With an effort that sent pain radiating in wicked lashes up his spine and all the way down to his toes, Xander pushed the sheet aside and sat up.
He was naked, clad in only a large white bandage wrapped tightly around his waist. It was stained rust with blood in erratic circles on the right side. He inhaled, testing the limits of his tolerance, and found he could take a full breath without effort. His ribs weren’t compromised, and since he could move his arms and legs, his spine wasn’t compromised either. That was a relief, because the last thing he remembered before passing out was a terrible deadness in his legs.
He stood carefully, balancing his weight over his bent knees. His back protested with a sharp, stabbing ache, but it was tolerable, less than when he had first sat up. He was alive, if not perfectly well. But no matter the injury, he’d heal quickly. If he wasn’t dead, he’d be fine within days.
He crossed the room, found the black pants and shirt that had been left folded on a chair, and pulled them on carefully with gritted teeth. His weapons were laid out in a neat row on the top of the plain dresser, and he smiled as he donned those as well, strapping the knives around his waist and ankles. He pulled on a pair of new black boots, size fifteen, government issue, and laced up the ties.
Then he walked out the door and went to find her.
The safe house—one of dozens the Syndicate kept in every major city across the globe—was a refurbished villa in the hilly and moderately affluent Aventine section of Rome. It boasted 360-degree views of the city and over ten thousand square feet of living space, the vast majority of it underground. From the street, it was a modest turn-of-the-century affair of brick and mortar surrounded by a tall iron fence, with gardens and trees and a bearded, chubby lawn gnome by the front gate whose pointed red hat had long ago faded to pink, and a security system to rival that of Fort Knox.
The bedrooms and lounging area were on the bottom floor, the kitchen, dining area, and media rooms on the second floor, the gym and training center on the first floor belowground. Aboveground it was simply a house. A beautifully decorated, unoccupied house, because no one ever ate or slept or lived there. Aboveground was all for show. Once you descended beyond the reinforced lead door to the
“basement,” you entered another world.
He walked past six unoccupied bedrooms and found himself alone. A staircase twisted up to the main room, which was a large, open space decorated in dark charcoals and brown and beige without a hint of feminine softness. Beyond it were the dining room and kitchen—modern and masculine as the rest of the belowground areas—and as soon as he reached the top step of the stairs, he heard Mateo’s gravel-rough voice drifting in from that direction.
“I can’t take it much longer, T.”
There came an agitated grunt, then the sound of boots pacing back and forth over tile. “
You
can’t! I feel like I’m gonna crawl right out of my fucking skin.”
“If he doesn’t wake up soon, we’ll have to leave Bartleby here with him and come back when it passes.”
Xander froze, listening.
“How much longer we got?”
“Three days minus sixteen hours,” muttered Mateo. “And counting.”
Groans. “Jesus Christ.”
He waited, but they didn’t say more. Curiosity got the better of him, and he made his way silently to the kitchen, where he stood there in the doorway, unnoticed, looking them over.
His boys. His brothers, in heart if not in Blood.
They were assassins like him—collectively referred to as the Syndicate by the rest of their kind —and like him they were disgraced sons of powerful males who’d been handed over as children to the brutal tutelage of the capoeira master Karyo, a human the Manaus colony kept on retainer because he was both a perfect killing machine and perfectly tight-lipped about his “unique” students and their kin, who paid so handsomely for his silence. It was either study under Karyo or be tossed into the Drowning Well; bringing shame to one’s family name was not well tolerated by his kind, and at least the Academy offered a chance to save face.
It offered their
fathers
a chance to save face. The young boys who would become the hardened killers of the Syndicate never gave a shit about things like that.
Mateo was the son of a duke, of the
Grandes do Imperio
—Great Ones of the Empire. At six years old he’d called his pompous father a
cachorro puto
—dog fucker—in front of the entire Manaus Assembly. He now leaned against the counter by the sink, muscled arms crossed over his chest, chewing his lower lip.
Tomás, eldest son of the colony’s Matchmaker, had burned his family’s home to the ground when he was eight in a fit of rage after his father had spanked his bare ass in the middle of Sunday church services when he wouldn’t stop squirming in the pew. He sat at the big square wood table with one knee jumping up and down beneath it, his head bent over, hands clasped over the back of his neck.
Julian, a giant skull-crusher of a male with shaggy dark hair who always drove the getaway car no matter the job, had stolen apples from a neighbor’s tree. He sat hunched over a bowl of pasta at the table, mechanically shoveling it into his mouth with a blank-eyed stare as if he didn’t even know he was eating.
And he, Xander, had simply been born to the wrong woman.
They had trained together in Brazil since boyhood in the fine arts of murder and mayhem, until his three adopted brothers had gone into the American military as spies of sorts and he had gone slowly insane.
They were the only three souls in the world he trusted with his life. They knew all his secrets and he knew all theirs, and if anything was finer than that, he hadn’t seen it.
“Boys,” he said.
Uncharacteristically, all three of them jumped. They gaped at him as if he were Lazarus, risen from the dead.
His brows arched. “What’s doing, gentlemen?”
And then they were on him like a pack of enormous, rough-and-tumble puppies, hugging him, slapping him on the back, making him see double in pain with arms squeezed around his middle.
“You look like shit,” Tomás said when it was over. He stepped back to peer at him with a critical eye. “You shouldn’t be up yet.”
“How’s the gash, man? Thought we lost you there for a minute, bro. You were pretty chopped up,” said Julian, his big hand wrapped around Xander’s shoulder.
Mateo merely looked him up and down and shook his head. “You’re one tough fuck, you know that?”
“And you’re just as ugly as I remember,” Xander answered, grinning. “But I guess a jarhead isn’t supposed to be pretty, right?”
“Navy SEAL, asshole,” growled Julian from beside him. “Jarhead’s a marine. And we have better hair.”
“Yeah, well, you’re all cannon fodder as far as the military is concerned. But we know better what you
really
are, don’t we?” He winked, and the big male grinned at him, nodding, and slapped his shoulder.
“He’s a shitty driver is what he is,” Tomás said in an affectionate tone, looking sideways at Julian. “We would have gotten to you sooner at the hotel, but Driving Miss Daisy here took his sweet time leaving Monte Carlo.”
Julian scowled at him. “I made a seven-hour trip in under three, jerkoff. Top that!”
Tomás shrugged. “Would have been quicker if that bus of bikini models hadn’t been unloading in front of the Fairmont.” He smiled, the lines around his mirror eyes crinkling. “Thought you were going to have whiplash. Or a heart attack.”
“You drove here from Monaco?” Xander said, surprised. “What were you doing there?”
The three of them knew how to fly—and hijack—anything from a single-engine Cessna to a military fighter aircraft, so he’d assumed they’d come by plane. Fortunately they had been close enough to get to him quickly. If they’d been in Quebec or Manaus, his chances of survival might have been exactly zero.
Tomás and Mateo shared a dour look. “Ali Baba sent us to do recon on some big-shot casino owner named Stark,” Mateo said. “Seems he’s into this guy Stark for some serious cash and is looking for a way out of it. And if Stark has a little
accident
, so to speak, Ali Baba won’t have to pay at all.”
Xander’s jaw tightened. “He’s gambling again,” he said, and the three other assassins nodded.
Ali Baba was their nickname for Xander’s half brother, Alejandro, who ruled as Alpha of the Manaus colony. A preening, undisciplined, shifty-eyed male with an ego the size of a small country, Alejandro was also incredibly lucky. Hence the nickname. Though he had a knack for winning big at casinos—and occasionally losing big, which it seemed he had been recently—that wasn’t what had earned him the sarcastic moniker first coined by Tomás years ago. The Syndicate called him Ali Baba because he’d been crowned Alpha only by a lucky turn of fate that propelled him to a position of power he hadn’t earned and didn’t deserve. He wasn’t as Gifted as Xander, or half as strong or smart.
But he
was
the firstborn son of their father’s new wife. The new wife who hated Xander with an elemental ferocity and was ultimately responsible for having him shipped off to the Academy. The new wife who’d taken Xander’s mother’s place when she died. More correctly, when she was killed.
By his father.
Ancient history, that. But some scars never fade. Like the scars on his back where his father had whipped him whenever he was disobedient and then poured salt over the flayed skin just to hear him scream. So the mention of his half brother’s name brought his blood to a boil.
“The gambling will have to stop when the rest of the Alphas convene on Manaus,” Xander said, dark, thinking of the move all the colonies were preparing to make. Since it had been discovered the Expurgari knew the locations of all the colonies except Manaus, preparations had been in the works to combine all four colonies into one mega-colony. Logistics were proving to be a nightmare, but once Alejandro was surrounded by three other snarling Alphas, he wouldn’t stand a chance of getting away with his usual idiocy.
And hopefully he’d do something to piss one of them off and there would be a bloody—deadly —fight.
“Maybe,” said Julian. “But our friend Mr. Stark still might not wake up in the morning.”
“Speaking of morning, how long have I been out?” Xander asked, curious how long it had taken him to heal this time. He wasn’t fully operational, of course, but a human wouldn’t have survived the hit he’d taken, forget about being up and around.
Silence, sudden tension, and furtive looks passed back and forth. Mateo said, “Sixteen hours.
Exactly.”
Xander’s nervous system went on instant high alert. They’d been talking when he came in the room,
three days minus sixteen hours
, Mateo had said...did that have to do with Morgan—had she been hurt? Where was she? Something in his chest went cold.
His voice lowered an octave, he said, “What’s wrong?”
“How’s your sniffer, X?” said Mateo, watching him from hooded green eyes.
Xander was confused. And he
hated
to be confused. “What are you talking about?”
Mateo glanced at Tomás, who said with a lifted eyebrow, “
Inhale
, man.”
When he did, Morgan’s scent hit him like a wrecking ball. Fire and fever and a dark, searing need, laced with her normal perfume of exotic spices and warm skin and lush woman, all of it overlaid with the distinct, exquisite aroma of a female, aroused.
The Fever. She was deep in her Fever. And there was absolutely nothing more irresistible to an
Ikati
male than that.
He staggered back, wide-eyed. An erection sprang to rock-solid life in his pants.
“Yeah,” Tomás said sarcastically, by way of explanation. “So there’s that.”
He swallowed, his throat like a desert. “Where is she?” he croaked.
“Bartleby’s with her,” said Mateo with a glance upward. “In the gym—”
“The
gym
?” He was aghast at the thought of her sprawled over athletic mats, writhing in unfulfilled need. “Why in God’s name isn’t she in one of the bedrooms, comfortable—”
“One of the bedrooms next to
you
?” Julian interrupted with a pointed look at the front of his trousers. “You think you’d have slept the last sixteen hours through that?”
Sweet Jesus, that’s what they’d been talking about when he came in. He couldn’t believe they’d stood it for as long as they had; a female in her Fever emitted an irresistible siren call to a male, a call that on a purely biological level was almost impossible to ignore. The Fever in females of young-
bearing age happened once a year and lasted for three days, and mated or not, it was a dangerous time for the female and any nearby males, as well.
Competition festered. Fights broke out. Animal impulses reigned supreme.
In his colony any female in Fever was kept on full lock-down until it passed. And now—
“Bartleby’s been giving her drugs to keep her calm,” said Mateo. “And we’ve been doing a little self-medicating with our friend Mr. Daniels over there,” he added, glancing at a bottle of Tennessee whiskey on the counter. “And now that you’re up, we can clear out until—”
“I’m not leaving,” Xander said emphatically. “I’m not leaving her here alone.”
Silently they assessed him. “She’ll be with Bartleby, X,” said Tomás.
He met the male’s cool, tintless gaze. “I’m not leaving her.”
“We’ll be back in a few days,” said Mateo, trying to be reasonable. “She’s out of danger. You took down both those deserters who broke into the hotel room, and no one but us knows we’re here.
She’ll be perfectly safe here with Bartleby for a few days—” Xander turned to him, his gaze flinty. “You’re not listening to me. I. Am.
Not.
Leaving.”
Mateo stared back at him. “Because...?”
“Because she’s my responsibility.”