Rapture's Edge

Constantine nodded. “D just…he just went crazy. There was no stopping him. I tried to talk him out of it, but you know how he is…about her…he was totally unreasonable…” He glanced up at Celian.

It was getting very difficult to hear above the adrenaline roaring through his veins. “Keep talking,” he said.

“Like I said, I owed him one.” His big shoulders hunched to a shrug, and he dropped his gaze again to the tabletop.

The room was utterly silent and still. Around his ankles, one of the hundreds of feral cats that ran wild through the catacombs twined back and forth, rubbing its whiskered face against his leg. “You risked all our lives,” Celian said very quietly, “you risked war with the other colonies because of a guilt trip.”

Slowly, Constantine raised his eyes and met Celian’s gaze. He shook his head. “No. I risked war with the other colonies because he’s my brother and he needed my help. I would do the same for either of you.”

Celian stood and began to pace over the bare rock floor. “It was hard enough convincing their Council that we didn’t have anything to do with the Expurgari, that we didn’t know what Dominus had been up to all those years. I still don’t think they completely believe it.”

Lix said to no one in particular, “Eliana is a thief?”

Celian kept talking. “And now I’ve got to convince them that we had nothing to do with D and this new clusterfuck—”

“A thief?” Lix interrupted, staring incredulously at a morose Constantine.

“Silas must have put her up to it,” he muttered, nodding. “She’d never do something like that on her own. She was too…”

Sweet, he didn’t say. Sweet and lovely and innocent as a fawn.

“We don’t know that,” said Celian, stopping in midstep beside the table. Lix and Constantine both looked up at him. “We don’t know who she is anymore. Or what she’s been up to the past three years since she disappeared. All we know for sure is that she saw the three of us standing over her dead father who was lying on the floor with a bullet in his head.” He paused, gazing at them with a new intent. “And the male she may or may not have been in love with had a gun in his hand. How do you think that would change you?”

They didn’t answer. They didn’t have to. Each one of them knew they’d be changed by that experience, and not for the better.

“Is he planning on trying to bring her back here?” Lix asked Constantine, who just shook his head.

“I don’t know. He didn’t say. I’m not sure if he even had a plan, other than getting her away from the police.”

“Okay.” Celian took his seat at the table. “Any ideas where he might take her once he did that? Assuming they’re not coming back here?”

“He’d need shelter, food,” Constantine said slowly, thinking. “And if Eliana is injured, somewhere with medical supplies. Somewhere he could lay low until he figured out a plan.”

“Somewhere like a safe house. Probably one not too far from the prison,” said Lix, and they both turned to him. He looked back at them, a lock of black hair obscuring one eye, and suddenly Celian had an idea where D might have gone.

He said, “I’m going to need another phone.”

11 Cross-Dressing Pixie

A subtle hum in his blood, a thrill along the nerves in his spine; D felt it the instant Eliana awoke.

He froze, an oiled chamois cloth in one hand, the muzzle of his Glock in the other, taken completely by surprise.

That she was awake so soon, that is. The sedatives he’d given her should have been strong enough to knock out a male twice her size, for twice as long. He’d given her an extra dosage because he had to be certain she didn’t wake up during the surgery to remove the bullet from her hip and sew her up, but—

A loud thump from below. Then another. D glanced at the floor beneath his feet. In one of the bedrooms one level below Eliana was awake, and judging by the sound—another ominous thump, this one accompanied by a shiver in the floorboards and the unmistakable crash of breaking glass—she was less than happy.

Damn. He really shouldn’t have left that crystal vase in her room.

He’d picked flowers from the garden outside, had thought it might please her to see the pretty bouquet when she awoke, but now it seemed like a very stupid, obvious mistake. That heavy crystal vase would make an effective weapon if applied with force against the side of his head. He preferred to keep his skull intact, but if the noise coming from downstairs was any indication, she might have other plans.

He made a quick mental inventory of her room: two more vases, desk, chair, flat-screen television…all could definitely be bad for the future state of his head.

He set the gun and the cleaning cloth on the table and wiped his fingers carefully on a dish towel to rid them of the oil, trying to ignore the very slight, sudden shaking in his hands. His heartbeat had picked up, too, irregular spikes that almost painfully pounded against his ribcage. He breathed in slowly, trying to calm himself.

He’d been awaiting this moment for three years, and now that it was here, he felt like a schoolgirl—dry mouth and trembling knees and a stomach full of dancing butterflies.

“Get a grip on yourself, soldier,” he muttered, throwing the towel on the table with a flick of his hand. He rose and made his way through the kitchen, the living room, the media room, everything done in masculine shades of charcoal and black and brown, Spartan as the assassins who’d previously owned this safe house liked it. They kept one just like it in every major city across the globe, for occasions such as this, and today he was thankful for it.

Slowly he went, down a set of spiral stairs to the bottom floor. The bedrooms.

He stood at the end of the carpeted hallway looking down the corridor. All the doors were open except one, at the far end, which was locked.

And vibrating. She was hitting—or kicking—it from the inside. If it hadn’t been reinforced she would have easily kicked the door right out of its frame, but as it was, she was doing a fine job of trying. He wondered what the inside of the door looked like.

Not pretty, he’d bet.

“Eliana,” he called. The blows on the door abruptly ceased. He took several steps forward, listening, hearing nothing but the pounding of his own pulse in his ears. “Ana, it’s me.” He cleared his throat, feeling suddenly like the biggest fool on the planet. Of course she knows it’s you. Nicely played, idiot!

Ignoring that snarky little voice inside his head that never failed to demoralize him, D reached out, put his big hand on the doorknob, turned it, and pushed the door open.

It swung back on silent hinges, revealing the room in all its chaos.

She’d torn the sheets and quilted duvet from the bed and upended the mattress against the bed frame so it stood on end, a queen-size padded wall concealing the far corner of the room. All the drawers in the bureau stood open, their contents rifled through, clothing pulled out and left in piles on the floor or hanging haphazardly from the backs of chairs or over the desk, which also had all its drawers ajar, a few upside down on the floor beneath it. The two bedside lamps had been smashed, though one had survived the attack and lay on its side against a wall, uplighting the room in a wash of intermittently flickering yellow.

The crystal vase with the flowers he’d brought lay shattered at his feet, the flowers scattered over the dark rug in bright confusion, drenched and half demolished.

That actually hurt.

“I’m coming in,” he warned, his voice harder than he intended because he was feeling sorry for himself about the flowers.

Silence. He took it as an affirmation and eased into the room.

His first mistake was assuming she’d hidden behind the mattress; he realized that as he saw movement