Page 67 of Rapture's Edge (Night Prowler 3)
“What?” She blinked into the unfamiliar room. A candle in a little saucer on a dresser across the room sent up a merry flame that flickered and spun, a warm yellow spot of light in the darkness.
He pressed his lips to the back of her neck. “Nothing. Go back to sleep.”
But she couldn’t, now that she was awake and the ice storm was howling inside her head again.
He was right, before. His crass way of informing her exactly how she needed to “work” things out had been successful. He had taken the sharp edge of her anguish and dulled it with his body. And for that she was profoundly grateful, because she wasn’t sure she would have survived the night without it.
The pain of betrayal is a physical thing, a deep, hollow ache in the pit of the stomach that spreads to every organ, corrosive and black. If it spreads to the brain it might even cause insanity, and Eliana was convinced she was halfway there already, but she couldn’t possibly care less.
Her father had been her idol. She knew on some level he was damaged—she’d seen the way her kin sometimes shrank away from him, blanched and trembling; she’d seen the dark, dangerous light that sometimes crept into his eyes—but she also knew he was gentle and good to her, and though he was within his rights by law to put Caesar to death because he was unGifted, he’d spared his only son. From all accounts, he’d loved her mother and treated her well, he protected the colony, he gave them whatever they needed in order to survive, to thrive.
But he was a monster. Dominus might even have been the devil himself.
What she experienced reading the pages of his journal was a terrifying descent into the mind of a brilliant, evil creature, a creature with no soul and no conscience but with a very healthy appetite for vengeance and an iron resolve to turn the planet into his own personal playground. The serum she thought he’d created only to help half-Bloods survive the Transition had a far more sinister application.
Holocaust.
He was going to use it to wipe out the human race. Their dream of peaceful coexistence had been a lie written in the sand, meant to pacify her until the tide turned and reality washed all those dreams of peace away in a tsunami of blood and tears.
Oh, there would be a few left. Enough for slaves who would cook and clean and breed the next generation into servitude. But their entire gene pool would be wiped out within a few generations.
She realized then what the elders meant when they called her spem futuri, hope for the future. She realized with sudden, horrible clarity what he’d meant when he’d told her the night he died, “Your young will rule the earth.”
She was the last of Dominus’s Bloodline, a line that had sired kings for a thousand generations while humans were still busy making cave painting
s. A line that until the failure of Caesar had produced males far more Gifted than any of their kind. A line that would go extinct without new heirs to continue it.
Her heirs. Her and her brother’s.
Her father had planned to breed them together.
That’s why he never insisted she marry though all of their kind married young. That’s why he didn’t kill Caesar when it was discovered he was unGifted. Dominus didn’t believe a female could rule, and the colony would never accept an unGifted Alpha, so the crown would skip a generation and go to the male child she would produce with her brother. An heir and a spare, because Dominus intended to ensure there would be more than one male offspring from the joining of his two children.
He intended to be there. He intended to watch.
The horror of it, the horror of all of it, had made her literally sick. She retched in a corner of her room at the abbey until there was nothing left for her stomach to eject except bile.
And Silas, trusted family servant before her father died, trusted friend after, had known about all of it.
His guilt was implicit. Promised a special place in the new world kingdom imagined by her father, Silas had improvised quite ingeniously when her father had been killed. He’d used her Gifts to get the money to develop the serum and stockpile weapons, used her ignorance to keep her under control.
One cold, undeniable fact remained, however; it was Demetrius she’d found standing over her father’s dead body, not Silas. Demetrius who’d been holding the gun.
Demetrius who claimed he didn’t kill Dominus but refused to say who did.
And something else left her feeling as if her blood had turned to ice water. There was still the possibility, however small, that Silas had told her the truth about the Bellatorum. That Demetrius not only killed her father but knew of his plans for the serum beforehand and saw an opportunity to seize power far greater than just assuming control of a single colony. He somehow knew about Mel and her husband. What if he knew other things?
What if he knew everything?
What if, as Silas had said, D’s Gift of Foresight had shown him a future in which he ruled the world?
It couldn’t be discounted, no matter how much it sickened her.
She didn’t want to believe it. She wanted to believe what her body told her, what her heart told her. She wanted to melt into his arms and let his heat surround her until she spiraled down into forgetting, into not caring what the truth might be.
But she wasn’t that girl. She cared about the truth. The Truth, capital T. And she was going to get it, even if it killed her.
“You’re not going back to sleep,” D gently accused, stroking a hand up her arm. She made a noncommittal noise and then sighed.
