Page 83 of Edge of Darkness (Night Prowler 4)
Caesar made a motion indicating Nico should be released. He slumped in his chair, cradling his mangled hand to his chest, sweating and white and bleeding from a small cut beneath one eye where Marcell had punched him to keep him from Shifting to avoid his punishment. If the skin was broken, Shifting was impossible, so Marcell had surprised Nico with the unleashed strength of his fist as he came around a corner in the dark tunnels of the bunkers, and then dragged him here to face his king.
His peeved, perverted king.
“Nico,” that king said now, drawing the blade lovingly across the flesh of his palm, “I want you to understand something.” He glanced up to find Nico staring at him through a haze of agony. His voice dropped to a low, menacing murmur. “Failure will not be tolerated. Failure is for losers, and fools, and the weak. And we are none of those things. Are we?”
“N-no, sire,” whispered Nico, swallowing around the words.
“I take care of my friends, Nico. You know this. You also know what I do to my enemies.”
Caesar waited for an acknowledgement. It came in the form of a jerking head shake.
“So. My advice to you is this: do not fail again.”
And then Caesar received the pitiful, whispered, “Yes, sire,” he so loved to hear. He smiled at Nico, told him to go, and watched in warm satisfaction as he stumbled from the room, clutching his ruined hand to his chest.
At precisely the same moment, a tall, muscular, bone pale man stepped off a private plane that had just landed at the El Prat airport in Barcelona.
Followed by a silent line of men clad in simple, funereal black garb who spread out behind him over the tarmac in a V like a flock of geese as he progressed toward the sliding glass doors of the gate, he moved quickly and with purpose. He didn’t pause to speak with the bowing man who appeared by his side inside the gate to take his bags, nor glance in either direction as he made his way through the crowded terminal to the line of black SUVs that awaited them at the curb.
Jahad was on a holy mission. He did not have time to stop, or look, or speak.
The SUVs took them to a budget hotel near the Sagrada Família cathedral. Jahad had never been to Barcelona before, and he’d never seen Gaudi’s fabulist cathedral, the enormous bulk of which, awash in a riot of colorful lights, dominated the skyline. Gazing at the extraordinary, soaring spires, he felt gripped by a fervor of kinship for the dead architect, a profoundly religious man whose ascetic lifestyle and devotion to God mirrored his own.
He lifted his gaze to the heavens. In Latin, he recited a line from Psalms.
“Let them be as chaff before the wind; and let the angel of the Lord chase them.”
A prayer against the enemy, one of many he knew by heart. In fact he knew both Testaments, Old and New, by heart. He’d had many years to study, many years to contemplate, many years to think on the moment when all his study and contemplation would come to its ultimate fruition and he would hold the beating heart of his enemy—ripped from his chest, fresh and throbbing—in his hand.
Jahad smiled up at the dark sky. Yes, the angel of the Lord would chase them. And he would find them. And he would smite them from the Earth, one by one, until their abomination was only a distant memory, never to rise again.
Followed by his cadre of silent, watchful men, he turned and went into the hotel.
Once the lodging had been paid, the men had dispersed, and he was alone in the shadowed confines of his room, he slowly removed all his clothing. He folded it into a small, neat pile on the bed, removed the braided length of leather from his satchel, and sank to his knees on the bare wood floor.
The first lash raised an angry red welt on his back, but didn’t break the skin.
He whipped himself harder.
After one hundred lashes his back was properly shredded. Rivulets of blood ran down his naked buttocks and thighs and pooled in spreading circles beneath his knees. Though his breathing was irregular and his pupils had dilated, his hands did not shake. He did not allow himself to utter a single noise.
He dressed, not bothering to wipe away the blood or tend to his wounds, and called his second-in-command. To the man’s deferential, “How may I serve you, electus?” Jahad responded with only four words.
“Find me a goat.”
Then he disconnected the call, lowered his bulk to an uncomfortable chair in the corner of the room, and settled in to wait.
“I’m sorry, what did you just say?”
Ember had frozen stiff in Christian’s arms. Gazing up at him, with her arms still wrapped around his shoulders, her unblinking eyes grew so wide he saw the whites all around her dark irises.
“You’re moving in with me tonight,” he repeated. His voice was low but the tone indicated there was no room for discussion, which, of course, made Ember’s face flush with anger. The woman just hated being told what to do.
How inconvenient.
“Not only is that not your decision, it’s totally crazy,” she replied bitingly. She tried to extricate herself from his embrace but he held her against his body, pinning her arms to her sides when she tried to wriggle free.
He ignored her cries of protest.
