Rapture's Edge

substantial wooden chairs of their own, arms crossed over cashmere sweaters or silk jackets, or hands spread on the fine linen cloth of the table or clenched into fists at their sides, each one with a face that didn’t bode well for the state of her health. Their expressions were uniformly hard, hostile, and grim.

One at the end—a younger one, boyish and bookish with a lock of dark hair flopped over one eye, glasses he kept pushing up the bridge of his nose—looked a little green around the gills.

Must be his first execution.

They didn’t stand as she was brought forward, only watched her approach with eerie, vivid yellow-green eyes, lucent and piercing in the wan sunlight that slanted through the far windows of the chamber. They were the same eyes as the one she’d met outside, the brother of the Alpha, and they chilled her in exactly the same way.

Her people’s eyes were the color of a tropical midnight, or the richest, loamy earth—dark but warm and full of life. These people’s eyes were clear and glacial, and they sliced through her like gusts of killing cold wind.

They were wealthy and elegant and refined, but beneath all of that, they were killers, to a one.

She lifted her chin. I am Eliana, daughter of the House of Cardinalis. The women of my lineage are lionhearted; I won’t be intimidated. I won’t let them see me beg.

In a bone-jarring move that snapped her teeth together and elicited an instinctive snarl from her lips, Keshav shoved her to her knees in front of the men.

“Silence!” one of the men at the table commanded. Older, gray-haired, and pompous in formal, outdated clothing that included a brocade vest and cravat, he stood, and Eliana let her snarl subside to a low, warning grumble in her chest.

The one who’d stood glanced at Keshav behind her and nodded. Without warning, pain speared through her and her breath was knocked from her lungs as he kicked her, hard, in the kidney.

She fell forward, gasping, tears of anger and humiliation burning her eyes. She rested her forehead on the cool wood floor for a moment to regain her balance. The air was frigid on the backs of her bare legs.

I won’t beg. I will not.

The pompous one spoke, and his British accent somehow managed to make him seem even more arrogant than his posture and expression attested.

“I am Viscount Weymouth, Keeper of the Bloodlines. I will be in charge of these proceedings, and if at any time your answers do not satisfy me, I will order Mr. Keshav to administer another motivational little prompt, and another, until they do.”

There was a pause. “Do you understand?”

Eliana said to the glossy parquet floor, “No. I thought I was supposed to be silent. How can I answer your questions if I’m supposed to be—”

There came another kick, this one more vicious, to the ribs.

She moaned with the pain and would have curled into a little ball around it, but she was roughly dragged back to her knees by a hand fisted in her hair. She couldn’t right herself, though, because pain had absconded with her motor skills—and her ability to breathe. She gulped hoarse, hacking breaths, waves of agony radiating through her like fire. The only thing that held her upright was the fist in her hair.

She tried to go to the place of peace and relaxation in her mind where she went when she did her daily katas, but it was no use. Adrenaline and fear lashed her with the crack of a bullwhip, and it was no use.

“Attempts at humor,” intoned Viscount Weymouth, “will not be tolerated.”

Eliana heard Mel’s snarky reply in her head: Evidently.

“What the bloody hell is this?”

Eliana looked toward the shocked voice. From the door beside the end of the table, the Alpha’s brother had appeared, and he now stood staring at the viscount in livid, unblinking outrage.

Unapologetic, the viscount looked at him down the end of a long, aquiline nose. “It was agreed that I would oversee—”

“You weren’t granted permission to begin without us—and you weren’t granted permission to touch her!”

They started going back and forth, the brother outraged and Weymouth sputtering indignantly, the other men at the table throwing one another restless looks, deciding, it seemed, whose side to take.

Gods, how she loathed politics. She’d seen it since she was a little girl, the posturing, the pandering, the currying of favor done at court. There was always an intrigue and a scandal, a secret to be kept, a deal to be made. There was always a bully, always someone who felt loftier than their station, and always—like Weymouth —a climber in the bunch.

Finally, apparently sick of the discussion, the brother turned his attention to Keshav and spat, “Unhand her! Now!”

Perversely, that made her want to smile. She’d forgotten there was always a courtly knight, too. Then she felt another pang of regret that he wasn’t the Alpha. She’d bet anything his brother wasn’t half as knightly as he.

Keshav released her as if she burned. She fell forward again, but this time the brother was there to catch her. He steadied her, let her rock back onto her heels, and when she was ready, gently pulled her to her feet. He kept his hand, warm and steady, under her arm.

“A chair,” he directed to Keshav, between gritted teeth.

A chair was produced posthaste, and she sank into it with a whispered word of thanks.

Then the air in the room seemed to shift, a swift, snapping-to of attention that swept toward the door the brother had appeared through. Fighting a wave of nausea from the acute pain in her back and side, Eliana glanced up and froze.

The Alpha. It had to be him.

Dressed in the palest pearl gray button-down shirt and black slacks that showcased the lines of his lean, muscled physique, he might have been anyone, except for this:

He was ferociously beautiful.

Shining black hair that brushed wide shoulders, classical features, a mouth that seemed a little too sensual for a man. Piercing yellow-green eyes like the others, dusky skin like them, too, and there was something else that set him apart, something about his posture that screamed power. Even just standing still in the doorway he exuded a rapacious energy, violent and wild, that pulsed outward from him like a bubble, encompassing everything around him.

This was no commoner. This wasn’t even a lord, though undoubtedly he was titled, landed aristocracy of the Empire.

This was a king, through and through.

Effortlessly, he commanded all their attention and held it as he silently surveyed the scene. Eliana felt the fleeting, electric brush of his gaze as it rested on her, then profound relief when it passed.

Her father—her mad, evil, genius father—had the same kind of presence. The same kind of easy, elemental power. Eliana briefly wondered if this king was insane, too, but that thought was obliterated by who appeared next.

The Alpha took a slow step away from the door and held out a hand. A long, white arm appeared from the shadows of the door as if in a stage drama, its wrist and hand bent in a motion of fluid, feminine grace. The pale hand rested in the Alpha’s, and then the woman attached to that gracefully curving arm stepped over the threshold and into the light.

And all Eliana’s pain and fear simply vanished.

It was instant and total, the feeling of kinship. Of kindred. It was also colossally stupid, because she knew nothing of this woman or this king or this land, but just looking at her face imbued Eliana with a feeling so warm and relieved and profound it could only be called homecoming.

Or maybe insanity.

The woman paused a moment, studying her. Garbed in the plainest gray wool dress, without cosmetics or jewelry or a single ounce of apparent effort, she was easily the most stunning woman Eliana had ever seen. Her face and figure, her skin, the loose, golden hair that cascaded over her shoulders to her waist—everything was perfect and utterly unblemished, like some kind of master artist’s representation of an angel, of ideal, feminine