“Well,” she said, defensive, “that’s what happened! Who knows why Demetrius does anything—”
“Ah,” he said, and folded his arms across his chest.
She stared at him. “What, ah? What does that mean?”
He raised his brows and shrugged. “Judging by the way you say his name, I’m guessing you and this Demetrius have some history.”
In a wave, heat rose up her neck, spread over her cheeks, her ears, her brow.
Gregor snorted, examining her face. “Some major history.”
“Yes, we do,” she said, her voice gone small. Her eyes filled with that traitorous moisture, and she didn’t even bother to blink it away. “I—I was in love with him, and he killed my father.”
Gregor’s arms fell to his sides. His face softened. “Oh, princess—”
He took a step toward her, and at that exact moment an extremely agitated Merck crashed back through the bedroom door.
“Got some bad company, boss!” he shouted, red-faced and sweating. “Sky out!”
He disappeared through the door without another word, leaving Eliana with a skyrocketing heartbeat and a grim-faced Gregor, who answered her question before she could get it out of her mouth.
“It means run,” he hissed, grabbing Eliana by the arm.
They’d had a hell of a time subduing D; it was only the tranquilizer Constantine had been smart enough to snatch from the infirmary before they’d left Rome that had finally done the trick.
“He’s going to have one mother of a headache when he wakes up,” Lix said as he watched D’s enormous, slumbering form on the couch where they’d deposited him. They were gathered in the living room at the safe house where they’d found D…but no Eliana.
She’d been here, though. Celian, Constantine, and Lix could all smell her, faint traces of clover and roses diffused in the air, stronger downstairs, strongest of all in one of the bedrooms that looked as if a tornado had passed through. Lix had forgotten how amazing she smelled. An unmated, incredibly powerful, full-Blood female in her lush, exquisite prime…there was nothing on Earth to equal it.
No wonder D had been practically impossible to put down.
“He deserves a damn headache,” muttered Celian from his position in the doorway across the room. He leaned against the doorjamb—the largest of the group at almost six foot eight, his head was one inch from the top—and folded his arms across his broad chest. He sent an ominous glower toward the unconscious warrior sprawled on the couch. “Stubborn, pigheaded, rebellious bastard.”
Lix inspected his forearm and winced. A perfect outline of D’s teeth was embedded in his skin. “Since when is he a biter?”
“Since he fell head over balls for Eliana, that’s when. Which is exactly the same time he lost his damn mind.”
A low groan from the direction of the couch snapped all their heads around. Lix rose, Celian straightened from the doorway, and Constantine—pacing back and forth in taut silence on the other side of the room—stopped short. D’s head rolled first one way, then the other. One of his big hands twitched.
Sounding worried, Lix said, “Should we restrain him?”
“That will only piss him off.” Celian shot a glance at Constantine, who still hadn’t moved. “Let’s give him a minute, see what he does. Keep that syringe ready, though.”
One eye cracked open, then the other. D blinked up at the ceiling. The hand that had just twitched flexed open, then curled to a fist. Then in one blinding fast movement he shot from the couch as if someone had electrocuted him and sank to a reflexive fighting stance, fists raised, knees bent, legs spread apart. A wicked snarl ripped from his lips.
“Easy, brother,” said Celian, low. D looked over at him, black eyes unfocused, and wavered on his feet. “It’s only us. We had to put you down for a minute. That tranquilizer you’ve got in your system is going to make you a little wobbly—”
As if to prove his point, D staggered sideways and crashed into a wooden side table that promptly splintered to pieces. He regained his balance, shook his head like a dog, and growled, “What the fuck?”
“Excellent question,” said Celian dryly, “and one I was hoping you could answer for me.”
“How the hell did you find me?” D reached out and spread his hand against the wall for balance.
“It wasn’t exactly rocket science,” Lix answered in a neutral tone. “Xander was more than happy to tell us the location—”
“Son of a—”
“—of The Syndicate’s old Paris safe house. It was only a matter of putting two and two together.”
D spat, “I knew I should have killed him when I had the chance!”
“Where is she, D?” said Constantine from the other side of the room. “Where’s Eliana?”
At the mention of her name, D drew himself up to his full, bristling height and glared daggers at all three of his brothers. He didn’t say another word.
Celian’s voice was brusque when he said, “Okay. Here’s how this is going to go. You’re going to tell us what happened here, what you know, and what—if anything—she said that might help us determine the location of their new colony. And then we’re going to decide what the next play is—”
“The next play is my fist down your throat.” D uttered this with so much cold, savage fury it actually gave Celian pause, which was a feat in and of itself.
“I told you,” Constantine said to Lix and Celian, his voice defeated. “He’s gone totally off the reservation.”
“Maybe we can use that to our advantage.” Celian seemed almost distracted as he said this, contemplative in a way that had Lix and Constantine sharing a look. “For a while, at least.”
With D watching him with wild eyes, Celian casually crossed to a table set against the wall and seated himself. He stretched his long legs out, crossed them at the ankle, pursed his lips, and began to slowly trace an invisible pattern on the tabletop with his finger.
“Let’s say, for example, you are beyond reasoning with. For the time being,” he emphasized, glancing up at D, then back down. “Let’s say we report back to the Council of Alphas that we did indeed catch up with our love-crazed brother”—D hissed a low warning at that, but Celian went on, unperturbed—“but unfortunately he escaped from us before we could get any information from him about the whereabouts of the missing princess, who he so inconveniently sprung from jail, and her tribe.”
D’s growl tapered to silence. A shade of hostility faded from his posture, but he continued to watch Celian in narrow-eyed, wary belligerence.
“And let’s say we request more time to bring him in, because only we can do it and only we can get any information from him which he may—or may not—have about said princess.”
D understood that Celian had already talked to the Council, had probably been threatened with bodily injury and a war…and still wanted to buy him some time to find Eliana. The anger drained from his body and was replaced by an even deeper respect than he already had for the leader of the Bellatorum. This was a risk, and a big one. He said, “They’ll never agree to it.”
To which Celian quietly replied, “They will if I tell them the Roman colony will join the tribal confederacy and I’ll serve on the Council of Alphas if they do.”
This pronouncement was met with shocked silence. Everyone in the room knew how much Celian had resisted joining the confederacy, how much he hated the idea of subjecting his own people to outside laws. Foreign laws. Joining the Council would mean big changes, less control, and definitely less freedom. Plus a lot more contact with one Leander McLoughlin, Alpha of Sommerley, whom he openly loathed.
“Hardly a fair trade,” said Lix, his voice tight, watching D.
He had a point. “If they agree to it at all, you’ll only get a few days. Maybe not even that. It’s not worth it.”
Celian gazed at D in steady calm, ignoring the others. “It is if you tell me it is. And then the three of us will vote on it.”
Instantly, Constantine said, “I’m in
.”
“Great,” Lix muttered. “Guess we don’t need to vote, then.”
D folded his arms across his chest. After a silent stare-off with Celian that lasted several long moments, he said, “Silas is behind it. He told her I killed her father, and I got the distinct impression he’s been leading them all to believe the four of us planned a coup…and that she’s got a bull’s-eye on her back.”
Celian’s brows rose. “She thinks you want to kill her?”
“She thinks I want to kill them all.” Disbelief, anger, and pain rang in his voice. He ran a hand over his head and held it there, briefly closing his eyes.
“It does look like she’s pretty mad at you.” Constantine eyed the fresh red gouges on D’s cheek.
“Mad doesn’t even begin to cover it,” D muttered. He touched a hand to his face and winced. “She went ballistic.”
“I’d have paid good money to see that.” Celian’s voice was mild, but there was a hint of laughter behind it. “Our little principessa, angry enough to take you on.”
“She’s angry all right.” But even worse than the anger was the terrible sadness he’d witnessed in a woman he remembered as ebulliently happy and alive. D’s chest constricted at the memory of her tears, the memory of that bottomless well of sorrow he’d glimpsed in her eyes, pain that—wrongly or not—she thought was caused by him. He felt the sudden, violent urge to wring that lying Silas’s neck until it snapped. He slowly walked back to the couch and sat with his arms hanging off his knees.
“The police know what she looks like now,” said Constantine quietly. “They’ll be looking for her.” He looked at D. “And you. It’ll be a lot harder for you to track her now.”
“What did you hear about it on television? Did they report any bodies the police were unable to identify?” D was looking at the floor, hunched over and lost in thought, all the anger from moments before drained from his posture.
“No.” Celian sat forward in his chair. “You hit someone?”
D nodded. “One of The Hunt. They got there the same time I did. If I’d been a few minutes later…” He looked up at Celian, and his eyes burned. “They’re still out there, looking for her.” Then his jaw worked and his voice was shaded with venom. “Seven of the eight, anyway.”
Celian frowned. “The television reports only mentioned that the chief’s right-hand man was slightly injured in the bombing. Apparently there were no other injuries—”
“There was another injured man,” D interrupted. “Human. Injured pretty badly from what I could tell. Glasses. White coat. Looked like a doctor type.”
Celian shook his head. “No mention of him, no mention of any unidentifiable bodies. Leander didn’t mention it, either.”
D’s lips peeled back in an ugly snarl over his teeth, and he sat up, ramrod straight, radiating violence. He growled, “Tell him, from me, that I am going to personally tear off the heads of every one of his little group of assassins—”
“Probably not helpful to the cause at hand,” interrupted Celian.
“—and if any of them harm a single hair on her head, I’ll come after him and his entire colony myself! I’ll go Old Testament biblical on them. I’ll rain fire and brimstone on that mother—”
“Again,” Celian said, louder, harder, “not helpful. Our objective is to buy you more time to find Eliana and bring her in, not start a tribal war!”
D ground his teeth, stood, and began to pace back and forth in taut, smoldering menace in front of Celian’s table. He flexed his hands open and closed, itching to get them around someone’s neck. “She’s just going to keep running from me. She thinks I want her and the others dead. She thinks I killed her father—”
“You didn’t tell her?” From across the room, Constantine’s voice was low and shocked, and his expression was shocked, too. “You didn’t tell her what happened? That it was me who pulled the trigger?”
D kept right on pacing. “That’s your story to tell, brother, not mine.”
Moving slowly, Constantine walked to the table where Celian sat and sank into the opposite chair. He ran a hand through his thick, black hair, blew out a breath, and shook his head in wonder, watching D pace.
“There’s got to be a way for me to prove to her that whatever Silas told her about us, it’s all lies.”
“Except for the killing her father part.” Constantine dropped his gaze to the table. “That part’s actually true.”
“He was going to kill me, Trollboy.” D used the nickname he hadn’t used since they were both children, teasing each other about everything from girls to their looks. Constantine was Trollboy because he was anything but, and, accordingly, D had been dubbed Chatterbox. “He was a batshit crazy bastard who terrorized our entire colony and sunk a knife in my chest when he found out I went on a date with his daughter. You just had my back.” D slowed his pacing and lifted his head to look at Constantine. “Guess I never said thanks for that.”
“No,” said Constantine, “you didn’t.”
“Well…thanks for that.”
With those few words, Constantine knew that the rancor between them from the last three years had been forgiven. D held his gaze for a beat, nodded, and then resumed his restless pacing.
“So my problem is, unless I have some kind of proof that Silas is no good, Eliana will just keep running forever.”
“Like, written proof?” Lix piped in. Three pairs of questioning eyes turned to look at him, and he stared back at them, waiting for them to guess. When they didn’t he rolled his eyes and said, “The journal, geniuses. Her father’s journal. We still have it.”
The air went electric.
The journal of the mad King Dominus had been found after he’d been killed and the princess and her retinue had fled the catacombs of Rome that night three years ago. It outlined—in meticulous detail—his plan to take over the other colonies, his genocide against his own people, the genetic testing he’d commissioned, which resulted in a serum that allowed human and Ikati blood to be compatible. Like all sadistic megalomaniacs, his ultimate goal had been world domination. He was going to put the Ikati back at the top of the food chain, using human DNA and fertility to do it.
And then he was going to wipe them off the face of the earth.
Silas—his trusted servant, equally sadistic and power-hungry—had been assisting him with all of that.
D looked at Celian. “How soon can you—”
“Twenty-four hours, maybe sooner if we leave right now.”
“You’ll call Leander on the way?”
Celian nodded, rising from the table. “I can’t guarantee he’ll call The Hunt off Eliana’s trail, but I’ll get you a few more days. We’ll figure it out from there. You better work fast, though.”
Constantine rose as well. “Do you have any idea where she might have gone from here? How are you going to track her?”
D smiled, and it was almost gleeful, the happiest any of them had seen him in years. “While I was taking a little nap thanks to your tranquilizer, I had a dream, brother.” He tapped his temple. “I had a dream.”
The first bullet screamed by Eliana’s right ear, and the second embedded itself into the wall next to her head at eye level with an ominous thunk that dislodged a puff of smoke and spat razor-fine chunks of drywall right into her face. Clutching Gregor’s hand, she threw up an arm and twisted away, cursing.
“How many of these bastards are there?” Gregor shouted, barreling down the stairs three at a time, dragging Eliana along like a sack of rocks behind him.
Just before the third shot rang out—another near miss that ricocheted off the metal handrail with a high-pitched, ringing twang—Eliana shouted back, “Seven!”
The ferocity of their pursuit made it seem more like seventy. She felt each one of them as separate, stinging waves of heat across the surface of her skin, their silent intent to kill her as clear as if they’d screamed it. Four Ikati assassins behind and three more somewhere nearby, unseen beyond the walls,
moving fast on different floors of the building.
Probably, like them, headed for the exits.
They were in a narrow stairwell, racing down in headlong, dizzying spirals. Gregor’s footsteps clattered loudly off the unpainted walls and metal steps, and the torn soles of Eliana’s bare feet left little bloody prints like a trail of crimson breadcrumbs. She didn’t know how they’d found her, she’d been so careful to disguise her scent, but somehow she’d led the assassins right to Gregor’s building, right into the very heart of her friend’s business—and life.
If they survived the next few minutes, she was resolved to kill them all.
Then she’d get on her knees and beg his forgiveness.
Gregor crashed through an unmarked door on one of the stairwell landings, and suddenly they were in a parking garage, dim and silent except for the ominous sound of the steel door slamming shut behind them with cold, unnerving finality, grim as the lid on a crypt.
Eliana gazed around at the long lines of cars, their dark windshields like rows of blank eyes, reflecting back nothing. She muttered, “This is always the scene in a movie where someone dies.”
Gregor ignored her and yanked her forward over the cracked cement, heading directly for a sleek, two-tone gunmetal-and-black Ferrari parked two aisles down at the end of the row. It only took a few seconds to get there, get the doors unlocked, and start the engine.
But it was long enough.
Just as they tore out of the parking spot—engine roaring, tires squealing and sending up plumes of acrid white smoke, a deep, rumbling vibration rising up through the leather seat to set her teeth a-clatter—the door they’d entered the garage through flew open to reveal the tall, straight figure of a man in a tailored dark suit and white dress shirt, gripping an enormous silver gun in each raised hand. The guns were leveled directly at the Ferrari.
“Oh shit,” said Gregor, stomping his foot on the gas pedal.
The only way out was toward the assassin, unfortunately, and they took four bullets to the windshield as they raced down the aisle. Swerving wildly, they ducked and screamed as the glass splintered into a spider’s web confusion of tiny cracks that surrounded four perfect holes, but didn’t shatter. Around a corner shots rang out again, but everything was a flying muddle of noise and motion in Eliana’s brain. All she could do was dig her heels into the floor mat, clutch the molded leather of the seat, and hang on.
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