Rapture's Edge

What if, as Silas had said, D’s Gift of Foresight had shown him a future in which he ruled the world?

It couldn’t be discounted, no matter how much it sickened her.

She didn’t want to believe it. She wanted to believe what her body told her, what her heart told her. She wanted to melt into his arms and let his heat surround her until she spiraled down into forgetting, into not caring what the truth might be.

But she wasn’t that girl. She cared about the truth. The Truth, capital T. And she was going to get it, even if it killed her.

“You’re not going back to sleep,” D gently accused, stroking a hand up her arm. She made a noncommittal noise and then sighed.

He seemed to sense her inner turmoil, because his hand drifted over her shoulder, and he spread his palm flat over her chest, feeling for her heartbeat. It thudded against her breastbone, fast and erratic. She could almost hear him thinking.

But he stayed away from anything too dangerous and said with a hint of a smile in his voice, “So you’re the invisible girl now. Pretty impressive, I gotta say. How’d that happen?”

“By accident, I guess. I mean, living underground in permanent shadow all my life I never really had the need to hide from anything…” She faltered, and D’s arm tightened around her. Eliana guessed they were both thinking of what she had to hide from now. “Anyway, the first time I saw the sun was the day we left Rome. We were walking through an olive tree grove in Mazzalupeto when the sun rose over the horizon, and I was so scared I hid in this ruin of an old barn, in a horse stall. When Mel came to look for me, she couldn’t see me, even though I was standing right there, not three feet away.” She closed her eyes, remembering Mel’s panic and her own. “It took awhile to learn to control it. At first, I had to be scared to disappear. Then, later, I could just think of something that scared me. And now I can do it at will.”

D lay there in silence for a moment, his breathing even, his chest warm against her back. “But your clothes disappear, too. When we Shift to Vapor, anything we wear or hold just falls to the ground. I don’t understand how—”

“Because I’m not changing myself. It’s not a physical thing, unlike turning to panther or mist. I’m changing the light, the way it bends around me. So I keep my clothes. Best of all, I can do it when I’m injured, unlike Shifting. But there has to be shadows. I can’t do it in full sunlight, or even in brightly lit rooms.” She’d tried, she’d tried a million different ways, but there was something about all that light that spooked her, that made her shrivel inside. She never knew daylight could feel so violent.

“Bending the light,” he repeated, his voice softly awed. He slid his hand from over her heart where he’d kept it while she was speaking and cupped it around her jaw. He turned her face toward him. He put his lips to her ear. “Do you have any idea how amazing that is? How amazing you are?”

Her heartbeat picked up again. She was grateful he’d moved his hand. She shrugged off his compliment with a wryly spoken, “You already got into my pants, cowboy. You can lay off the sweet talk.”

He chuckled, a deep rumble that reverberated through his chest. “You were always terrible with compliments. I see nothing’s changed.”

Nothing’s changed? God, what she could have responded to that. She bit her lip to keep from saying anything. Then with a gentleness that made her stomach clench, D released her jaw and trailed his fingertips over the back of her neck and shoulders, tracing the outline of her tattoos.

“This butterfly is beautiful. Blue and black, like your hair.”

“Like my mood,” she corrected. His fingers stilled, and she amended that to, “My…usual mood.”

She felt his smile. He stroked the place at the top of her spine just beneath the gentle bump of the seventh vertebrae, and she felt goose bumps form in the wake of his touch. “And what does this symbol mean?”

“It’s the kanji character for ronin,” she murmured, staring at the slender yellow flame across the room as his fingers paused their slow tracery. “They were samurai—”

“Whose masters had died, leaving them adrift.”

She wasn’t surprised he knew about the ancient warrior class of Japan; he seemed to know something about everything. She sighed.

He said, “If a ronin’s master was killed, the code of the samurai refused to allow their death to go unavenged, though they themselves must then commit ritual suicide for committing the crime of murder.” He was silent for a moment, contemplative, and then his fingers began to trace the pattern again, slow and light and almost…reverent.

“It’s about loyalty,” she whispered into the dark. “It’s about sacrifice. And honor. It’s about living for something beyond yourself and having the courage to die for what you believe in.”

“Yes,” he murmured, and very gently pressed his lips to the nape of her neck. “It is.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. There seemed to be a deeper meaning to his agreement, and she knew the irony would not be lost on him that she wore the symbol of the ronin on her skin and he was the man on whom she had pledged vengeance, yet here they were, entwined together in a bed in which they’d slept after making love. She still felt like killing someone, only now she wasn’t sure if it was him, herself, or the next person she laid eyes on. Maybe all of the above.

Irritated now, she said, “How did you find me? At the catacombs?”

Another low chuckle. “Dreamt it.”

Her heartbeat accelerated—did that mean he knew exactly where the rest of them were? About the abbey, the entrance from the catacombs?

D stirred behind her, nuzzling his face into her hair. “Followed a bunch of guys into the catacombs from a manhole cover hidden behind a crypt in the Montmartre Cemetery. Had no idea where I was going, just got a starting point, and then they showed up.”

To hide her sigh of relief, she pretended to yawn. “And those assassins that are after me…who sent them?”

“I told you, they’re a group assembled from the other four colonies—”

“But who sent them, exactly?”

There was a pause, and then D said, “The Queen.”

“Queen?” whispered Eliana, astonished. “They let a woman lead?”

“There have been others before,” he murmured, tightening his arms around her. “Marie Antoinette, Cleopatra—”

“No!”

“It’s rare, but when it happens, an Ikati Queen is far more powerful than any male Alpha. They say this English Queen can Shift to anything she likes, not just panther—”

“No!” Eliana sat up in bed, the sheets rucked around her waist, and stared down at him. He stared back, shadowed eyes and corded muscle, heat rising from his naked body in delicious, heady waves. He reached up and swept his thumb, very lightly, across the apple of her cheek.

“Whether they realize it or not,” he murmured, gazing into her eyes, “women are always more powerful than men. The only reason males are bigger, physically stronger, is because we’re made to protect and serve the more valuable sex: females. Nature bestowed on them the ability to conceive and give birth. Only females grow life inside their bodies. Only females bring it forth. They’re made to create and nurture life. There’s nothing more powerful, more necessary, than that.”

Heat suffused her cheeks. When his look became too intense, too probing, she dropped her gaze to the covers. We’re made to protect and serve.

“And now this powerful, can-shift-into-anything Queen wants me dead.”

“They haven’t read your father’s journal. They don’t even know it exists, so what you read is for your eyes only. But they know he was the leader of the Expurgari, and they believe you—or your brother—have taken his place. They’ve been hunted by this group for hundreds of years, their leaders have been killed, their people tortured. She herself was apparently tortured. You know now what Dominus planned to do…we’ve been on the brink of war with them since you left. They don’t fully believe none of us knew what your father was doing, but we’ve given them enough concessions to hold them off. For now.”

So because of her, the entire Roman colony was in danger. But why, if the Bellatorum wanted to keep peace with the other colonies, hadn’t they let the Queen read