Shadow's Edge (35 page)

The viscount nodded, still backing away.

“And what of
her
?” Durga demanded, pointing one shaking finger at Jenna.

Leander turned his head to consider Jenna, just the one elegant motion of his neck, and for a swift, horrifying moment, she was sure she would be dragged to prison along with Morgan. She kept her heels hard against the floor, kept her spine straight and her face impassive. But the look he gave her, the blade-thin smile as he examined her under his lashes, sent a spike of dread straight through her heart.

All the warmth and softness that had been there in the forest had now been replaced by something alien and cold. It sliced through the air between them, slick as steel, predatory and dangerous.

“Christian, Andrew.” His gaze flickered to his brother and another, much larger man, then came back to her face. “Escort Jenna back to her chambers. Don’t let anyone else in. Wait for me there until I return.” He took another step away from her.

“You’ll never find Daria without her!” Morgan screamed, struggling to free herself from the hands that bound her. Someone twisted her arm behind her back and Morgan grimaced in pain. “She’s as good as dead without Jenna!” she screamed again.

But no one paid her any heed. Nearly every gaze had settled back on Jenna.

Jenna didn’t protest as Christian came up and took her arm gently, she didn’t speak as he and Andrew led her from the room. She held her head high, she kept her face straight. She wouldn’t let them see her fear.

But as she passed through the doorway, she couldn’t resist another, final glimpse at Leander.

She craned her head over her shoulder to see him, standing alone in the middle of the room. Motionless, taut, gazing straight back at her.

Gazing back at her with unblinking eyes of dead-cold flint.

Christian stared out the row of massive windows in her pink and gilt room, silent, his back turned to her, his hands clasped behind his back. Her gaze skipped around the room but she saw nothing except the repeated pattern of ivy on the wallpaper, which made searing impressions of red against her eyelids when she closed them.

She’d done this often over the past few minutes.

The chair she was sitting on seemed oddly insubstantial, as if she had only to shift her weight and it would disappear beneath her in a puff of smoke. Nothing, in fact, seemed to hold any weight any longer. Even her hands in her lap seemed poised to evaporate into nothingness. It all seemed like something from a dream.

From her time spent here with Morgan, Jenna knew this room was sealed like a vault. She’d been over it a hundred times as vapor, searching for any escape, any exit, but there was none.

No handles to open the windows, no cracks in the panes, no fireplace and chimney that led to the freedom of the roof. Not even a breath of air flowed past the doors. They were fitted perfectly with a custom lead jamb that allowed no gaps and locked her in with the finality and airtight seal of a tomb.

They’d prepared well for her arrival. There would be no escape until Leander decided to let her out.
If
Leander decided to let her out.

If they ever find you...run...

How she wished she had listened to her mother. What a stupid, reckless fool she had been.

He didn’t love her, he didn’t trust her, he didn’t even allow her to speak in her own defense before sending her away under guard to await his return. She knew he imagined her in league with Morgan’s plans to destroy the
Ikati
, he imagined her a traitor. And now she knew with vivid clarity what happened to those who ran afoul of their savage, unyielding Law...

Her mouth went dry.

The longcase clock in the corner began to chime the hour in low, haunting notes.

“I know you had nothing to do with Daria’s disappearance,” Christian murmured, bringing Jenna back from her dazed inspection of the backs of her hands. He turned his head to consider her through half-lidded eyes. Against the fall of the silk curtains and the dark oyster clouds beyond
the windows he seemed as cool and remote as the rainfall that slanted over the emerald forest in the distance.

“I appreciate that, Christian,” Jenna answered quietly. “But your Assembly doesn’t seem to share that opinion.” Her voice dropped even lower. “And neither does your brother.”

Leander, oh, Leander,
how close we came.

She still smelled him on her skin, she still felt his hot breath in her ear and heard his moans of pleasure as he found his bliss inside her. She almost tasted the velvet sweetness of his tongue as he thrust it into her mouth.

But now it was gone, all gone with the blink of an eye, and nothing could ever bring all that sweetness back.

Christian continued to gaze at her with an inscrutable expression. His eyes and face were shadowed as the gray light from the windows flared into nimbus around his head.

“Do you love him?” he suddenly asked, his voice too loud.

It startled her. She stared at him across the silent room and realized there was a distinct possibility she would be sent to a traitor’s death within the hour. She wouldn’t be a coward now, here at the end of everything.

She wouldn’t lie. To him, or to herself.

“Yes,” she rasped, her throat closing around the word.

He only blinked and turned back to the window. He seemed to contract into himself, drawing down like a flame in an airless room, a phantom of a man fixed in a room of feminine frills and very tight locks.

“How do you know?” he murmured, gazing out upon the rain-swept day to some faraway point she couldn’t see.

Because every time I see his face, I feel like I could fly.

She didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until Christian slowly turned and sent her a small, pained smile. “Yes,”
he said, holding still, his eyes fiercely bright. “That I understand.”

They stared at each other in weighted silence for a moment. He turned away once again.

“What will he do to Morgan?” Jenna heard her voice from the far-off dream place she still moved within.

I love him, oh, God help me, I do.

“Most likely kill her.”

This ripped through her waking dream like a knife through flesh. Blood flooded her cheeks. “Of course,” she said, hard. “Why not? After all, she’s disposable—she’s only a
woman.
”

“It has nothing to do with her gender,” he said, staring out the window. “She’s a traitor, Jenna. She admitted it herself. Because of her, at least one man has died—I expect she was the one responsible for the deaths in our sister colonies. And now, if the Expurgari know where we are, if they know of all our colonies around the world...we’re all in grave danger. She hasn’t only betrayed Viscount Weymouth. She’s betrayed us all.”

Jenna thought of betrayal, of revenge, of how much Morgan must have hated these men, the way they controlled every aspect of her life. She understood her anger, her powerlessness. She thought of her father and how he left this place because he wasn’t allowed to love as he pleased.

When she thought of Leander pain came stealing back, spiraling up from her gut to sink icy claws into her heart. She felt her nails digging into her palms and was glad for the pain there. It lessened it everywhere else.

“And what is it, I wonder, that
you
are going to do now?” Christian asked, interrupting her thoughts. He lifted his hand and trailed one tapered finger very slowly over a
beveled pane of glass, leaving a trace of gathered mist from the warmth of his skin.

She looked away, found the familiar sight of her hands clenched pale in her lap. She drew in a deep, bitter breath and flexed her fists open. There were little red crescents where her nails had broken the skin.

“You say that like I have a choice in the matter. I’m probably going to sit here in this room, watched over like a bird in a cage, until the Assembly decides my fate.”

Maybe they would imprison her forever. Maybe they would kill her and bury her next to her father.

Or maybe...maybe they would torture her.

She imagined it would be Leander who would do it. She imagined his beautiful face hard as he beat her, as he whipped her and flayed her skin and made her blood run onto the ground.

And maybe they will all burn in hell.
She fought back sudden, bitter tears.

“No,” Christian said. Jenna looked at him, blinking past the moisture in her eyes. “No, that simply won’t do.” He stared at her, fierce and hungry. “Not for
you
.”

He smoothed one hand over his mess of thick black hair, straightened his shoulders beneath his ivory linen shirt, and bent down to pick up a marble-topped accent table near his feet. He threw it straight through the wall of windows.

The room exploded into noise.

Jenna covered her face on instinct as great, jagged chunks of glass flew in every direction, glinting through the air like a thousand miniscule blades. The dust of shattered marble and destroyed lead casings sifted around them, settling in her hair and on her arms, drifting down after
a moment into thin, unnatural silence as she sat frozen in shock.

A shout from outside the door, the sound of the handle being tried. It didn’t open, he’d locked it. Jenna stared openmouthed at the door, then at Christian. He stood amid the rubble of the demolished window with his hands hanging loose at his sides. His serene expression hadn’t changed, but his eyes shone ferociously green from the depths of his shadowed face.

“Leander is Alpha of the
Ikati
, Jenna.” His voice was full of ancient sorrow and such forsaken need it chilled her skin. “But
you
are the Queen. Whether they recognize it or not, whether you wish to rule or not...”

A faint, melancholy smile curved his lips. His voice grew soft. “Whether you choose to love one brother over another, that fact remains.”

He motioned with one hand to the windows, to the gaping hole and the cool breeze that stole in to disturb the curtains and send them lifting and flapping in heavy silken ruffles around his legs. “I’ve never been more than the second son, the second best. But above all else, I am
Ikati
. I’m bound by the Law. I’m goddamned
defined
by it. And on this, the Law is perfectly clear.”

He drew a long breath, the muscles in his jaw working. “You are the Queen. I believed Morgan because I’ve known it from the beginning. Anyone just has to look at you, to feel you, to know. They’re all just afraid of what it means for them. But you are the Queen, and your life is your own.”

Jenna breathed in and out, blinking in shock and abrupt understanding. Sunlight crawled along the threaded colors of the rug beneath her feet. A pair of starlings rose
into the sky beyond the windows and winged off, zigzagging drunkenly into the silvery-blue horizon.

She stood without thinking, crossed to him, touched her hand to his unshaven cheek. “I knew you were a gentleman,” she whispered.

His small, sad smile made another appearance. Angry fists began pounding on the bedroom door. Neither of them moved.

“But I can’t let you do this.” She stared into his eyes, shaking her head. “They’ll have your head for this. You know they will.”

He lifted his hand and gently pressed her fingers to the side of his face, covering her fingers with his own. He turned his nose to her wrist and inhaled. “My head...” his voice faltered. “My head is not your concern.” He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his lips, very briefly, to her skin. “But yours is of great concern to me. Please, go. Quickly.”

“Jenna!”

Leander’s enraged voice tore through the door. His fists kept an intense, throbbing rhythm on the wood. “Christian! What’s going on in there? Open this door!
Open this goddamned door!
”

“You can’t go home,” Christian said calmly, lifting his head to gaze at her, ignoring the thundering racket. “They’ll look there first. Go somewhere they can’t find you and live your life.”

He smiled again, only this time it was bittersweet, filled with longing and regret, and did not reach his eyes. “Somewhere warm. That’s where I’d go, if I could.” He turned to the shattered window and stared off into the distance. “Somewhere without all this dreadful fog.”

“Thank you, Christian,” she whispered, blinking away the moisture that blurred her vision. “Thank you.”

She kept staring at him as the pounding on the door grew louder. She knew it would be the last time she’d see his face, a face that was as flawless and carved as all the rest of his kind, a face full of a pain that nearly broke her heart, a face she would never be able to erase from her memory...

...a face so like Leander’s, the man who’d captured her heart and inflamed her body and wanted to see her dead.

The sound of wood cracking under pressure snapped her out of her reverie.

“Go,” Christian urged, backing away, his gaze fixed to her face. “
Go
!”

Without another word, Jenna Shifted to vapor and surged out the broken window into the windswept sky just as the door splintered open and five men burst into the room.

Leander was the first one through the ruined door, but she was already gone.