“It’s the struggle that refines them,” he explained, “the challenge. Give them too much water, sunshine, and fertile soil and they grow fat and tasteless, like a Concord grape, appetizing only when saturated with sugar and made into jelly. Or they wither and die of boredom. Like people. The best ones are survivors. Stripped of chaff, refined by struggle and hardship, they’re rendered complex and potent by their very endurance and ability to thrive in spite of deprivation.”
Poetic, she thought. My assassin is poetic.
“So,” Morgan said, gazing at him askance from beneath her lashes, “which are you, then? A fat jelly grape?”
He smiled, wry. “No.” His gaze flicked over her, once, hotly assessing. “And neither, I suspect, are you.”
The food arrived. Plates loaded with prosciutto and honeydew and cornetto, biscotti and boiled eggs with heir-loom tomatoes, toasted bread and more of the wonderful espresso. Morgan dug in, trying to avoid the burning stare Xander aimed in her direction.
“I thought perhaps the most crowded areas first,” she offered around a bite of buttered toast once the waiter had retreated. “The touristy areas. Ancient Rome, the Palatine Hill, places like that.”
“More sightseeing,” he said, with a tone that indicated his disapproval of this plan.
She swallowed her bite of toast and sent him a frosty look. “It’s just a numbers game. Jenna didn’t See their direct location, so I have to start somewhere. We can eliminate the bigger, more obvious tourist traps first, then move to the outer areas if we don’t find anything. But I have a feeling we will.”
“You think they’re hiding in plain sight?”
“Why not?” She shrugged. “We do.”
There followed a long, uncomfortable silence. She ate, trying to ignore him while he sat still as stone in his chair, examining her with a gaze so heavy it was touch. Heat across her cheekbones, fight-or-flight adrenaline coursing through her veins. But she was not—not—going to look at him.
At last he spoke, and she instantly wished he hadn’t.
“Why did you do it?”
Concentrating on the contents of her plate, she speared a ripe piece of melon on the tines of her fork, folded a paper-thin strip of prosciutto over it, and lifted it to her mouth. It melted on her tongue, savory and sweet.
“I thought I told you. I wasn’t running away. I just wanted to look around a bit before we got started.”
“That wasn’t what I meant. Which you know.”
His voice was quiet, barely audible over two elderly gentlemen at the next table arguing vigorously over a game of chess. In spite of herself she glanced at him, expecting to find derision or contempt. But there was only curiosity, that and something deeper, something indefinable that glittered dark in the golden depths of his eyes. The air between them crackled.
Apprehensive and uncomfortable, she dropped her gaze to her plate. “What difference does it make? What’s done is done.” She savagely speared another cube of melon, then dropped her fork to her plate with a clatter and sat back against her chair, her appetite vanished.
“As a matter of fact, it makes a great deal of difference.”
“To who?” she replied, unhappy. Her sentence was iron-clad, her fate was sealed. Whys no longer made any difference to anyone.
“In the end, everything matters” was his cryptic response. “The big triumphs and failures are what we most remember, but all the little mindless moments, all the forgotten details of your life matter, too. It all matters, because it all adds up to who you really are.”
Surprised, she glanced up at him. That look of curiosity was still there, intense and unflagging, and she was held in it, suspended like a fossil pinned in liquid amber. All at once her apprehension and unhappiness disappeared and she felt only that odd bud of hope again, the one that had first taken root last night. It burned through her heart like a spear of fire.
“Who I really am,” she repeated, uncertain. Was this a test?
He nodded, the smallest motion of his head.
“I’m nothing. I’m no one. I’m...” she cleared her throat, wretched, “...a traitor.”
“Are you?” he murmured, with an almost imperceptible accent on the first word.
His eyes were hypnotic, sunlight and shadow, searching and searing and washed with ancient sorrow that darkened their pure luminosity but allowed her a glimpse into a well of torment so deep, so unfathomable, it was frightening. For a moment as he watched her, his mask of perfect indifference slipped and she glimpsed beneath it something that she recognized all too well.
Pain. Just like her, this beautiful, unrepentant killer was in pain.
In the space of one moment to the next, something vital changed.
“Haven’t you ever wanted a different sort of life?” She blurted it, unthinking. It came out small and pleading. Raw.
“A different sort of life,” he echoed, hollow.
“That’s all I ever dreamed of, since I was a little girl,” she rushed on. “Something more. Something...else. Anything else.” She gestured to the people strolling past, the whistling waiters, the arguing chess players, a pair of nuns in black habits walking arm in arm up the steps toward the church. “What they have, but I never will.”
He sat in absolute stillness, watching her with unblinking eyes, his face rigid. “Freedom.”
“Yes,” she said, surprised he had guessed. “Liberty and independence and, especially, the choice over who we can love.” His face turned ashen when she said those words, but she pressed on, ignoring it. “ ‘One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.’ Do you know who said that?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Nietzsche.”
She laughed, surprised again. “An existentialist assassin! Yes, Nietzsche. And he was right. Death is always preferable to a life in chains. If nothing else, at least we should be allowed that.” Her hands shook. She pulled them into her lap, clasped them hard together. “But we’re not. We’re allowed nothing. And for me, for a woman...”
Her voice faded. There was silence between them for a moment before she resumed, low, to her hands. “I thought becoming an Assembly member would change that. I thought being more Gifted than most of the other men in our colony would change it. I thought if I worked hard and tried my best to be like them...to fit in...I thought things could be...different.”
He hadn’t moved or, it seemed, taken a breath. She looked up at him, searching.
“But I was wrong.”
“The new Queen—” he began, but she shook her head and cut him off.
“I didn’t know. It was before. And now...” She bit her lip, fighting the sudden, horrifying onslaught of tears. “Now it’s too late.”
“They promised you freedom. The Expurgari promised you freedom.” He said it softly, not as an accusation but as if he understood.
Morgan knew in her heart she was a coward. She was bold and smart and self-sufficient, she was many things her mother would have been proud of, had she lived to see it, but she was a coward because she couldn’t stand it. The isolation, the oppression, the secrecy, and the silence, the crushing weight of the legacy of her Bloodlines and her Gifts.
Everyone else in the tribe could stand it. They had for millennia. But not she.
She would rather die.
“When I first Shifted at fifteen,” she said, struggling to maintain her composure, “I was taken before the Keeper and the Matchmaker so they could determine who would be a proper Blood match for me. Because I had Suggestion, I was more valuable to them.” She looked up at Xander. “As a breeder.” She took a breath and went on. “They wanted to breed me into the Alpha’s line, but I knew what that meant—the least possible amount of freedom conceivable. So I threatened to kill myself. You can’t imagine the uproar it caused.” Her hand drifted upward to linger at the metal rings around her neck. “They threatened the collar, but I wouldn’t budge. They relented, in part I think because my father was too valuable to them—”
<
br /> “Why?” Xander interrupted, intense.
She lifted her gaze to his. “Money. He handled the tribe’s investments. He knew everything, where it all was, how much we were worth. Everything. Day and night, counting, counting, counting. Ledgers and holdings and bank accounts. That’s all there was for him.” She turned her head and looked out at the bustling piazza, at a Gypsy child with huge dark eyes and dirty clothes, begging for money at the base of the Spanish Steps. “Especially after my mother died.”
“He loved her?”
Startled, she looked back at him. He watched her with laserlike intensity, unblinking.
“Yes. They...it was Matched, but they did love one another.”
“So you were a child of love.”
She stared at him, blank. Love?
“You were conceived in love,” he insisted.
“I...yes. I guess so, if you put it that way. I suppose I was.”
He nodded, as if this pleased him, and she flushed red, embarrassed at the turn in the conversation and completely confused. Why the hell was she talking about love with the man tasked with ending her life if she failed her mission?
“Were you?” she shot back, defensive.
His face changed. A flicker of unnamed emotion, here then gone. “My mother suffered the fate you were lucky enough to avoid.”
She blinked, understanding. “The Alpha.”
He nodded. A muscle twitched in his jaw.
“She’s Gifted.”
“She was,” he corrected, flat, and now, realizing what he meant, she was sorry she’d asked.
“Oh. I’m—I’m sorry. What happened?”
He held her gaze for another moment, still intent, then inhaled and leaned back in his chair. He looked away and ran a hand over his cropped hair and held it there for a moment, an unstudied gesture, masculine and unconscious and somehow intimate. His voice came very low.
“He was not a gentle man.”
It chilled her. She could only imagine the atrocities behind those simple, succinct words. Even Leander, Alpha of Sommerley, with all his sophistication and elegance and finery, even he was a killer beneath all of that. All the Alphas of their kind were born and bred for one thing, and one thing only: domination.
“No,” she said quietly after a moment. “They never are.”
He didn’t respond, and she sat staring at his profile, outlined stark against the morning sun, brutally handsome and hard. She’d met the Alpha of his colony once before, a man named Alejandro...
“You’re the son of an Alpha,” she said, curious. Leander would never allow anything to come between him and his birthright. “Why aren’t you Alpha of the Manaus colony now?”
That twitch in his jaw again, but that was all. He glanced back at her, his eyes searing gold. “Fate chose my path. And I followed it.”
She frowned at him, waiting for more, but he only turned his head and directed his gaze to the passing tourists, bobbing by in a sea of color and noise.
“You are the strangest assassin I’ve ever met,” she declared, undecided again if he was mocking her or just being evasive. This entire conversation made her head spin.
“You’re acquainted with many assassins?” he said drily, to the view of the palazzo.
She speared another ripe piece of melon, lifted it to her lips, and ate it. “Not any who’ve read Nietzsche and talk about love and fate all in the same breath,” she muttered.
He chuckled softly. “I’ve had an unusual education.”
She snorted. “I’ll just bet you—”
He went rigid in his chair and whipped his head around so fast it was a black blur in her peripheral vision. He hissed, low, through his teeth, and a deep, warning growl rumbled through his chest. All the tiny hairs on her arms stood on end.
“What is it?” she said, stiffening.
The air around them seemed to warp and shimmer, and she felt his anger and adrenaline pulse over her skin in heated, dangerous waves. The arguing men at the next table fell silent, and she wondered if they felt the sudden atmospheric change, but she didn’t dare look over.
“Open your nose,” he growled, scanning the palazzo. His lips peeled back to reveal a set of perfect, gleaming white teeth. His hand went to his waist.
She glanced around. The café, the passing crowd, the bright, sunlit morning—she saw nothing out of the ordinary.
“Your nose,” he hissed and shot to his feet. His chair skidded back and toppled over with a clatter to the cobblestones.
There was a twitter from a table of young women as they noticed Xander for the first time; a few soft gasps rose from another. Conversation all around them ceased except for a few startled murmurs. And she could understand why. At his full height, on full alert, the assassin exuded a current of feral, crackling electricity, virile and potent, that rocked her back in her chair and left her breathless. Even the humans must have been able to sense it, but if not, there was still the fact of the taut, leashed lines of his body, those massive shoulders and arms, the face of a destroying angel, perfectly beautiful and perfectly cold. She stared up at him, startled, as an exquisite rush of heat flooded through her veins.
“Xander, there’s nothing,” she said, horrified by her body’s response. What the hell was the matter with her? “Will you please sit down, you’re making a scene—”
But then she sensed it. Hot and heavy and peculiar, a wave of power unlike anything she’d ever felt. Enveloping. Burning. Surrounding. It felt at once intimate and alien, probing, and she knew without doubt it was meant for her. On instinct she inhaled and caught the scent of lightning and smoke, a lingering sting like gunpowder on the back of her tongue. Sweat and musk and succulence, masculine and heady.
“Alpha,” she breathed, tasting the truth with every nerve in her body. “My God, it’s an Alpha.”
And not one of their own—no one from any of the four Ikati colonies felt like this. Though it was undoubtedly one of their kind, a male of their kind, he smelled different. He tasted different. His aura was scented dark, so dark, like mulled wine and spice and violence, like secrets and whispers and tunnels beneath the earth. Intoxicating and frightening, it held her frozen in her chair, hypnotized.
“Find him,” Xander commanded, his eyes raking the passing crowd.
Without hesitating, Morgan closed her eyes and concentrated.
The crowd vanished. Everything fell silent. There was only warm air, the chair firm beneath her, and the glass edge of the table, cool under her wrist. She cast out her awareness in swift, concentric rings, enveloping everything around her. Warm humans and solid buildings and the corded sinew of trees, canvas umbrellas and all manner of dull, inanimate objects and the sweet, fleet wind brush of starlings flitting through the air. Cars passed by a few blocks over, a plane flew by overhead, hard and fast and metallic.
And then—oh, and then—
She collided with him and gasped.
He was power and darkness and black, grasping need, a frightening, gravitational pull, strong and elemental. She felt as if she’d entered the atmosphere of a massive black hole and was in danger of being sucked in and swallowed.
“By the steps,” she panted, pulling back from the contact with an effort that caused her an almost physical pain. “At the top of the Spanish Steps—he’s there!”
She opened her eyes, turned her head, and through the sea of people and color and movement, found him.
He stood fixed and silent on the uppermost terrace of the sweeping white staircase, leaning on the balustrade with his hands gripped so hard over the curved edge his knuckles were white. He was tall and large—not as muscular as Xander, but just as substantial—with black hair just beginning to gray at the temples. Dressed in elegant, spotless white, he stood out in the riot of color around him, and the power of his shining, bright presence made everything else fade to gray like a brilliant ray of sun against the clouds.
His face was severe yet appealing, blessed with the hard grace and undeniable
beauty shared by all Ikati, a beauty that made heads swivel for another look as he stood staring back at her with eyes so sharp and strange she shuddered.
They were black. Coal black. Flat and endless. She had the impression of being sucked into that gravitational pull again, of falling. Of drowning.
Then Xander moved and set her free. He took off at a run, brutally shoving his way across the piazza, leaving a swath of cursing tourists in his wake. He sailed over the enormous plashing fountain in its center in one flying leap and landed on the other side—a feat no human would ever be able to achieve, evidenced by the astonished gasps of everyone that saw it—and kept running in a beeline toward the wide, sweeping staircase and the man standing near the top.
The man in white didn’t move as he watched Xander approach. He held perfectly still, his gaze trained on him, wearing an expression of mild irritation but not fear or surprise, almost as if he expected exactly this scenario.
His gaze went again to Morgan. She sat perfectly still under the cold weight of it, rigid as stone, finding it difficult to breathe.
There came a voice inside her head, and then breathing became impossible.
You will be mine. Beautiful stranger, blood of my blood, you will be mine.
Just as Xander reached the first level of steps, the man in white turned and vanished into the crowd.
Xander saw him turn and vanish, and he ran even faster.
In a flat-out sprint, he took the steps three at a time, pumping his arms and legs hard, shoving past people or colliding into them, knocking them over—but he didn’t stop or even slow.
An Alpha. In Rome.
Impossible.
In all the four colonies of Ikati—England, Brazil, Quebec, and Nepal—there was no one unaccounted for. Travel was severely restricted, Bloodlines were carefully kept; everyone knew everyone and always had. There weren’t even any stray half-Bloods anymore, not since the new Queen had been found. And the few deserters they’d had over the past decades were all caught and returned, or killed, most to his own credit. The fact that a male of his age and potency had gone undetected and unnoticed was impossible.
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