Rapture's Edge

half-lidded and shining with heat.

He reached down and stroked her, just above where they were joined, the nub of her sex wet and swollen beneath his thumb. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. Her hips jerked.

“No,” he warned, and she answered with a groan of objection. She made a move as if she was going to push out from under him, but he captured her wrists in his hands and pinned them over her head, pushing them down into the cushion. She protested, but he crushed his lips against hers and thrust hard and she moaned, bucking beneath him, biting his lip. Panting, his threadbare control unraveling with every movement of his body, he pulled away to look at her and found her staring right back at him, her brows drawn together, her face contorted in something like agony.

“Please.” So urgent it was nearly a plea, she said it in a hoarse, broken whisper, and it unwound the very last shred of his will.

He took both her wrists in one of his hands and cupped her face in the other. He let his hips take over, a primal thrusting that had her moaning her approval beneath him, but he never took his gaze from hers.

“Yes, Ana. Now.”

And because her eyes were open he saw the exact moment it happened, when she tipped over the edge and went spinning beyond pleasure into ecstasy, even before her body clenched and arched beneath him. Even before her eyes slid shut and her moans formed the shape of his name.

“Baby girl,” he whispered, fierce, fire licking along every nerve ending, electricity snapping up his spine. “My beautiful girl…”

When it hit it stole his breath and sent shockwaves through his body. Pleasure, so acute it was almost pain, rocketed through him, and he jerked, spilling himself into her, growling and grunting like some kind of wild animal, his face against her neck, the beast inside him screaming, Yes yes yes yes yes! Mine! All mine!

Her nails in his back. Her heart against his chest, pounding wildly. Her body, plush and warm beneath him. The moonlight sketching shadows on the walls and the leafless winter tree in the yard and the car passing by, unseen, somewhere far off in the night. Every little detail of the moment seared itself into his memory like a brand so that even beyond his shaking and hoarse panting and the roaring in his ears, he was aware on some level that this moment would stay with him for the rest of his life.

Sometime later, when their breathing had slowed and their heartbeats returned to normal, she murmured his name. Dazed, he raised his head and blinked at her, and she stroked his face, smiling.

“This doesn’t change anything,” she whispered, her eyes soft. “I still hate you.”

And he had to laugh. Weakly, his forehead pressed against her chest, he laughed.

24 Holocaust

It was a long, long while before they spoke again.

At some point in the night he’d carried her to the bedroom, but she wasn’t awake for that. She wasn’t awake when he tucked her into his side and pulled the blankets over them both, his arm around her, holding her close. His body was heat and muscle at her back, his legs drawn up behind hers. She came awake only when she became aware of his deep voice at her ear, murmuring something that ended with “…forever.”

“What?” She blinked into the unfamiliar room. A candle in a little saucer on a dresser across the room sent up a merry flame that flickered and spun, a warm yellow spot of light in the darkness.

He pressed his lips to the back of her neck. “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”

But she couldn’t, now that she was awake and the ice storm was howling inside her head again.

He was right, before. His crass way of informing her exactly how she needed to “work” things out had been successful. He had taken the sharp edge of her anguish and dulled it with his body. And for that she was profoundly grateful, because she wasn’t sure she would have survived the night without it.

The pain of betrayal is a physical thing, a deep, hollow ache in the pit of the stomach that spreads to every organ, corrosive and black. If it spreads to the brain it might even cause insanity, and Eliana was convinced she was halfway there already, but she couldn’t possibly care less.

Her father had been her idol. She knew on some level he was damaged—she’d seen the way her kin sometimes shrank away from him, blanched and trembling; she’d seen the dark, dangerous light that sometimes crept into his eyes—but she also knew he was gentle and good to her, and though he was within his rights by law to put Caesar to death because he was unGifted, he’d spared his only son. From all accounts, he’d loved her mother and treated her well, he protected the colony, he gave them whatever they needed in order to survive, to thrive.

But he was a monster. Dominus might even have been the devil himself.

What she experienced reading the pages of his journal was a terrifying descent into the mind of a brilliant, evil creature, a creature with no soul and no conscience but with a very healthy appetite for vengeance and an iron resolve to turn the planet into his own personal playground. The serum she thought he’d created only to help half-Bloods survive the Transition had a far more sinister application.

Holocaust.

He was going to use it to wipe out the human race. Their dream of peaceful coexistence had been a lie written in the sand, meant to pacify her until the tide turned and reality washed all those dreams of peace away in a tsunami of blood and tears.

Oh, there would be a few left. Enough for slaves who would cook and clean and breed the next generation into servitude. But their entire gene pool would be wiped out within a few generations.

She realized then what the elders meant when they called her spem futuri, hope for the future. She realized with sudden, horrible clarity what he’d meant when he’d told her the night he died, “Your young will rule the earth.”

She was the last of Dominus’s Bloodline, a line that had sired kings for a thousand generations while humans were still busy making cave paintings. A line that until the failure of Caesar had produced males far more Gifted than any of their kind. A line that would go extinct without new heirs to continue it.

Her heirs. Her and her brother’s.

Her father had planned to breed them together.

That’s why he never insisted she marry though all of their kind married young. That’s why he didn’t kill Caesar when it was discovered he was unGifted. Dominus didn’t believe a female could rule, and the colony would never accept an unGifted Alpha, so the crown would skip a generation and go to the male child she would produce with her brother. An heir and a spare, because Dominus intended to ensure there would be more than one male offspring from the joining of his two children.

He intended to be there. He intended to watch.

The horror of it, the horror of all of it, had made her literally sick. She retched in a corner of her room at the abbey until there was nothing left for her stomach to eject except bile.

And Silas, trusted family servant before her father died, trusted friend after, had known about all of it.

His guilt was implicit. Promised a special place in the new world kingdom imagined by her father, Silas had improvised quite ingeniously when her father had been killed. He’d used her Gifts to get the money to develop the serum and stockpile weapons, used her ignorance to keep her under control.

One cold, undeniable fact remained, however; it was Demetrius she’d found standing over her father’s dead body, not Silas. Demetrius who’d been holding the gun.

Demetrius who claimed he didn’t kill Dominus but refused to say who did.

And something else left her feeling as if her blood had turned to ice water. There was still the possibility, however small, that Silas had told her the truth about the Bellatorum. That Demetrius not only killed her father but knew of his plans for the serum beforehand and saw an opportunity to seize power far greater than just assuming control of a single colony. He somehow knew about Mel and her husband. What if he knew other things?

What if he knew everything?