Edge of Oblivion (22 page)

They exchanged glances. Celian was laid out facedown on a cot in the infirmary, bloodying towel after towel that was pressed to his mangled back. The cat-o’-nine-tails was infamous for its brutality—he’d be out of commission and in a lot of pain while the chunks of scored flesh grew together.

D said, “How is he?”

Lix shrugged. “Lost a lot of blood, but he’ll be fine in a few days, you know that. Celian’s a badass—”

“I meant Constantine,” D snapped, shrugging on his long overcoat.

Lix inhaled deep, then passed a hand over his face. He dropped both hands to his waist and exhaled. “He’s not talking.”

Which meant he was taking it hard, as he always did, as Dominus, of course, knew.

The King knew everyone’s weakness, and Constantine’s weakness was his brothers. He was more loyal to them than to their cruel King, and when they hurt, he hurt. Especially when
he
was the cause of that hurt. Like tonight, when he’d been forced to whip Celian into unconsciousness while the King watched, amused. Dominus had been measuring Constantine’s loyalty to him with gruesome tests like these for years, and D had wondered how long it would be before Constantine finally snapped.

D cursed under his breath, remembering the dream, the particular look on Constantine’s face as he pulled the trigger: hatred and deep satisfaction. Evidently he would snap, and soon.

“Had a dream,” he said to Lix, who sent him a wry smile in return.

“I know. That’s why I’m here.”

D looked up at Lix, his brows drawn together in question, but Lix only shrugged again, the motion not exactly nonchalant. “Dominus,” he said simply.

D realized with a cold chill over his skin that the King had sensed him dreaming, as he did when the dreams were particularly vivid. And now he wanted a full report.

“Shit,” D muttered, eyeing the arched corridor at the end of the room that led out to a mess hall and connecting tunnels beyond. Those tunnels, winding and dark, led directly to the King’s chambers.

“Just tell him the truth, D,” Lix said quietly. “Just tell him what he needs to know.”

He doesn’t
need
to know everything
, D thought, ever the rebel, but aloud he said only, “
Recte.
”

Right.

The antiserum that would allow half-Bloods to survive the Transition was almost perfect.

Dominus had been working on it for the past three decades, had in fact started the first experiments before he had earned his degree in cell and gene therapy as a young man. It had confounded him then more so than now, since he had almost solved the maddening riddle of exactly which component of human DNA warped the superior genetic characteristics of
Ikati
DNA. Because it so clearly did: over several thousand years of his race’s recorded history, only a tiny percentage of mixed-Blood
Ikati
were ever known to survive their first Shift at twenty-five.

The first and most famous was a female named Cleopatra. Ruthless and cunning, that one, almost as fine a strategist as he. And his spies informed him another female had recently done the same, and even been named Queen of that massive colony in the ancient woods of southern England he’d had his eye on for so long.

He’d never take a half-Blood Queen for himself. Though he’d kept human women—captured and held prisoner, tourists mostly, the choicest ones—as part of his harem since his beloved Sabina died so long ago, that was pure pragmatism: humans bred like rabbits. A single female could produce a child—or two or three—every nine months for decades during the entirety of her breeding years.

Full-Blood
Ikati
females were only fertile once per year and rarely got pregnant. It was the reason his kind had all survived on the edge of oblivion for centuries. Humans were simply outbreeding them.

Not for long, though. He was going to turn their fertility against them.

Three of the six
Liberi
injected with the latest version of the antiserum had survived their Transitions this past week alone. Close. So close. Only a few more trials, and he was sure he’d perfect the compound, and then he’d inject the hundreds upon hundreds of his half-Blood bastards and put the final stage of his plan into place—

“Sire.”

Dominus looked up from his perusal of the latest DNA sequence and variance report from his privately funded, state-of-the-art lab in Milan to find D and Lix standing at the arched entrance to his library. Like windows, doors were absent in all the catacombs.

Except the heavily guarded doors that led to the outside world, of course.

“
Salve, Bellatores
,” he said, laying aside the report on his desk. He leaned back into the comfort of a large leather chair and gazed at them while they stood in silence at the doorway, waiting for his command. They wouldn’t enter unless invited, and he had half a mind to let them stand there and sweat, but he knew they were both on edge from the incident with Celian. He liked to occasionally push them to the far edge of their constraints: anger kept a warrior razor sharp. “Better to be feared than loved,” his own father had told him, wisely.

He’d felt neither for the old man and had killed him as soon as he was old enough to lead, but still, it was good advice.

Motioning them forward with his hand, he said, “Come in. Sit with me.”

The two huge warriors sat in the two chairs opposite his desk—dwarfing the furniture and looking profoundly uncomfortable—and Dominus had to press the smile from his lips. He looked first at Lix, long-haired and unshaven, then at D, tattooed, bald, and emitting his usual aura of violence, dark as a lightning storm and just as dangerous.

Tell me, Bellator
, he thought. With a clenched jaw, the warrior began to speak.

“The full-Blood male we encountered at the Vatican,” he said, moving only his lips. His entire body, big as it was, had fallen still as stone. He hated when Dominus was inside his head, which, of course, the King found highly amusing.

He made a noise of interest and gestured for D to continue.

“He was here, in the
fovea
.” He licked his lips. “With the female.”

The King’s eyebrows shot up. He leaned forward, put his elbows on the desk. “Go on.”

“She was naked,” he said tonelessly, “chained to the wall.”

At that, blood began to pound through the King’s veins. Naked. Chained. Two more beautiful words could not be found in any language. He’d think more on that later on, when he was alone.

Perhaps when he was with one of his human concubines; they were so much easier to scare than their
Ikati
counterparts, and he loved them to be scared when he took them. He loved them to scream. “And the male?”

Here D inhaled and dropped his gaze to the edge of the King’s desk. “You stabbed him in the back. You killed him.”

“So I win,” he said, very soft. D glanced up at him, stone-faced. His voice came very low.

“You always win, sire.”

Dominus sat back in his chair, pleased beyond measure. That male he’d encountered had powers he’d never heard of and smelled of death and carnage and the kind of hardened soullessness he’d only ever found in himself, all of which had given him considerable worry.

But this made everything so much easier. The warrior’s dreams were never wrong, and like the one that had alerted him to the arrival of the two strangers, this one had been so strong he’d felt the echoes of it from half a mile away. He watched as Lix shifted in his chair, still uncomfortable, and abruptly decided the two of them deserved a little reward.

“It’s three days until the next
Purgare
,” he said, thinking of the ritual burial ceremony that took place at midnight under every full moon for all the
Liberi
who hadn’t survived their treacherous first Transitions over the previous month. Their mothers, the
Bellatorum
, and the rest of the upper classes gathered to scatter the ashes into a secret spot of the river Tiber along with flowers and murmured farewells, and he’d come to hate each and every
Purgare
as a personal affront to his pride.

But not for long. This next could be the last.

“Take the next few days off,” the King continued, gratified when the two warriors looked at him, shocked. “Go out, get drunk, Shift in the Villa Borghese if you like. Silas will give you money.”

He motioned to his most trusted servant, who glided forward silently from the shadows of the room and bowed in their direction. “Enjoy yourselves.”

“Thank you, sire,” said Lix, sounding more than a little confused, and he tried not to smile again. The King wasn’t known for leniency or charity, but he dearly loved to keep them guessing.

“Take Constantine as well,” he added, in a rare swell of benevolence. The male had taken his task of punishing Celian exceptionally hard and might not leave his bedside until he healed. A small gesture of generosity would go a long way toward mending his raw emotions. After all, a king needed his warriors loyal. And as the very intelligent human Niccolo Machiavelli once said, “Severities should be dealt out all at once...but benefits ought to be handed out drop by drop, so that they may be relished the more.”

“Father,” said a female voice from the door. The two warriors leapt to their feet and stood at attention, eyes fixed on some far-off point behind the King’s head.

Dominus rose from his chair. “Eliana,” he said, his voice warm.

She walked toward him over the hand-knotted Persian rug with the poise and grace of a runway model and paused beside him, offering her cheek.

He leaned down and kissed her, thinking she was too thin. Her cheekbones stood out in the perfect oval of her face, which made her dark eyes look even larger than normal. He brushed a lock of her choppy black hair from her forehead and wished she’d grow it longer. He didn’t like this modern look on her.

As beautiful as her mother had once been, his only daughter was twice that and had his intelligence and drive to boot. Trained in martial arts—unnecessary, but it kept her occupied—an expert in computer science, and fluent in several languages, she was worth a hundred of someone like her older brother, Caesar. The boy was cowardly and unGifted and had he not been his son Dominus would have given him over to the
Castratus
. But Eliana was his pride and joy. Unfortunately she chafed just as her mother had at the life of sheltered privilege she’d been forced to lead.

But Dominus would never risk allowing her the leniency to roam free in the world. She was the only thing he truly loved, the only precious spark of light in his life of war and darkness, and he protected her from the dangers of the outside world just as he protected her from the ugly truth of what he was and all the things he’d done to get that way.

But someday, if his plan worked, she could live free as a bird. As could they all.

Forever.

She turned to the warriors. “
Bonum mane, Bellatores
,” she murmured, gazing at D. Lix gave a murmured hello, but D remained silent. His gaze flickered to hers, and he inclined his head, then glanced away. That muscle in his jaw flexed again.

Dominus smiled. He’d noticed it before, the hunger that wafted from the tattooed warrior like perfume whenever his only daughter was near, and he welcomed it. Eliana would never find him attractive; of that he was sure. She had suitors aplenty and was quite literally out of his class. And Demetrius—rebellious, insubordinate, combative Demetrius—had more than once been induced to follow some order he found egregious simply because he’d had Eliana utter it for him.

Oh, how he loved to prey upon weakness. Just thinking about it warmed the frozen cockles of his heart.

“I heard a rumor a strange full-Blood male was spotted near the Vatican,” Eliana said, turning back to him with a little furrow between her dark brows. “An Alpha. Are you in any danger?”

He smiled down at her. Out of necessity, he’d told her—everyone, actually, he’d told everyone long ago—that they were being hunted by others of their kind, that they’d be massacred if found by these savage interlopers.

That his own father had been killed by one of them.

“That’s nothing for you to worry about, love,” he said with a meaningful glance at D. The big male met his gaze straight on.

Slowly, D nodded his head yes, and the King’s smile grew wider. “That’s nothing for you to worry about,” he repeated, and sent the warriors on their way.

When Xander opened the door to the gym and stuck his head inside, the perfume that hit his nose was so lusciously overpowering he sagged against the jamb, momentarily stunned.

“Who’s there?” came Bartleby’s aggravated voice from behind a folding screen erected in one corner of the darkened room.

Morgan’s scent, a voluptuous bloom of heated woman and exotic dark loveliness, drew him forward, had him salivating like one of Pavlov’s trained dogs. Following it was a compulsion, a decision made in some deep, animal part of his brain that overrode all logic and restraint. He pushed off the doorjamb and let the door swing shut behind him.

It was hot in the room, a tropical heat, the air humid and perfumed. Along with the lack of light it reminded him of a night he’d spent once in Bali, but there hadn’t been this amazing, sensual force pulling him forward then. There hadn’t been this
need
.

Because it was need. As basic as the need to eat or breathe or Shift, the urge to mate with the source of all that lovely, deep, feminine scent was a lashing demand in every cell of his body.

He took several steps into the room but froze when he heard a low moan.

Morgan’s moan.

“Go away,” hissed Bartleby from behind the screen, “you’ll make it worse!”

Just going to move her to a bedroom
, Xander thought, one ragged part of his brain still functioning.
Just going to get her off the floor, get her comfortable...