Page 71 of Rapture's Edge (Night Prowler 3)
He knew it. He’d hardened himself to stark reality long ago.
What was not bearable: If somehow, against all odds, his feelings were returned…his beloved would die, too. Only it would not be swift. It would be gruesome. It would be used as a lesson to all, an assertion of power so blatant its meaning could not be misunderstood. A spectacle that would make even the most fearsome of warriors tremble in dread as they watched.
Disobedience equaled death. Taking a woman above his own caste equaled death. Taking the king’s daughter—slow, torturous, epic death. There was no other way for a soldier of his station and hadn’t been in millennia.
So love—aside from being pointless—was agony. Love was a soul-eating demon. Love was the most terrible feeling in the world.
A close runner-up: despair.
He was filled with that now. Dead cold where love was red hot, despair clogged his throat and choked him as if he’d swallowed handfuls of crematory ash.
She’d come to him and they’d fought and made love and even slept together—simple things, normal things he’d wanted for years—and yet he’d awoken alone, and the simple fact of the silent room and the empty bed beside him filled him with such despair he wondered for a breathless, bottomless moment if this is what hell might be like. Not flames and screams and lakes of fire, but anguish and hopelessness and misery wound together like a wretched braid, cinched tight around his neck in an invisible noose from which he would hang for all eternity, alone.
D had no Foresight to anticipate this. His sleep had been deep and silent.
Slowly, painfully, he rose from the bed he and Eliana had shared together, his heart like a wild thing in his chest, refusing to settle. He’d told her the truth last night; he had no idea where her colony was, he’d just followed those laughing men through a silent graveyard and then into the winding bowels of the earth. He could go back there, he supposed, but what hope did he have to find her in the same place? If she wanted to be lost to him, she would be. She wouldn’t go back to the same place. She might already be on another continent.
Or captured by The Hunt.
The thought sent an electric jolt of fear through his body, which was swallowed quickly by fury. Damn her. Damn her stubborn pigheadedness, damn her refusal to believe him when he said it wasn’t him who shot her father. Okay, he’d concede it didn’t look good, him standing over Dominus’s corpse with a gun, but she should know that his word was his oath—
He stiffened. The hair rose on the back of his neck. He looked around the darkened room, listening hard into the silence.
Was that a scream?
He held still, breathless for a long moment, every nerve alert, every pore attuned to any noise, until—
No. It wasn’t a scream. It was a pulse, an invisible push, palpable as a hand reaching out to shove him, which sent a shockwave of recognition through his body. It came again, fainter than before, but unmistakable.
D never dressed so fast in his life. Shirt, pants, boots, and blades, all of it donned without thinking, both ears attuned to the feeling that might come again at any moment, the vibration that would show him the way to find her.
Because it was her. He didn’t know how, but he knew it was Eliana, and she was in trouble, and she needed him.
And because she was his life, his heart—his soul—he would find her. He would.
It thrummed through him like the bloodlust he sometimes felt after a kill, bright and blinding. In the sharing of their bodies, their breath, in the consummation of a love so long unrequited, his soul had fused to hers the way a grain of sand accretes to the nacre of a shell, and something else had been born between them. Passion had always existed, but tonight a pearl of something deeper had formed, permanent and unbreakable.
Possession.
She belonged to him now. He’d find her.
Not even death could keep him away.
“Demetrius,” said Silas with a sneer, his handsome face contorted with anger. “Always this obsession with Demetrius. It’s beneath you, my dear. He’s nothing but the help.”
Eliana felt frozen to the floor. She didn’t have to look over at Mel to see she was frozen as well, her face reading white against the dark stone wall behind her, eyes wide and staring at the gun in Silas’s hand.
“So are you,” Eliana said calmly in spite of the blood roaring through her veins.
He clucked, disapproving, but it didn’t faze him. Silas smiled, a malicious specimen that pulled his lips flat over his teeth, and took a slow step into the room. “Probably not smart to antagonize the man holding the gun. However, you are incorrect. I was a servant—and a loyal one, at that—but now I’m something a bit more elevated, wouldn’t you agree? Your father’s death created a vacuum, my dear, and as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum.”
“My brother—”
“Your brother is a sock puppet.” It was hard, abrupt, and possibly louder than he intended, because his glance flickered to the doorway behind him before it settled back on her. “Not only is he unGifted, he’s a fool, unworthy of his position. Not even worthy of his name. Caesar, indeed. What a bit of wishful thinking that was! Didn’t it ever bother you, Eliana, that you were the one in the family with the brains but you were never allowed to be…anything…because you were a woman?”
He took another step forward, and she and Mel took corresponding steps back. He seemed to be enjoying this, their shock and patently obvious fear. His smile grew wider and more excited by the second.
“I would have changed all that, you know. I would have let you lead beside me. We could have made a glorious team, you and I.” His voice grew soft, while his eyes, ever dark and glittering, grew heated. “Unfortunately, I don’t team up with whores.”
