She leapt up from the bed and stood quivering and wide-eyed before him. “Show me!” she blurted out, desperate for any distraction that would restore her rapidly shrinking sense of control.
His eyes drank her in, her breasts and hips and thighs, all so softly rounded, all so lushly feminine.
“As you wish, dear lady,” he drawled. He pulled the covers away from his body in one long, slithering rustle of fabric, revealing his naked body, the flat, hard muscles of his abdomen, his unabashed, impossible-to-ignore erection.
She blanched and yanked the sheet away from the bed with a hard pull, then wrapped herself in it, leaving nothing visible of her body save one bare forearm and her forehead and eyes, which blinked at him, fast and startled like a baby bird’s.
“Not that!” came the squeak of her voice through the sheet.
He lay back against the mattress with his fingers laced behind his head, a wicked smile lazing across his handsome face. The morning light gleamed in molten streamers across his chest. He crossed his ankles and slanted her a look of mock distress. “It grieves me to hear you find the sight of my naked body so distasteful, love. I rather think I might cry.”
“I meant the forest! I meant how to Shift to a panther!”
His body drew down to complete stillness at this. His eyes grew flat and dark, the smile vanished from his face. He sat up, ramrod straight, planted his feet on the floor and gripped the edge of the mattress. His legs were spread wide open, his stiff member jutted up to push against the reticulated muscles of his belly.
She looked away. His lack of self-consciousness, the perfect ease in which he inhabited his skin, struck her as more viscerally appealing than anything else she had seen of him so far. He exuded heat and untamed power, he was lithe and beautiful and unfathomable, he was utterly enticing and charismatic without one ounce of effort.
Yet she knew in her heart, for all his beauty and refinement and the poetry of his words, there lived beneath a primal creature, poised to pounce. A creature that had had a hand in her father’s death.
She could never allow herself to be drawn into his world, no matter how skillfully he spoke words like my beautiful girl and home and tell me you’re mine.
It seemed a very long time before he spoke. The room was still and cool around them.
“What you said last night,” he began, his tone dark and controlled, “in front of the Assembly, about Shifting at ten years old.”
Her gaze was drawn back to the startling, feral beauty of his face. A crackle of electricity fluttered over her skin. “Yes?”
“That was the truth, wasn’t it?”
“Of course it was,” she snapped, failing to keep the affront from her voice. The sheet slipped down to her neck. She clutched at it with stiff fingers, drew it back around her throat.
He only stared at her, gripping the edge of the mattress with those long fingers that had stroked her only moments before, and narrowed his eyes.
“And what else?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, her lips flattened to a thin, stubborn line. She raised her chin.
“I mean,” he said, with that same narrowed, assessing look, “that if you have been Shifting since you were ten years old—and successfully hiding that fact from everyone around you, including our scouts—you are, in all likelihood, capable of all manner of interesting tricks. I’d like to know what they are.”
She ground her teeth together. Don’t let him bait you! Don’t let him win!
“I honestly have no idea what you are talking about,” she said, plucking at the sheet to wrap it more securely around her body. “But if you prefer not to accompany me into the forest so I can try to Shift into something more substantial than a wisp of air, suit yourself.”
She began to march toward the windows with her head held high, the sheet billowing out behind her like the train of a wedding gown. He stood quickly from the bed, strode over to her, and gripped her arm.
She turned to him, startled, and was instantly snared in the heat of his eyes. The slanting light from the windows turned them a pale, clear jade.
“You can trust me, Jenna,” he said. His voice was surprisingly soft for all the hard, unyielding edges in his face. “In spite of what you may think, I do have your best interests at heart. If there is more to this story than you are telling us, if there is anything else you are hiding from me, from the Assembly, I need to know it now. You are out of danger from them now, but your place in the colony will not be secured until we establish exactly what you are capable—”
Jenna removed her arm from Leander’s grasp with as much dignity as she could muster, dressed only in a ridiculous, trailing sheet, shaking from head to toe with outrage, with a naked and resplendent man by her side.
“There is no securing me, Leander. Not here, not anywhere else. I told you last night, I won’t be locked up. I won’t be your prisoner.”
They squared off to face each other, unsmiling.
“Yes,” he said. “I recall. But you have apparently forgotten what I told you last night.”
But she hadn’t forgotten. She was acutely aware that his promise to let her go was the one thing that had let all her fear and hesitation melt away. His promise was the one thing that had allowed her to surrender to the moment, to the desire that sang through her blood and shortened her breath and ate through her veins like poison. But now in the cold light of day the certainty of last night seemed foolish, wishful thinking, and was replaced by doubt.
“You would really do that?” The memory of her meeting with the Assembly brought the metallic bite of anger to the back of her throat. “With all your rules and restrictions and secrets, you would let me just walk back out into the world, back to my old life? When no one else can leave Sommerley without permission from you? When even Morgan, an Assembly member, can’t be free to live her life as she pleases because she’s a woman?”
Leander’s face remained neutral, not a muscle in his face or body moved. But his eyes, oh, how his eyes burned straight down into her soul with such a fierce blaze of anger she nearly took a step back.
“Yes,” he replied, his voice deadly soft. “I would.”
She raised her chin another fraction of an inch, unwilling to be intimidated. “I don’t think they would let you.”
He gazed back at her, inscrutable and terribly beautiful, as magnificent and untamed as the vast black forest that stretched beyond the windows into infinity.
“I am the Alpha of this colony, Jenna. They don’t allow me anything. I do as I please.”
“And if there’s a price to pay?” she asked, knowing there would be. Not even he would be exempt from the Law. Her father certainly wasn’t.
His voice dropped and he said, “Then I will pay it.”
She chewed the inside of her lip, unsure of what to say next. The sky outside the windows was going from pale gray to pewter, a silver dawn turning dark. Clouds heavy with rain floated on the horizon, waiting to drop their bounty of water to the trees and mountains and plains below. It looked cool and dewy and inviting, when everything in this room suddenly seemed so densely close and heated and filled with nothing but him.
“I came here for answers,” she finally managed, after an endless, aching moment. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted.” She cleared her throat after a tickle made her voice crack. “That’s what’s most important to me. Finding out...who I am. Filling in all those missing holes in my past.”
His eyes softened. He reached up and twisted a strand of her hair between his fingers. “I’m here to help you, Jenna, but you’re keeping me at a distinct disadvantage if you don’t tell me everything.”
He lifted the lock of hair and stroked it over the slope of her cheek, down the curve of her neck. She shivered as he trailed it over the swell of her breasts, his gaze dropping to follow the path.
“Yet I have to think,” he said, his voice lowered to a husky whisper, “that can’t be the only reason you came here.” He brought his g
aze back to her face, dropped the strand of hair from his fingers, and lifted his hand to brush her cheek with his knuckles.
She felt the heat bloom over her cheeks under the weight of his frank, knowing look.
“Don’t be so pleased with yourself,” she said frostily, angered by his arrogant assumption. She’d had just about enough of everyone’s assumptions about her and Leander.
“Of course that’s the reason I came here.” She turned away, clenching her fingers so hard around the edge of the sheet it pinched and puckered in her fist. “This was just,” she said, waving a hand to indicate the two of them, the sudden, stifling heat of the room, the disarray of the unmade bed, “an unfortunate accident.”
He dropped his hand to his side. It must have been her imagination that made the temperature in the room seem to drop several degrees. She chanced a look in his direction. The narrow, assessing look was back again.
“I see.”
He turned his head, shifted his gaze toward the misted morning outside the windows. She was struck again by the sculpted, arresting planes of his face, the full, solemn mouth, the curve of long lashes so pure and perfect with the glimmering fairy-light catching the tips and turning them to silver.
He looked, she thought with a shiver crawling up her spine, exactly like what he was.
Dark magic.
Magnetic and dangerous and beguiling. Capable of anything.
“Well then,” he said through thinned lips, “if it’s only answers you’re after...”
He slid away from her, moving toward the marble fireplace on the opposite side of the room. It hadn’t been lit last night; the hearth was cold with day-old ashes. She followed his progress with her eyes as he paused with one hand propped against the mantel.
He turned to look at her. She couldn’t read the expression on his face.
“It’s answers you shall have. Follow me, if you please.”
He Shifted to vapor and vanished into the black mouth of the fireplace. A wisp of trailing gray smoke curled out behind him as he rose up the chimney and into the gathering gloom of the morning sky.
It took only a moment before her surprise wore off and she Shifted herself. She dropped the sheet to a puddle of satin on the floor and darted up through the soot-crusted flue to emerge over the lip of the bronze chimney cap, but he was already quickly becoming invisible against the cloud cover that hovered over everything, swallowing the light.
He was a pale specter of fluid movement high in the sky, far beyond the green and manicured gardens of Sommerley, already breaching the first line of trees in the forest.
He was moving fast.
She surged forward, darting away from the roof and rising into the thick air as quickly as she could, pushing through the clusters of silver-gray clouds. The cool wind rushed over her, the moisture-heavy air slowed her and added drag to her progress, but she willed herself to keep moving, to keep him in sight.
But where was he going?
The ground became a blur of passing color beneath her, the ordered gardens of the mansion gave way to wild fields then low, rolling hills covered in heather and peat. Then the forest below, an abrupt line of dark trees so thick they appeared like a body of water, like a vast, ancient lake...placid on the surface, with danger and secrets lurking below.
Thunder began a long, distant rumble.
The first of the rain began just as she lost sight of him beyond the rise of a hill. A gentle sheeting of mist became something more definite, heavier drops that slipped through her, first softly then with more energy, slicing, pricking like a million tiny needles. She rose up farther into the sky, banked over the hill, and then paused, searching the leaden sky and the silent black forest below.
Leander was nowhere to be seen.
She caught his scent far to the south, perhaps a dozen miles, just a faint lure of spice and smoke wafting on the freezing wind. Only a few atoms of his presence still lingered in the air, but it was enough. She shot toward it, using it to guide her like clues in a game of hide-and-seek, until finally it became strong enough that she slowed at the edge of a meadow, searching.
But this wasn’t a natural clearing, she saw as she hovered above. This was man made, with orderly beds of flowers and a low stone wall that ran the length of it.
Where was he? The rain now sliced through her so hard she had to concentrate on staying vapor. It was uncomfortable. She contracted, fighting the storm. She didn’t know how much longer she could hold herself in this form.
But there—just across the clearing, next to a massive, dripping conifer—the gleam of water sliding over naked skin.
He was crouched low to the ground with one hand on the rough bark of the giant tree, the other sunk into the earth. He was looking up at her, unsmiling.
She skirted the perimeter of the clearing, staring down at the intentional beauty of the gardens and grasses and odd, flat pieces of moss-covered stones, and Shifted to woman just behind Leander. Relief flooded through her as she took air into her lungs and stretched her limbs. The scent of wet earth and rainwater and him hit her nose, followed quickly by the bite of freezing air on her unclad skin.
They were shielded from the blunt edge of the storm by the canopy of boughs above them, but she was still getting wet, and quickly. She padded over the soft layer of dead leaf and moss underfoot and crouched down next to Leander, her knees in the wet bracken, shivering with cold. They did not look at each other.
“Where are we?”
His voice came on a draft of frigid air. “The final resting place of the Ikati.”
She came to her feet at once, forgetting her nudity and the cold and the wet and the storm raging above. He rose silently beside her and turned his face toward hers.
“You brought me to a cemetery?” She watched a drop of water fall from above to catch the rise of his cheek, then slide down over it like a tear. He did not blink. “Why?”
“I wanted you to see something,” he said evenly, his eyes dark and unfathomable.
“What?”
A small flicker of emotion flared in his eyes, but was quickly extinguished.
“Your father’s grave.”
He turned and walked away from her, out into the open clearing and the raging storm. His naked body was soaked at once by the downpour, his hair blew slick and black around his shoulders, buffeted by the wind.
But she only stared after him, too frozen to move.
20
Daria was naked.
She was also gagged and blindfolded, her arms and legs bound so tightly with rope the skin beneath was chafed and bleeding. It wasn’t the only part of her that bled. The long, cross-shaped gouge they carved in her upper arm with the tip of a hunting knife was still bleeding freely and throbbing.
She had been in the trunk of this vehicle for hours, since she had awoken with the blinding pain in the back of her head where they had hit her with something blunt and heavy. Her arms were tied behind her back, her knees were drawn up against her chest, her body was racked with uncontrollable shivering.
They would kill her. Of that she was sure.
Expurgari. Terror and fury roiled in the pit of her stomach, sending the acrid sting of bile rising up her throat.
She hadn’t seen or heard them sneak up on her, which meant they were both sly and clever. She hadn’t smelled them either, which meant they knew how to disguise their scent from the Ikati.
It also meant they had been waiting, watching, all the while right under their noses.
She’d been winded by all the dancing, taking turns with her husband and a flushed, distracted Christian and many other men of the tribe—friends and relations both—and had gone out to the rose garden for a breath of fresh air. She was alone for only a moment, leaning against a flowering trellis of jasmine, gazing up at the stars.
She was distracted, undeniably, with the news that had spread like buckshot through the gathered gentry that Jenna’s Shift had been confirmed, in front of the Assembly, that Leander
himself had made her do it—with a kiss, no less—then they both had disappeared.
To discuss things further, most likely.
She smiled, gazing up at the stars, thinking of a match between the two of them. For all his independent ways, she knew her brother longed for a partner who could love him, who would stand up to him and stand by him and challenge him to be his best. And Jenna seemed perfectly suited to that task. Perhaps she could even persuade him to allow the women of the colony a more active role in the decisions that affected their lives.
A cluster of stars in Virgo blinked down at her, millions of light-years away, winking with dreams and promise.
And then the hands closed hard around her mouth.
They were calloused and rough and covered in something tacky and viscous, like pine resin. There was a blinding stab of pain in the back of her head that sent scarlet and orange fireflies exploding behind her closed lids. A wave of intense dizziness hit her, followed very quickly by a rising swell of blackness, then nothing at all.
Until she had awoken to the fact of her limbs bound, her skin bruised and cut, her body lying atop a filthy, stinking blanket in the black prison of the trunk. The low, melancholy hum of spinning tires and the road rolling away beneath her sang a song of good-bye. She was being taken far from her home, far from any hope of rescue.
There would be no escape from them, she knew. She was smaller and shackled and weak with injury. She couldn’t Shift. She bit her lip to hold back a sob and prayed she would be strong enough not to talk.
Though they would surely have gruesome ways of trying to make her.
Daria’s heart began a painful throb within her chest as the car slowed, then stopped. She heard doors opening and closing, the crunch of boots on gravel, low, masculine voices muttering something she couldn’t make out. A burst of cold air hit her naked skin as the lid of the trunk popped open.
She screamed against the gag as two pairs of big hands closed around her wrists and ankles and hauled her from the trunk.
21
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