picturing…the oil painting from Montrag’s study?
Rehv refocused on the princess.
Who had noticed Ehlena and was lurching over with a dagger in her hand.
“He is mine!” she gurgled, blue blood dripping from her mouth.
Rehvenge bared his fangs and hissed like a great snake. With his will, he barreled into the princess’s mind, plowing through even the defenses she was able to marshal, taking over, popping open the lids on her lust to rule and to have him as a mate. Her desires made her stop and turn to him, her mad eyes full of love. Overcome with what she wanted, trembling in ecstatic visions, at the mercy of her weakness…
He waited until she was good and worked up.
Then he slammed her with one single message: Ehlena is my revered queen.
The five words shattered her. Broke her down more surely than if he had taken out a gun and shot another compass into her chest.
He was what she wanted to be.
He was what she wanted to have.
And she was getting the shaft.
The princess put her hands to her ears, like she was trying to stop the buzzing in her head, but he just spun her mind faster and faster and faster.
With a raw scream, she took the knife in her hand and thrust it into her gut all the way to the hilt. Unwilling to let her stop there, Rehv made her turn the weapon with a quick jerk to the right.
And then he called on a little help from his friends.
In a black tide, from out of small fissures in the walls, the multitude of spiders and scorpions returned. Once controlled by his uncle, the hordes were now under Rehvenge’s dominion, and they swelled forward, encompassing her.
He told them to bite and they did.
The princess screamed and clawed at them and succumbed, falling over onto a mattress of what would destroy her.
The symphaths watched it all.
While Ehlena turned her head into Zsadist’s shoulder, Rehv closed his eyes and sat still as a statue in the center of the room, promising each and every one of the citizens before him something worse if they did not obey him. Which, in the twisted value system of symphaths, only confirmed their choice of ruler.
When the princess ceased her sobs and fell still, Rehv lifted his lids and called off the insect guard. In their recession, they revealed her swollen, pitted body, and it was clear she wasn’t getting up again-the venom in her veins had stopped her heart and clogged her lungs and shut down her central nervous system.
No matter how great her desire, there was no reanimating that corpse.
Rehv calmly told his robed and masked subjects to retreat to their quarters and meditate on the display. In response, he got back the symphath version of love: They feared him totally and therefore respected him.
At least, for the time being.
As one, the symphaths stood and filed out, and Rehv shook his head at Ehlena and Z, praying they did what he needed them to-which was stay right where they were.
With any luck, his brethren in the masks would assume he’d kill the interlopers at his leisure.
Rehv waited until the last sin-eater was gone not just from the chamber, but the halls beyond. And then he released the hold on his spine.
As his body slammed into the floor, Ehlena rushed over to him, her mouth working like she was speaking to him. He couldn’t hear her, though, and her toffee-colored eyes seemed all wrong viewed through the rose lenses of his symphath eyes.
I’m sorry, he mouthed. I’m sorry.
Something fucked-up happened to his vision at that point, and Ehlena was suddenly rifling through a backpack brought over by…Christ, was Vishous here, too?
Rehv faded in and out as things were done to him and shots given. A little later, the whirring sound started up again.
Where was Xhex? he wondered dimly. Probably gone to clear the way out after she killed the princess. She was like that, always with the exit strategy. God knew the practice had defined her life.
As he thought about his head of security…his comrade…his friend…he was pissed off that she’d broken her vow to him, but not all that surprised. The real question was how she’d managed to get up here without the Moors. Unless they’d come as well?
The whirring sound stopped, and Zsadist sat back on his heels, shaking his head.
In slow motion, Rehv looked down at himself.
Ah, he was still tethered by his shoulders, and they weren’t having any luck cutting through the chains. Knowing his uncle, those links were made of something stronger than any saw could get through.
“Leave me…” he mumbled. “Just leave me. Go…”
Ehlena’s face came back in front of his, and her lips moved with deliberation, as if she were trying to explain things to him-
Abruptly, having her so close triggered the bonded male in his blood and caused some of his depth perception to return-and he was relieved as her face started to assume its normal contours…and colors.
Rehv lifted a shaking hand up, wondering if she would let him touch her.
She did more than that. She clasped his palm hard and brought it to her lips for a kiss. She was still talking to him, not that he heard what she was saying, and he tried to concentrate. Stay with me. That was what it looked as if she were trying to communicate to him. Or perhaps he was picking up on that through the way she held on to his hand.
Ehlena reached out and stroked his hair back, and he got the impression she mouthed, Breathe deep for me.
Rehv inhaled to make her happy, and as he did, she glanced at something or someone behind him. She gave a quick nod to whoever it was.
At then pain exploded in his right shoulder, his whole body torquing, his mouth cracking wide to let out the scream.
He didn’t hear himself yell. Didn’t see anything else. Agony knocked him out cold.
SEVENTY-ONE
Ehlena rode home in the back of a black Escalade with Rehv curled up in her lap. The two of them were mashed into the rear section, but she didn’t care that there was barely enough room for his huge body alone. She wanted him this close.
Needed to put her hands on him and keep them there.
As soon as they’d torn the hooks out of his shoulders, she’d done the best she could with the horrible wounds left behind, quickly packing them with sterile gauze that she taped in place. The second she was done, Zsadist had picked him up and carried him out of that godforsaken chamber, with her and Vishous providing guard.
Xhex had been nowhere to be found on the trip out.
Ehlena tried to reassure herself that the female had gone to join the aboveground fight with the slayers, but the rationalization didn’t stick. Xhex never would have left Rehvenge until he was safely free from the colony.
As fear flickered through Ehlena’s chest, she tried to calm herself by stroking the stripe of thick dark hair that ran down Rehvenge’s head. In response, he turned his face into her, as if needing the comfort.
God, he might have symphath in him, but he had proven where his heart was: He had destroyed the princess and protected them all against those terrifying creatures in the masks and robes. Which said everything about whose side he was on, didn’t it? Without him somehow taking control of the colony, there was no way any of them, including the Brothers who’d been fighting lessers on the lawn, would have gotten out of there safely.
She glanced up at the others in the SUV. Rhage was wrapped in leather jackets, naked and shivering, the color of congealed oatmeal. They’d had to pull over twice so he could throw up, and given the way he was swallowing
