Hawk felt like he was drowning. He felt as if all the gravity in the universe had centered on a place in the middle of his chest.
“Garrett kept trying to kill himself in prison, so eventually they moved him to a psychiatric facility. He’s still there. Still keeps trying to kill himself. Still calls my father every year on my birthday, asking if I’ve forgiven him yet.”
There was a long, terrible silence. Hawk was trembling with horror, thinking of her face when she’d told him she could only look back on their first night together as another betrayal. He whispered her name.
In a quiet voice, she said, “You’re the only one I’ve ever told that story. My girlfriend Nola knows part of it. And my father knows, of course. But other than that . . . you’re the only one.”
Hawk rolled her over and took her face in his hands. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” His voice shook.
She wiped away the moisture at the corners of his eyes. “I didn’t tell you so you could feel sorry for me. I told you because I want you to know that all the broken things inside me feel less broken when I look at you.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. “Now, you mean. Because of what I gave you. Because of the drugs. When they wear off—”
“If it means I’ll feel differently than I do right now, I hope they never wear off. I’ve never felt this happy. This free. I want to feel like this forever.”
Her smile was lovely and warm, but he saw the haze, the faint fog of the spirit vine dulling the normally crystalline sheen of her eyes.
A mad, mad idea seized him.
She could feel like this forever. He couldn’t make the past go away, but he could take away its power to hurt her.
All he had to do was ask kalum to show him how to make the spirit vine brew.
He buried his face in her neck, hiding, shaking with the awful realization that he’d never wanted anything so much in his entire life.
And what kind of man did that make him, that he wanted to basically keep her enslaved, her free will devoured by psychoactive drugs that made her happy and malleable and . . . and . . .
Mine.
It came from some primeval place inside him, an ancient beast calling out, roused by the scent of blood. It began to whisper to him, coercive and sly.
There’s nothing for you here, in this colony where you’re only the Misbegotten, the lone wolf who lives like a hermit, misunderstood and unwanted except for the occasional, impersonal, tryst. Why shouldn’t you take what you want? Why shouldn’t you have a taste of happiness, after all these years of living in the dark? Why shouldn’t you both? You can heal her. You can heal yourself.
Take her. Take her and run.
Hawk’s shaking grew worse.
Jacqueline felt it. She wound her arms around his neck. “It’s all right,” she whispered into his ear as he crushed her against him. “Whatever you’re thinking, it’ll be all right. You’ll see. No matter what happens, I promise everything is going to be all right. It has to be. Because I don’t think anything else could ever compare to this.”
She squeezed him when she said the word, “this,” and in that moment, Hawk knew she was right.
And he knew exactly what he was going to do next.
He pressed a kiss to her forehead, smoothed her hair away from her face. She settled against him, warm and perfect, and within seconds fell asleep.
Hawk held her as the sun rose higher in the sky, held her as the minutes turned to hours and his mind spun with plans and possibilities. Then he rose from the bed as quietly as he could so as not to wake her, and slipped out of the room.
Olivia Sutherland was having a nightmare.
She was a strong woman, not prone to fear or flights of fancy, but ever since she and the rest of the final families had left Sommerley and begun the journey to the rainforest, she felt as if a malevolent specter had been lurking silently behind her, following every footstep, its bony hands reaching out for the back of her neck.
The feeling worsened the deeper they’d gone into the jungle. They were led by an eerily silent Leander and the colony guide. Tonight after she’d breastfed her own child and the Queen’s twins and they’d been tucked into their snug pouches, she’d lain in a makeshift bed of bracken and leaves beside her snoring husband, staring up at the black tangle of branches above, feeling her skin crawl as if a cluster of tarantulas were using her body for a mating ground.
Wrong wrong wrong. Something was wrong—terribly so—but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.
She tried telling herself it was homesickness. She tried telling herself it was nerves. She tried making a thousand different logical arguments to convince herself she was overreacting, but something deep inside her belly argued back that she was in danger.
She’d fallen asleep with that thought in mind . . . and the feeling of doom had crept into her dream.
She was running. A highway stretched open in front of her, cutting through a landscape of floating ash and desolation. Buildings burned, smoke coated the sky, piles of rubble spat flames. Though she was running as fast as she could, the road began to tilt up, rising swiftly, and she had to scratch and claw at the asphalt to keep herself from sliding back, sliding down into what she knew awaited her:
Death.
The road reared too high, sheer as a cliff face. She screamed and dug her fingers and toes into it, but it wanted to shake her off. It wanted her to fall. She fought as long as she could, but the angle was too steep, and there were no footholds, just unforgiving black pavement, bisected by two mocking yellow lines.
Just before her fingers slipped, Olivia looked over her shoulder to see what awaited her at the bottom.
Two tiny babies looked up at her from far, far below with solemn, identical faces. They sat naked on a blanket the color of blood, surrounded by howling winds and firestorms but untouched and tranquil, as if floating inside the eye of a hurricane. Four small arms reached up, pale and pudgy, tiny hands opened, fingers spread wide. A sound came from everywhere and nowhere, an ancient and terrible intonation that resonated with such power everything quaked, including Olivia’s soul.
Laughter. It was the laughter of children, warped into a babble of such force and shrieking frenzy Olivia opened her mouth and screamed in terror.
Then she let go.
Olivia bolted upright in blackness, the scream still on her lips. Grayson awoke, instantly on high alert, and shot to his feet from his position on the pallet beside her. He whirled around with a snarl, trying to locate the threat in the teeming dark jungle.
But Olivia knew now where the real threat lay. It wasn’t in the darkness. It wasn’t in whatever would greet them at the new colony, or in anything they might have left behind.
With trepidation, she turned her gaze to the small, snug pouches that held the twins, perhaps a dozen yards away, nestled beside Leander as he slept under the branches of another tree. He was awake now also, demanding to know what was wrong, but Olivia couldn’t look at him.
She couldn’t take her eyes away from the twins.
They were awake, too. They were looking directly at her. And though she was still half asleep and her heart was pounding so hard it made it difficult to hear anything above the rushing of blood through her veins, she was quite sure she heard the four-month-old girls speak in unison.
“Olivia.”
Just her name, clear as a bell. Only their lips didn’t move.
And they were infants; they couldn’t speak.
No one else seemed to hear it. Leander and Grayson and the guide were focused on her, not on the twins. But she felt certain her ears weren’t playing tricks on her . . . as certain as she now felt that these two children of the Queen and her Alpha were monsters.
Or miracles.
Or perhaps a bit of both.
Hawk was intercepted on his way t
o kalum’s cave by a messenger, a lanky boy of sixteen named Zaca, who had unkempt hair, a long, loping gait, and a thousand-watt smile he flashed at regular intervals. He was barefoot and bare-chested, and wore only a loose pair of tan cargo shorts, which were slipping down his narrow hips. He ran up beside Hawk just as he jumped down from the rope.
“Big Daddy wants to see you.”
Hawk tried not to smile at the ironic nickname for Alejandro. He liked the kid, who reminded him of himself at that age, wild and smart-alecky, though Zaca’s easy smile earned him a lot more friends than Hawk’s scowls ever had.
“The Alpha finds out you’re calling him that, you’re in a boatload of trouble, Z.”
“It’s not like anyone’s gonna tell him!” Zaca scoffed.
“Really? Not even Big Daddy’s big brother?”
Zaca went white. The smile dropped from his face. “I . . . uh . . . I didn’t mean . . .”
Hawk put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right, I was only trying to warn you to watch what you say. Things get around. And Big Daddy has a terminal case of PMS, if you know what I’m saying.”
He winked, and Zaca breathed a sigh of relief. “Yeah. I guess so. I’ll be more careful.”
“Any idea why he wants to see me?”
“He’s called an emergency meeting of the Assembly. It’s about the girl.”
His nerves immediately stood on end like a thousand exclamation points. Hawk studied Zaca’s face. “What about her?”
Zaca hunched his shoulders up to his ears, spreading his hands open.
Right. As if Alejandro would ever tip his hand. Hawk decided his visit to kalum could wait a few more minutes.
“All right. Thanks for the heads-up. And remember what I told you.” He gave Zaca a friendly shove, which Zaca returned, dancing on his toes with boxing fists, taking jabs. Hawk pulled him into a headlock just to show him who was boss.
“I give!” Zaca shouted to the ground. “I give!”
Hawk released him, and gave him a slap on the back of his head for good measure. Zaca loped away, smiling, but turned after a few paces. “I totally had you, old man. I just let you think you won because I feel sorry for how feeble you are.”
“Old man! Feeble!” Hawk lunged forward, and Zaca darted off, laughing.
“Punk!” Hawk shouted after him. The smile he’d repressed before spread over his face as he watched Zaca run. Good kid. His father must be proud of him.
That errant thought momentarily paralyzed him, as did the ache that blossomed in his chest when he imagined having a son of his own, a son who smiled and made friends and breezed through life as if it were an all-you-can-eat buffet and he was the only one in line.
Real life sidled up beside him, sucker punching him right in the gut. Family? Future? Peace? Those things were for other people, better people. For the infamous Bastard there could be one thing only, and that was disgrace.
By the time Hawk arrived at the Assembly meeting place, his mood had sunk a shade below black.
Unlike his own home, the meeting place was easily accessible by ladders, and was linked to the rest of the colony by the network of suspension bridges through the trees. When he entered the room, Alejandro looked up at him over the rim of an overfull wineglass. Perched on his elaborate chair, he was flanked on both sides by the members of the Assembly, who were seated at the curved tables. The atmosphere in the room felt as warm as a morgue.
“You wanted to see me?”
Alejandro looked irritated by Hawk’s abrupt greeting. “I see a few days alone with the human hasn’t improved your manners.”
“It hasn’t been easy,” he said, jaw tight.
“Understandable. You must be finding it excessively hard to have someone invading your privacy, having to actually hold conversations.”
“We’re not doing much talking.” Hawk willed his face to show nothing, aware he was treading on thin ice. From the corner of his eye, he saw Alejandro’s brows rise, and he thought a bit of obfuscation was in order. “She’s still healing.”
“Ah yes. I understand kalum gave you something for her pain?”
Hawk’s gaze snapped back to Alejandro’s face. He wore a tiny smile, the meaning of which Hawk couldn’t guess.
How much did Alejandro know? Was he being played?
“Yes,” he agreed carefully. “She’s been sleeping a lot.”
“Sleeping,” Alejandro repeated tonelessly. Only his smile was wry.
“She’s recovering from being beaten with a cane,” Hawk snarled, unable to keep the anger from his voice. “So yes, she’s been doing a lot of sleeping. She needs to heal!”
Alejandro swallowed a long draught from his glass, then lowered it and stared at Hawk with penetrating intensity. “As you can imagine, I’m anxious to get to know our new friend a little better. She’s so . . .” He paused to lick his lips. “Interesting. Don’t you agree?”
The words, the tone, and the lip smacking were all designed to nettle him . . . and they did. Hawk enjoyed a vivid vision of Alejandro on the floor beneath him, eyes popped wide, face red, thrashing and gagging as Hawk strangled him with his bare hands.
When he didn’t react, Alejandro asked, “How long do you suppose this ‘healing’ will take?”
Hawk controlled his breathing. As best he could, he kept his posture relaxed, though a vein began to throb in his temple. “I can’t be expected to know how long it takes a human to heal.”
“Good point. They’re unpredictable, these humans, aren’t they?” Alejandro tapped his fingers against the wineglass. “For instance, her offer of belu for you. What on Earth do you think could have prompted such a magnanimous gesture?”
Alejandro’s smile grew wider, his expression all wide-eyed innocence, and Hawk thought, He knows.
It wasn’t forbidden for him to be with Jacqueline, not exactly. The Law explicitly forbade him from impregnating human females, but not bedding them. As long as he kept his secret and his silence, the occasional dalliance outside the tribe was frowned upon, but tolerated. Especially since he was unmated, basically unmarriageable.
But Jacqueline Dolan was a special circumstance. Brought to the colony at the Alpha’s behest, an enemy combatant they were trying to turn to their side, use for their purposes, she existed in that intangible gray area between friend and foe, property and person . . .
Savior and sacrifice.
Any decisions regarding intangibility belonged to the Alpha, by default. For as long as she remained in the colony, her fate remained in Alejandro’s hands.
Also, she’d been meant as a punishment for Hawk. Not a reward. The Alpha would not be pleased to find out they’d been doing anything other than irritating each other.
So when Hawk finally answered, he chose his words carefully.
“She offered belu for Nando as well.”
Alejandro nodded. “Odd, don’t you think? Though if I recall correctly, her exact words were, ‘Even the reason he hit Nando was my fault.’ Which leads me to believe . . .”
Alejandro took another long drink of his wine. Around the tables, nervous glances were shared.
“That she only did it for you.”
The room was deathly silent. Morgan’s eyes were burning holes in Hawk’s skull. He realized there was only one direction this conversation was headed: down.
Alejandro stood, gazing down his nose at Hawk. He smoothed a hand over his shining dark hair and said, “I want to see what the two of you got up to in the city. I want to inspect our insurance that Jacqueline Dolan will write the article she was brought here to write.”
He paused, and the room held a collective breath.
“I want to see the pictures. Bring the disc to me.”
A command, a challenge, and a threat, all rolled into one. Hawk had endured it his entire life, these sneered directions, this total
lack of respect. He’d endured it because he’d never had anything worth standing up for.
Anyone.
There was no way in hell Alejandro or anyone else was ever going to set sight on those pictures. Those were for him, and him alone.
So was Jacqueline. She’d finally given him reason to stand up for himself.
Which Alejandro obviously knew.
So be it.
Hawk put his shoulders back, rose to his full height, looked Alejandro dead in the eye, and said, “No.”
Alejandro had anticipated this answer, evidenced by the expression of smug satisfaction that appeared on his face. “One hundred lashes for your dis—”
“No,” Hawk said again, louder. He took a step toward the dais, and Alejandro’s eyes widened in surprise. “No lashes. Not ever again. I’m finished taking orders from you.”
Alejandro’s face flushed red. “Guards!”
Before Nando and his team could leap forward from their positions, where they stood stiff and blank-eyed in a line behind the dais, Hawk shouted, “Naparqudu ana sepiya, ak kalbu!”
Lie at my feet, weak dog!
They were ritual words, known by all but spoken only by a sananu.
A rival. A challenger to the Alpha’s throne.
Everyone gasped. The guards froze. Morgan leapt to her feet, as did several other Assembly members, everyone horrified and bug-eyed, looking at him and each other in astonishment.
“You dare!” Alejandro shouted, lips drawn over his teeth in a vicious snarl.
“Oh, I do,” said Hawk, his voice low and dark, blood boiling like black lava through his veins. “I definitely do. And mark my words, brother . . . you’ll be sorry I did.”
Chaos.
Shouting, chairs overturned, the crash of a vase as someone knocked it over in their rush from the room. Almost all the guards ran out, followed by several of the Assembly members, the wine boy, and the scribe, who abandoned his pen and paper on the table, all of them shoving and jostling, in a great hurry to spread the news.
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