Edge of Oblivion

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 cafe, 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