Shadow’s Edge

He shouldered through the men to stand before her, swarthy and substantial, blocking her path. His eyes glittered dark and baleful. “You have no authority whatsoever,” he sneered. His lips curled back to reveal a row of startlingly even, white teeth. He crossed thick arms over his chest. “In fact, I must insist you take your leave.”

Jenna felt Leander take a step forward behind her, felt his fingers make a possessive span against her shoulder, felt his intention to crush Durga’s windpipe so acutely she imagined it in vivid detail. His gurgling death on the rug at her feet, hot blood coagulating on the cold wood in thick crimson pools, fingers clawing at the air, grasping, finding nothing.

“I am the Alpha of this colony, Durga,” Leander hissed near her ear. “I give the orders here. This woman is under my protection. Choose your next words wisely!”

Before Durga could form a reply, Morgan’s voice rang out high and clear behind his back.

“The Queen of the Ikati has every authority granted under the Law!”

That’s when the air in the room actually turned to ice.

Leander’s fingers spasmed, sunk deeper into her flesh. No one moved. No one spoke. Jenna didn’t think anyone even breathed. Somewhere off in the distance beyond the open windows, a dog began to bark.

She suddenly felt as if she were watching herself from above, floating as a fine sheen of vapor, free and disembodied, hugging the ceiling. She was curiously detached and a bit light-headed. Her blood seemed to have stopped circulating throughout her body and pooled in a great heated mass at her feet. She thought she might actually faint if it weren’t for the pressure of Leander’s hand on her shoulder, the real and painful sting of his nails sinking into her skin.

Out of the frozen, astonished silence, Christian’s voice rose like the chiming of a bell. “I knew it!”

Durga’s eyes, horrified, found her face. “No. Impossible! She’s a half-Blood—”

Viscount Weymouth immediately interrupted, his voice wavering. “Daughter of the most powerful Alpha in all our history, the skinwalker himself—”

“A traitor!” Durga shouted. “Who married a human! Her mixed blood is impure, she cannot have even one-tenth of his Gifts! She cannot be Queen!”

“Skinwalker?” Jenna murmured to no one in particular, still floating, still free, the shouts of the men bouncing off the walls and the protective bubble of shock that had settled around her.

Alpha.

Half-Blood.

Queen.

“It’s happened before, Durga.” Weymouth’s blue eyes, pale and rheumy, fixed on Jenna, his face ashen. “Cleopatra, the last pharaoh of Egypt, was a half-Blood Queen. You recall her, I assume?” His voice dropped lower and lower as he spoke. “The saying is as old as our kind. Blood follows Blood. If the Blood is strong, the Gifts are strong.”

He lifted his hand and pointed a shaking finger right at her. “And her Blood is the strongest of them all.”

Skinwalker.

Jenna’s protective bubble of shock burst wide open.

Now the blood began to rise up from her legs, rise up under her skin, scorching like fire through her veins as they all stared at her, a roomful of flabbergasted men ahead of her and one furious one behind, his anger growing and pulsing and focused now on her, his eyes like sandbags on her back.

She didn’t even have to look at Leander to feel the burning gaze he leveled her with.

“THIS IS RUBBISH!” Durga roared. He turned blazing eyes toward Leander. “Complete fantasy! How do we know this woman doesn’t have some kind of involvement with the dogs who took your sister! She kept herself locked in her rooms for days with the other one—” He jerked his thumb toward Morgan, who had dropped to her knees on the floor as the men who held her stared in shock at Jenna, their anger forgotten. “A female who just admitted treason, a female you allowed onto your Assembly, a female who now knows everything about us—our defensive strategies, our logistical strengths and weaknesses —everything!”

He leveled Jenna with a look of such pure, unmitigated hatred she nearly took a step back. “She cannot be Queen! She can’t even be trusted! The two of them were probably planning this all along!”

“No,” Christian said flatly. “She knows nothing of this.”

Durga growled, a low snarl of hostility that rumbled through the room. “We cannot know that! They both should be taken and questioned and we then can determine what to do with —”

“Jenna.” Leander’s voice came from beside her, spare and hard. “Is there something you need to tell me?”

She turned her head to look at him and saw it like an ugly blemish that marred his beautiful face.

Doubt.

He doubted her. And she had just realized what he meant to her, she had just begun to admit to herself how much she wanted and needed and cared for him and now...now he doubted her.

“Jenna,” he said again, an imperative.

Weak sunlight angled through the high windows, spilling pale across the gleaming floor, falling warm across his features. But there was no warmth in his eyes. They glittered diamond hard and cold.

He waited, silent. For all the gold in the world, she couldn’t find her tongue to speak.

“Just tell them, Jenna!” Morgan sobbed. “Just show them what you can do!”

Leander’s hand slipped from her shoulder, he slid one step away. And all the while, one thing hammered in her head, drowning everything else out with a cruel irony that would have made her smile if she didn’t want so very badly to weep.

Mate.

“You can’t possibly think I had anything to do with Daria’s disappearance, Leander,” she said as strongly as she could manage while everything inside of her was weak and floundering. All the new joy she had found in the forest was being sucked away, inch by inch, by a vacuum, a massive black hole of pain. “You can’t.”

He continued to stare at her, his eyes assessing and full of swift calculation, his face too savage, too far beyond human touch to be tamed. “You wanted nothing but the truth from me, do you recall?” he murmured. “You demanded that much, and now...” His voice was so soft, ever so dark and controlled, revealing nothing. “Now I must demand it from you, love.”

Not a sound was heard in the chamber. Not a muscle moved, not a breath was drawn as the Alpha of the Ikati turned to face her fully and pinned her in his green gaze, clear and cold as a dragon’s.

“Is there something you need to tell me?”

It was a curious pain she felt, witnessing the awakening on his face, the way doubt bloomed into something deeper, something darker as she kept her breathless silence while the seconds ticked slowly by. Leander held her gaze without blinking, without smiling. The curious pain burned and burned and yet she could say nothing. She couldn’t speak.

Leander finally turned away, and Jenna felt something within her chest fall and shatter, like the glass she had dropped to the floor. She lost herself then, lost the feeling of completion and satisfaction she knew only a short time ago, wrapped in his arms, his body filling hers, their forms fitted together as perfectly as if they were made one for the other.

She lost the only fleeting happiness she’d ever known.

She controlled her breathing. She controlled her shaking legs. She even controlled the bile that wanted to rise up into her throat as she turned to Morgan, who knelt pitifully on the floor, still surrounded by stunned, gaping men.

“Tell them what you know, Morgan. Tell them where she was taken.”

“I don’t know!” she wailed. “They didn’t tell me anything—I was only contacted once—they promised me