Rapture's Edge

hotel.”

She laughed weakly and leaned over and pressed her hot forehead to their joined hands. His fingers against her flushed skin were ice, ice cold, and she guessed he wasn’t nearly as composed as he was pretending to be. With a low, rumbling laugh tinged with the merest hint of entreaty, he said, “Because I fancy keepin’ my head attached to my body, lass, if you don’t mind.”

“I promise I will not eat you,” she said solemnly. “But that little dog of yours…”

Gregor gasped in mock outrage, and she lifted her gaze to his face. His hazel eyes sparkled down at her. “Although you might be doing me a wee favor there.”

Eliana shook her head, overwhelmed by gratitude and the dawning realization that her father’s dream of living in the open—the dream she was working toward—might actually be plausible. If one human could accept her, why not ten? Why not a hundred?

Why not all of them?

“Well, then, let’s see what you can do, princess. Go ahead and show me.” He made a gesture with one hand, encouraging, but she shook her head.

“I can’t,” she said, knowing what he wanted. “I can’t Shift when I’m hurt.”

He snorted in disbelief. “Oh, how convenient! A few little scratches on the soles of her feet and the great shadow cat is spayed!”

She sighed and shrugged her shoulders beneath the throw. “That would have done it, yes, but the bullet holes didn’t help, either.”

His merriment instantly fled, and his voice dropped low and menacing. “Bullet holes.” His gaze swept her and settled on the bandage on her lower leg. He hadn’t mentioned it earlier, and now she didn’t respond to the question in his eyes. After a moment he said in that same low voice, “So the king’s assassins have caught up with the runaway princess.”

“It would seem so.”

Tension radiated from his body as if a switch had been thrown. He stiffened, looking around the sumptuous boudoir as if expecting to find them hiding behind the curtains. “Can they all do the vanishing Cheshire cat bit?”

Demetrius could. As for the rest of his new gang, The Hunt, whatever he’d called them, she didn’t know for sure, but if they were on his team, she had to guess yes. Miserable again, she nodded. “But they didn’t follow me here. I’m sure of it. I wouldn’t have put you in danger that way. And I disguised my scent so they wouldn’t be able to track me like that.”

When his brows pulled together in confusion she explained, “Water dampens our scent. I ran through every damn sprinkler, fountain, and wading pool in the city on my way here.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he muttered, staring at her in dismay.

“Tell me about it.”

A knock on the door produced Merck, returning with a dry set of clothes purloined from Celine’s closet. They both rose, and Gregor took the proffered items—gauzy loungewear, gossamer thin, and a drapey silk knit sweater in the palest pearl gray, things she would never choose for herself—and set them on the bed. Merck excused himself, and Gregor turned to her.

“You’re staying here tonight. I’ll call the doctor, but it might take an hour or so before he gets here, so get some sleep in the meantime.”

“The doctor?” she said, alarmed, remembering the German from the police station.

“For the bullet holes,” he explained gently, glancing at her bandaged leg. His gaze traveled up her body, searching for the others.

“Hip. But it’s already stitched up, the wounds are clean. I’ll be healed in a day.”

“From a bullet wound?” His face remained neutral, but his tone was clearly disbelieving. She only nodded. He accepted that with a shake of his head and then said, “You stitched your own bullet wounds? I’ve known hardened mercenaries who weren’t able to do that.”

She faltered. “I…no. It’s, um, complicated.”

His brows slowly lifted. He said, “Go to a veterinarian?”

She rolled her eyes. “If you must know, the same person who shot me and broke me out of jail was the person who stitched me up.”

He stared at her, nonplussed. “Walk me through this, princess. Someone who wanted you dead took the time to blow up the largest jail in France to spring you, then shot you—more than once —then took you somewhere safe, removed the bullets, and sewed you up?”

Put like that, it sounded less than reasonable. Eliana chewed her lip. “He only did that because he was trying to get information out of me. About the rest of us. Where we are. Where we’re staying. So then he could—”

“Assassins generally don’t have to perform surgery in order to get their marks to divulge information,” he interrupted, reasonable. “A pair of pliers would be sufficient. If this guy worked for me, he’d be fired.”

Eliana opened her mouth to say something, but found she had no reply.

“And you escaped from this do-gooder assassin…how?”

“He…well, he let me go. When his friends showed up. The other assassins.”

Of all the unbelievable things she’d told him in the last few minutes, this was the one with which Gregor chose to find issue. His face assumed an expression of extreme incredulity, as if he’d walked into his bedroom to see a unicorn reclining with a yeti on the bed. “Ah-ha. And he would do that because…”

Her lips twisted. “Like I said, it’s complicated.”

“That’s not complicated, Eliana. That’s nonsensical.”

“Well,” she said, defensive, “that’s what happened! Who knows why Demetrius does anything—”

“Ah,” he said, and folded his arms across his chest.

She stared at him. “What, ah? What does that mean?”

He raised his brows and shrugged. “Judging by the way you say his name, I’m guessing you and this Demetrius have some history.”

In a wave, heat rose up her neck, spread over her cheeks, her ears, her brow.

Gregor snorted, examining her face. “Some major history.”

“Yes, we do,” she said, her voice gone small. Her eyes filled with that traitorous moisture, and she didn’t even bother to blink it away. “I—I was in love with him, and he killed my father.”

Gregor’s arms fell to his sides. His face softened. “Oh, princess—”

He took a step toward her, and at that exact moment an extremely agitated Merck crashed back through the bedroom door.

“Got some bad company, boss!” he shouted, red-faced and sweating. “Sky out!”

He disappeared through the door without another word, leaving Eliana with a skyrocketing heartbeat and a grim-faced Gregor, who answered her question before she could get it out of her mouth.

“It means run,” he hissed, grabbing Eliana by the arm.

15 Off the Reservation

They’d had a hell of a time subduing D; it was only the tranquilizer Constantine had been smart enough to snatch from the infirmary before they’d left Rome that had finally done the trick.

“He’s going to have one mother of a headache when he wakes up,” Lix said as he watched D’s enormous, slumbering form on the couch where they’d deposited him. They were gathered in the living room at the safe house where they’d found D…but no Eliana.

She’d been here, though. Celian, Constantine, and Lix could all smell her, faint traces of clover and roses diffused in the air, stronger downstairs, strongest of all in one of the bedrooms that looked as if a tornado had passed through. Lix had forgotten how amazing she smelled. An unmated, incredibly powerful, full-Blood female in her lush, exquisite prime…there was nothing on Earth to equal it.