Edge of Oblivion

23

If he were human, D would have had trouble hearing Lix over the thumping bass of the techno music that screamed from the overhead speakers in the VIP section of their favorite bar and nightclub, Alien.

But unfortunately D heard him clear as day.

“That’s bullshit,” said Lix, and knocked back another shot of Patron.

It was his fifth. He was just getting started.

Watching Constantine disappear around a darkened corner on the far side of the room with a human female wearing a dress so short it was almost a belt, D sighed and ran a hand over his shaved head. “I’m telling you, Lix, there’s something weird going on with Dominus and that Servus, Silas. I just don’t know what it is yet.” He shook his head, frowning. “Something’s just not right.”

He’d dreamed of it in bits and pieces, clues that hinted at nefarious plots and well-kept secrets, tantalizing but ever out of reach. Unlike the dream he’d had this morning that had arrived in full—

though he’d edited it in the retelling, a practice he knew would get him killed if discovered—and the one that showed him the full-Blood female and her orange-eyed Alpha had arrived in Rome, he’d been getting morsels of something else over the past few months. Years, even, maybe. It was hard to tell.

“Talk like that can get you killed, D. You better not mention that around any of the Legiones; they’re just dying to take us down a notch. They’re only soldiers because they weren’t Gifted enough to make Bellatorum, but they’re not stupid. One of them will turn you in just to earn a day off.”

“Imagine what they’d do if they found out I was following him,” D said in a wry voice.

Lix gaped at him. “You wouldn’t. You couldn’t be that stupid. He’ll catch you!”

D had been spying on the King and Silas for several months now, trying to gain any kind of information that would satisfy the nagging feeling they were up to no good, but one glance at Lix’s horrified expression told D he shouldn’t have said anything. Not that he was going to stop.

Though he should have been used to it by now, he hated feeling like a chess piece, a dumb cog in the King’s machine. He planned to keep searching until he found some answers.

But to his brother he only said, “You’re right. I’m not that stupid. Bad joke.”

Better to have Lix ignorant, anyway. It was safer for him that way.

Lix relaxed back against the white leather booth and motioned to the hovering waitress for a refill of his tequila. “Jesus. Don’t scare me like that, asshole.”

The waitress darted over from where she’d been standing at the bar, staring, and leaned over Lix. A fall of bottlered hair spilled over her shoulders; her large breasts almost erupted from her low-

cut top.

“Si, signore?” she breathed, fluttering her lashes.

D rolled his eyes. Another human female throwing herself at a warrior’s feet.

Th e Bellatorum were larger and different and far more dangerous than their human male counterparts, exuding a primal power that parted crowds wherever they went, and they didn’t care who noticed. Dominus himself didn’t care. The King required only that they keep the location of their lair a secret, but as far as Shifting or standing out in a crowd...

“Humans are so stupid they can’t see what is right under their noses,” the King was fond of saying, “and even if the rare one does, all the rest will call him crazy.”

D grudgingly admitted he was right. Though those werewolf rumors had persisted for centuries, mistaken as they were. It was common knowledge they originated from some drunk Greek of antiquity who had seen an Ikati Shift; as if a dog would be able to change its shape.

He’d long ago tired of the attention. Yet the other Bellatorum hadn’t, so he found himself spending another night in this underworld playground, paroled from purgatory, watching the circus unfold.

Lix gave the human waitress a dangerous smile. His eyes lingering on her decolletage, he licked his lips. “Alium,” he said, low.

Her brows furrowed in confusion. Lix had forgotten he was speaking Latin, not Italian. He wasn’t thinking with the right head.

“Bring him water,” D said to the waitress in Italian and waved her away.

“Gratias, matrem,” Lix said sarcastically, then shouted after her swiveling derriere to bring him another tequila as he’d originally asked. He turned back to D, his expression sour. “Who shit in your cereal?”

He didn’t bother answering. Tense, he leaned back against the booth and stretched his arms out.

His gaze darted over the sweating, gyrating crowd on the dance floor below.

“Ah,” said Lix, drawing D’s gaze back to his face. The long-haired male was nodding. “I get it.

You saw Eliana today. You’re always in a piss-poor mood after you see the principessa.”

D sent him a baleful glare but didn’t respond.

“She likes you, you know,” Lix said, smiling.

Now D spoke, and his voice was like flint. “Shut up, brother.”

Unperturbed by the hostility that pulsed from D like another beat of the music, Lix shrugged.

“I’m just stating the obvious. You should make a move on that before one of those sissies of the Optimates mates her and she’s out of commission forever.”

“Speaking of talk that can get you killed,” said D pointedly, glaring at Lix.

Though the Bellatorum could have any female they liked and were highly sought after as breeding partners for unmated females, females of the Supremus—the King’s direct relatives—were strictly off-limits, on pain of death. And his only daughter...D shuddered to think of the punishment that would follow if it were discovered he’d bedded her. Or even kissed her, for that matter.

Lix made a face at him and stretched his legs out under the table between them. “Maybe Aurelio was right after all. You ever think of that? Maybe it is better to ask forgiveness than permission.”

D’s expression soured. “Forgiveness? Like the forgiveness Dominus granted Celian? Because that kind of forgiveness I can do without.”

It was Lix’s turn to scowl. He sent a glance over his shoulder to the corner Constantine had disappeared around. His voice low, he said, “I thought he was going to make Constantine kill him.”

D shook his head, ran a hand down the back of his neck, and squeezed the tense muscles there.

“Constantine would kill himself before he’d do any lasting damage to one of us, which the King knows. So making him whip Celian is all just part of his...”

Sickness, he didn’t say. Cruelty. Insanity.

“...thing. And Celian heals faster than anyone. He’ll be up and around in a few days.”

But in the meantime, Constantine would punish and anesthetize himself in any way possible, including getting drunk, getting into fights, and having rough, anonymous sex with human females. As he did every time the King played one of his sick games on him.

For the thousandth time D wondered what the hell it was all for, anyway.

Lix sat forward in the booth, crossed his arms over his knees, and said, “You think Lucien and Aurelio are coming back?”

D met Lix’s intense gaze. The music pounded, lights strobed, bodies swayed and writhed.

“No.”

Lix didn’t even blink. “Me neither. So what do we do about it?”

D watched as Constantine reappeared around the dark corner of the nightclub, disheveled and grim, looking as if he’d just attended his own funeral. The human female stumbled after him, weaving shakily through the crowd. She headed to the bar and collapsed onto a barstool, trying in vain to adjust her demolished clothing. “We don’t do anything,” D said with a slight emphasis on the first word.