lids. She was on the forefront of his mind every moment. Sleeping, waking, fighting, eating…he carried her with him always, and the need for her was like a sickness that had spread to every organ, eating him alive.
There would be no relief from it until he found her…or died.
He’d been in love with Eliana so passionately and for so long that the pain of her disappearance three years ago had transfigured itself into a morbid kind of obsession, burning and black and weirdly alive, like an agonizing cancer in his gut that was slowly devouring him from the inside out.
It was relentless, this obsession. He thought of nothing else. He dreamt of nothing else. He ate and breathed and lived for one thing only, and that was the day he’d find her and apologize for the mess he’d made and explain that contrary to what she thought, it wasn’t him who’d done the terrible thing that had driven her away in the first place.
Unfortunately, D had no idea where Eliana had gone. Rome was a huge city, ancient and sprawling, with a million places to hide. Or disappear altogether. But he knew the city and the particular musk and heady sweetness of her scent equally well and had high hopes he’d be able to find her before too much time had passed. Before things got even more complicated.
Before things got dangerous.
He failed, though. Every day and every night for years he’d searched, all for naught. He scoured the city, the surrounding countryside, as far north as the Alps and as far south as the tiny island of Malta, but not a trace of her could be found. He knew there was the possibility she’d left the country, though he couldn’t really get himself to believe it. Like all predatory animals, the Ikati had a home range. He thought she’d stick close to hers.
Wrong. She was gone. And he had no idea where she went.
That and the dreams he’d been having about her were killing him.
“Bonum vespere, Bellator,” said a soft voice. D’s head jerked up.
On the smooth rock floor on the opposite side of the thermae pool stood a young woman, robed in red. Dark haired and dark eyed like all of their kind, she also was very young. And very lovely. In layer over pale, wavering layer, light from the moving waters danced over her face, her body, the walls of the room. He searched his memory for her name…Iris. Former member of the Electi. Celian had disbanded the harem when the old king had died, but the Bellatorum were still sought after by the unmated females for sexual partners and breeding studs; the warriors were the most Gifted, and their genes were in high demand.
Among other things.
D nodded a curt greeting.
Encouraged, she smiled at him shyly and walked around the ledge of the pool, gazing down into the bubbling pale green water, sending him an occasional glance as she moved toward him. He saw the curves of her body beneath the flowing robe as she walked and imagined she might be nude beneath it.
Eliana.
His body responded. Naked in the hot water, he grew hard.
Iris stopped beside him. Silent, he looked up at her. She said, “May I join you?” Without waiting for a response, she opened her robe and slid it over her bare shoulders. It billowed into a pool of red silk around her ankles and settled against the wet stone.
Nude, she was more than pretty. She was ripe and perfect as a summer peach.
She crouched and swung her long legs over the side of the pool, and D watched with dark, gnawing need as she arched back and shook her hair from her face. She sat on the edge, leaning on her hands, her feet in the water, flat stomach and full breasts and a little smile as she looked down at him with an eyebrow raised like a cat with all the cream.
D stood abruptly. Water streamed from his naked body, and Iris lost her smile as her gaze traveled over his chest, down his abdomen, even lower…
Her eyes widened. Her mouth formed a startled O.
D grabbed Iris around her slender waist and dragged her into the hot water, holding her pinned against him. She was surprised but didn’t struggle; D knew he’d earned such a deserved reputation for brutality from his battles in and out of the ring that Iris would not be expecting gentleness from him
. And maybe that’s what she hoped.
As he pulled her head back with a hand in her hair and lowered his mouth to hers, D idly wondered who’d sent her. Lix? Constantine?
When her tongue touched his, he decided it didn’t matter. He needed this. It had been so long, so long since he’d even touched a woman, and she felt so good. So plush…
Eliana.
He pulled back from Iris’s soft mouth with a muttered oath. She looked up at him, confused. “Bellator?” she murmured hesitantly.
He didn’t bother with an answer. His body was still hard, aching for release, and now wasn’t the time to drown in memories of a lost love or think about his dreams that vividly depicted her in trouble, in pain…but never where. Holding Iris tight against his body, D sat on the submerged rock ledge of the pool and pulled her down with him. He kissed her again, harder than before, desperate to block out everything but this moment.
Hot water swirled around their bodies. Her legs came around his waist. Her breasts pressed against his chest, and D let out a low groan as he felt her press against that throbbing ache between his legs. He needed this…he needed this so badly…
Eliana.
This time his curse was nearly shouted. Iris pulled back, that sweet softness in her face hardening into something else altogether.
“Bellator,” she said in a businesslike tone. “How do I displease you? Tell me and I will change it.”
He wanted to laugh. He didn’t think asking her to change into another woman would go over so well. He brushed a strand of damp hair from her flushed cheek and said, “You don’t displease me, little one. You’re beautiful.” He tried out a smile. It felt strange on his face, alien, like it didn’t belong there. “You know that.”
The softness came back to her face, and she smiled. Her arms wound around his neck, and she began, slowly, to rock her pelvis against his. He felt her heat even in the hot water, and a growl rose in the back of his throat.
“Let me please you, Bellator,” she whispered, leaning close to stroke her tongue along his bottom lip. “Take what you need from me.” Taut nipples brushed his chest, and D lifted his hands to cup her full breasts, pinching those enticing nubs between his fingers. She gasped and tightened her legs around his waist and then kissed him, deep and demanding. His erection grew even bigger, aching for her, for release, for a moment of forgetting, for—
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