Rapture's Edge

perhaps something had been planted.

Perhaps a seed of doubt had been sown.

“Yes,” she agreed, her voice steady and cool, “it was genius.” She turned her head and looked him full in the face, her eyes flat, revealing nothing. “Ingenious, rather. One wonders how a group of males with room- temperature IQs normally preoccupied with nothing more than screwing and fighting could be quite so cunning.”

Ah. A challenge. He’d been prepared for it for years. What actually surprised him was that it had taken this long.

He returned her gaze with a steady, open one of his own. “Hatred is a powerful motivator, principessa.”

“Hatred?” she repeated, incredulous, and turned to him. “What reason would they have to hate me?”

“Not you,” he said with a gentle shake of his head. “Your father.”

She stared at him, revealing nothing. “Go on.”

Silas let his gaze drift away, lingering over the forlorn headstones. A raven caught his eye, and he followed its flight from the branches of a leafless tree until it disappeared into the winter sky beyond the pitched roof of the abbey. “Children can never truly know their parents,” he murmured sorrowfully. “Love and loyalty conspire to blind them to certain distasteful truths.”

Without looking he felt the change in her; the stiffening, the flash of heat. “Don’t talk to me in riddles, Silas. Say what you mean to say.”

He took pains to ensure his expression was exactly the right combination of angst, caring, and sincerity when he turned to face her. “Your father was a brilliant man, Eliana. I served him for most of my life. I know his intentions were good—”

“Silas,” she warned, moving closer.

“But he wasn’t always the kindest man. In fact, he could be…unspeakably cruel.”

He let it hang there between them, enticing as a windfall plum. Eliana said nothing for long moments, and Silas guessed she was searching her memory banks for corroborating evidence. She was silent just long enough to make him think she’d found it.

“Kings are known to be heavy-handed,” she said stiffly. “The burden of rule rests on their shoulders. They can’t afford to be…soft.”

“There is heavy-handed, Eliana, and then there is bloodthirsty. Tyrannical. Ruthless.” His voice dropped. “Mad.”

She barked a disbelieving laugh. “Mad? My father, mad? You yourself said he was brilliant—”

“Genius and madness often go hand in hand—”

“What proof do you have?” She was livid now, breathing hard, eyes flashing cold fire. She stepped even closer, and he took in a deep, intoxicating breath of her scent, not perfume but something richer, darker, decadent. “What evidence can you produce? My father worked his entire life to find the solution to the problem of our infertility and the curse of the Transition that’s plagued us since the beginning of time. And he found it! He actually did it! What kind of brutal madman would want us to survive, to join Bloodlines with humans and live in peace—”

“Your brother shares a portion of your father’s particular brand of madness,” Silas interrupted, very quietly. She blanched, her lips flattened in disgust. “But none of his genius and none of his foresight. Caesar is warped in ways your father wasn’t, but, my dear, your father was warped in ways only the devil himself could conjure. Ask, if you don’t believe me.” He gestured toward the abbey. “Ask your friend Mel. Ask any of the rest of them. Your father had a side so dark it puts the blackest pits of hell to shame.”

She flinched. All the color had drained from her face.

“I’m sorry. Truly I am. I only say this to you now to help you understand why the Bellatorum conspired to kill your father and take the kingdom for themselves. They found out about the serum somehow—I assume it was from reading your father’s journal, or from Demetrius’s Gift of Foresight—and they knew it would put their own status in jeopardy if all the half-Blood caste of Legiones could survive the Transition. They’d no longer be one-of-a-kind warriors— they’d be one of hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds. How special would they be then? They used you as a pawn in their game of domination, and I believe, I have always believed, that their ultimate goal is nothing less than domination of the world itself. They’ll move first on the other colonies, kill the Alphas and their families, just like in Rome, and then they’ll turn their sights on the world at large. These are killers, Eliana. Killers who are tired of answering to anyone. Killers who will not hesitate to take what they want, by any means possible.”

He stepped closer, his voice beseeching, his brows drawn together. “This is why it’s so important the serum doesn’t fall into their hands. Why it’s so important we continue to fortify ourselves with weapons and keep hidden for now, until we have the stronghold built and we can invite the members of the other colonies who are tired of their own tyrants to join us. Then we can take revenge for what the Bellatorum took from us.” He lifted his hand, brushing his knuckles across her heated cheek. “What they took from you.”

She swallowed hard. Her lashes lowered, and a slight breeze blew a stray tendril of hair across her cheek. Was it his imagination, or had she leaned into his hand? A surge of heat pulsed through his veins, victorious. Then her lashes lifted and she pinned him in her gaze, clear and cold as a dragon’s.

“I definitely plan on taking revenge, Silas. On all my enemies, whoever they might be.”

His hand on her face stilled, and he gazed back at her in arrested silence. Was she agreeing with him? Or was that a threat? She confused him even more with what she said next.

“Thank you for what you did with Caesar this morning. He might have killed me. It kills me to admit it, but… you were right about him.”

Now she sounded truly grateful, indebted even. “Eliana,” he murmured.

“And you’re also right about children being blind. But I’m not a child anymore. Whatever the truth is, I’ll find it. Because real power doesn’t come from hatred. It comes from truth.”

Silas almost laughed out loud at that. He had to bite his tongue to silence it.

Power didn’t come from truth. Power came from the ability to manipulate outcomes to one’s own favor. Just as he had now done.

She’d find out the truth about her father, and though she wouldn’t like it, he’d gain even more of her trust. Yes, killers did enjoy creating diversions. They did indeed.

Poor, sweet Eliana. Like a lamb to the slaughter.

He nodded solemnly, allowing his hand to fall from her face. Without another word she turned and walked slowly away, winding through the graves, dry leaves crunching like broken bones beneath her feet.

It was something Mel said earlier that day that had done it. A simple story, awful but undoubtedly true, had made a tiny grain of doubt take root and push up an evil leaf.

They were in the room where she slept—she didn’t refer to it as her bedroom, though there was a cot; it was more like a hotel room in purgatory, anonymous and cold—and Mel had been helping her into a new set of clothes after her bath. She’d napped for a while, but she was still exhausted, and her body was sore all over. Her ribs, they’d determined, weren’t broken from Caesar’s kicks, merely bruised. The bullet wounds on her hip and leg had already begun to heal.

Eliana had recounted in unwavering detail all that had happened from the moment she was shot in the museum, and Mel had listened, unusually silent. When she’d finished with her story and sat staring at the old stone wall across from the cot on which they sat side by side, the last thing she’d said had been, “I keep coming back to something Gregor said, before we had to escape from his building.”

“Which is?”

“Assassins generally don’t have to perform surgery in order to get their marks to divulge information.” Eliana glanced at Mel. “Why would Demetrius take the time to do that? And why, when the rest of the Bellatorum showed up, did he let me go?”

It was a long, long time before Mel answered. In the dim blue shadows of the room—there was no electricity in the building—her elfin face was very serious, almost austere. Finally she let out a small sigh, as if