Page 88 of Shadow's Edge (Night Prowler 1)
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 lo
ok 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.
The house was nondescript, deceptively so. Red brick and white shutters with a tiny green lawn and a picket fence, just like its neighbors to the left and the right. Nothing stirred beyond the lace-curtained windows, no voices were heard above the chirping birds and the evening traffic and the faint whine of the jet airplane that tracked a line of pearl gray across the indigo sky overhead. No lights shone from within to indicate an occupant.
It had taken all day to find this place.
The neighborhood was good, if unfashionable. She gathered from the older model cars lining the streets that the people who lived here were hard-working but not affluent. The gardens were small but well tended, the houses modest but kept in good repair. The suburb itself was altogether forgettable, like one of thousands found everywhere, on every continent on earth.
It was a place where you could blend in, if you had a mind to.
But it wasn’t where Jenna had chosen to blend in. It was where they had.
The stink of the Expurgari was all over it.
It was a rank, vicious scent of violence and jealousy and greed, with an underlying bloodlust that was unmistakable. It lay thick on the grass in the rose garden where Daria was taken, and it oozed from the benign-looking house like an evil vapor. It made her skin crawl.
