Shadow’s Edge

13

Jenna couldn’t stop apologizing for her clumsiness, though Daria brushed off her stumbled explanations with an elegant wave of her hand and another sharp look at Leander.

“Your surprise is perfectly understandable, Jenna. I had no idea you’d not been told. I assumed Leander had explained it all to you before you arrived.”

She watched as the footman brushed the last of the crystal shards into the dustpan and moved away behind a recessed door before she turned her gaze once more to Jenna. “It’s only a glass, after all.” She smiled, pushed back in her chair. “I hope you’ll excuse me, but I must be off. My husband, Kenneth, frets if I’m gone too long, especially now...”

Leander stood beside Daria and offered her a hand as she rose in one fluid, elegant movement of slender limbs and rustling skirts. “Dolt,” she murmured under her breath as she accepted his hand with a chilly smile.

“Merci,” Leander murmured back, keeping his face carefully neutral. He knew neither of them would be pleased if he allowed himself to smile.

Though he was. Pleased, that is.

Albeit in a wretched sort of way. He felt immensely satisfied he’d finally gotten a reaction from Jenna, and equally mortified by the pain he saw in her eyes when she recognized the portrait of her father. He’d only meant to rattle her enough to peer beneath the icy exterior she’d formulated; he’d chosen this room for their breakfast with a great deal of deliberation.

But she now seemed utterly disoriented and shaken. She had the wide-eyed, startled look of a deer in headlights. A deer just about to be run over by a very large truck.

“I’ll leave you to it then,” Daria murmured as she turned away, glaring at him from the corner of her eye.

She had always been the one with the keenest sense of justice, his older sister. Always the one who insisted they play fair, even if it tipped their hand or gave away their advantage. She was softhearted and kind to a fault, very much like their mother had been.

She turned back to give Jenna a warm smile. “It was lovely to meet you, Jenna. I hope we can spend more time together after the Council of Alphas convenes.”

“The Council of Alphas?” Jenna echoed. She was looking at the table, at the food, at the footmen lined along the wall, but she wasn’t looking at him, and she definitely wasn’t looking at the portrait of her father on the wall.

With a small, hissed exhalation of breath, Daria spoke through her teeth. “I see you have much to discuss with Jenna, Leander. Try not to leave anything out,” she said, her pale eyes like ice above her serene smile.

She released his hand and turned away, gliding past the tapestries and footmen and portraits, the scent of tea roses and hand cream lingering behind her. Her head was held at the stiff angle that told him he’d be in for an earful later.

Leander turned back to Jenna still sitting in her chair, all pink and gold and dreamy, sorrowful distraction, her perfect poise fracturing around the edges.

Daria is right, he thought with a sudden stab of guilt, I am a dolt.

“Perhaps a walk in the garden,” he suggested briskly, tossing his napkin onto the table. “It’s a beautiful morning. Maybe you’d like to get outside?”

“Outside...” she murmured, pulling back from her contemplation of the seedless grape she held between her fingers. She dropped it onto her plate and stood abruptly, scraping the chair across the parquet with a screech.

She blinked at him, at last awakening. “Yes. Outside would be...better.”

Through the maze of corridors that led from the gallery to the French doors at the rear of the manor, Jenna remained silent, moving gracefully by his side, ignoring the veiled, speculative looks of the servants as they passed.

Though their heads were always lowered, faces impassive, every one of them was profoundly, instinctively interested in her.

Everyone at Sommerley had felt her arrival by now. She was new, and different, and potent. Even the servants were atwitter with gossip and guesswork. Everyone knew who she was and why she was here, and he couldn’t stop their instinct to see her, to look at her, no matter how many hard, silent looks he threw.

Twice he felt her glance at him, but when he turned his head, she had already looked away.

They strolled through the French doors into the cool, dewy morning, footsteps striking lightly against the marble slabs. He looked to the sky and the profusion of white and lavender clouds floating gently there like tufted fleece, emptied of their burden of rain. A knot of starlings scored the pale horizon, a skein of silver-gray and black as they rose from the treetops, flashing in the light like quicksilver.

It felt bloody good to get a lungful of fresh air. He’d been confined to the East Room the entire night, arguing strategy and logistics with more than a dozen other sleep-deprived and agitated men, breathing air that had been inhaled so many times it was stale and humid.

Leander had set his guards at the perimeter of their territory. The few who could Shift to vapor floated overhead as small, drifting clouds, patrolling in tandem with dozens of sleek and lethal beasts concealed in the shadows of the forest. His orders were explicit.

If you see anyone new, anyone who isn’t Ikati, kill them.

His gaze slanted to Jenna. He couldn’t take any chances, not now.

She wore a sleeveless dress of pale blush cotton, tea length, cinched around her slender waist, one of the few ladylike things Morgan had chosen for her. It was feminine and soft and lent color to her ivory cheeks.

It made him think of cotton candy and hand-churned strawberry ice cream and a great many other pink and delectable things he’d like to run his tongue over.

“Am I the first human to ever come here?” Jenna asked as a pair of housemaids who’d been watering baskets of scarlet and purple flowers froze, dropped swift curtsies then fled, wide-eyed and whispering, through the French doors Jenna and Leander had just emerged from.

“You’re not human,” Leander corrected, “you’re a half-Blood. Those are two very different things.” They moved down the marble steps of the shaded colonnade onto the green expanse of the lower lawns. The air parted around him, sweet, thick with moisture and the scent of rosemary and garden roses, free of the smog that had choked his lungs in Los Angeles.

“But everyone else here is like you.”

He inclined his head.

“Then how do you decide who’s in charge? How do you decide who’s a servant and who gets to be on the Assembly?”

“When we first settled here generations ago, every-one was assigned a particular job according to his or her Gifts. The most Gifted were members of the Assembly, the least Gifted were servants, with a dozen different layers in between. It’s stayed mostly the same since then. Many of the maids and cooks and footmen here now had great-grandparents who served my great-grandparents.”

“And I suppose no one gets a vote in all this? The Alpha’s word is law?”

Leander’s lips twisted into a smile. “This isn’t a democracy.”

“So I’ve been told,” she said, dark, but didn’t add anything else, and he wondered what Morgan had told her on the ride from the airport. Nothing good, he’d bet.

He paused beside a groomed hedge of rosemary and turned to look at her. “There’s something else you should know.”

“Only one thing?” she replied, staring straight ahead at the wall of the forest that began in dappled sunlight beyond the dells and vales and turned to dusk a few yards in. “How reassuring. I was inclined to think there were several things I might need to know. If there’s only one thing, why, I feel so relieved.”