Mateo cocked his head. His eyes narrowed. “That sounds strangely familiar, Alexander.”
A rush of vicious fury, blinding white, and before he knew what he was doing, his fist connected with Mateo’s jaw.
Tomás and Julian jumped between them as Mateo snarled and moved to retaliate, his own muscled arm cocked back to strike, all of them shouting at once. It took a few minutes before they could be separated. Julian dragged Xander back into one corner of the kitchen, Tomás pushed Mateo, cursing, into the other. They stood staring at one another on opposite sides of the room, breathing hard, straining against the arms that held them.
“You did it again, didn’t you?” Mateo panted, flushed and angry, held tight in Tomás’s arms.
Xander bristled. “One more word and so help me God—”
“You
bonded
with her, you fucking idiot!” Mateo shouted. “You bonded with your mark! Are you crazy?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” Xander snarled, straining against Julian’s grip. “I’m just doing my job!”
“Oh, yeah? Tell that to the arm that just took a swing at me! Tell that to your
blood
!”
Xander froze. “What did you say?” he whispered, staring hard at Mateo. All the light in the room was suddenly bright, so horribly bright—
“Get off me,” Mateo spat, and broke free of Tomás. He circled around the kitchen, throwing off heat and flexing his muscled arms, staring black murder at everyone and everything. Finally he turned and looked at Xander, and when he spoke his voice sounded like he’d been swallowing rocks. “Doc did a transfusion, direct from her to you. Yes,” he said when Xander went stone stiff. “Her blood. In you.
That’s how you made it through.” He turned away, sat down heavily in the kitchen chair Julian had occupied, and stared down at the plate of cooling rigatoni.
“She did that? She did that for me?” Xander barely had the breath to speak. His body went completely lax. Julian released him but kept a wary hand on his shoulder.
Mateo glanced up at him. After a moment of weighted silence, he exhaled a heavy breath through his nose. “Yeah. Maybe you’re not the only one who’s bonded.”
“I’m not bonded,” he said, hoarse.
A bonded male was aggressively territorial, insanely jealous, and utterly devoted to his female.
He would kill for her, he would die for her, he worshipped the very ground she walked on.
He didn’t feel any of that. He felt...not like that. He didn’t. He
couldn’t
.
“Oh, man,” said Mateo, glaring. “Shut the fuck up. Who do you think you’re talking to here?”
Xander stared at him, his mind an utter blank. “I don’t even know her.”
“Apparently you know enough. When her blood hit your system you jacked like you were riding the lightning.”
If he’d felt any shred of humor at the moment, he might have laughed at Mateo and his amusing colloquialisms. “Riding the lightning” meant being electrocuted. In the electric chair. Which is how it looked when an
Ikati
received blood from their mate.
From their mate.
For all
Ikati
, love was much more than a state of mind. It went deeper than emotion, deeper than wishes or vows made in a chapel or a lifetime of shared values and goals. It changed something within, on a physiological level. It left a mark, a fingerprint, a
soul
print that was never erased. Though some of their kind were Matched for propagating the race in hopes of imparting Gifts to their offspring and some of them were mated in love, as true lovers and soul mates and friends,
all
of them were mated for life. “Until death do us part” wasn’t just five words spoken on a Sunday. It was an ironclad pronouncement by fate. Among their kind, there was no divorce, no affairs, nothing at all that came between mates. Ever.
Except death.
No!
his mind screamed.
It can’t be! It cannot be!
Mateo stood and jerked his chin at Julian and Tomás. “Either which way, we’re out of here for the next sixty hours or so. There’s enough food and meds to last until we get back. Bartleby will stay to take care of you both.” He strode to the staircase that led upstairs and took the steps two at a time.
“And you’re welcome for rescuing your sorry ass,” he muttered just before his boots disappeared from sight.
The three of them stood in uncomfortable silence until Tomás finally spoke.
“He’ll get over it. He’s just worried about you. And he’s probably just jealous. That girl of yours is one serious piece of—” Cut off by Xander’s deep, warning growl, Tomás threw up his hands. “Point taken! I’m not saying another word.”
Julian spoke. “You won’t be able to stay here without...you know. That’s a physical impossibility.”
“I can control myself,” he said, stiff.
Julian glanced down at the bulge straining in Xander’s pants. “Sure you can.”
“X,” said Tomás, very quietly. Their eyes met, and Xander saw something he’d never seen there before: pity. “Don’t make this another Esperanza, man. You couldn’t save her, and you can’t save this one either. Don’t be a fucking tragedy.”
Xander walked up to Tomás, pressed his chest against the other male’s, and stood looking at him, eye to eye, nose to nose, vibrating rage. When he spoke, his voice was low, controlled, and cold as ice.
“Back off, Tomás. You’re stepping into a minefield. And we all know what happens to fools who take strolls in minefields.”
They stood like that, eyeball to eyeball, unblinking, until Julian intervened. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he spat, shoving them apart. “What the hell is wrong with you! We’re on the same team, you idiots!”
“Tell that to your friend Romeo,” Tomás snarled, then turned his back and headed for the stairs. He went up, but stopped halfway. He turned and fixed Xander with a hard look. “Take the next three days to get your head straight, bro. Fuck her, don’t fuck her, I really don’t give a shit. But if you don’t finish her when you’re supposed to, you
know
what happens. The Assembly will come to us.
Then we’ll have to take her out, and
you
too, you dumb fuck. Otherwise we’re all dead meat. So don’t put us in that position. We’ve been through too much together to get killed for a skirt.”
Then he stalked up the stairs, leaving Xander alone with a pensive Julian.
“Sorry, X,” he said, sounding as if he truly were. “But he’s right. You know he’s right.” He clapped a hand on Xander’s shoulder in farewell, then, like his two brothers before him, made his way to the stairs.
“There’s a feral colony somewhere in the vicinity of the Vatican,” Xander said to Julian’s retreating back. The big male spun around to face him, eyes wide. Xander went on, his voice dull, his heart clenched to a fist in his chest. “Those two males you saw in the hotel room weren’t deserters.
They’re feral; they don’t belong to any of the known colonies. They were with four others when I first saw them. And there’s another, an older male who I think is their leader. So if there’s that many males, there’s females. There’s a colony nearby.”
“How?” Julian said, shocked.
Xander looked at the white tile floor, shook his head, took a deep breath, and blew it out. “I don’t know. But they want Morgan.” He looked up into Julian’s wide eyes, and his voice took on a darkly menacing tone. “And I’m not going to let them have her.”
“Oh, man,” said Julian, shaking his head. “This situation has gone totally FUBAR.”
Xander allowed himself a small, mirthless smile. FUBAR was one of the many slang terms that peppered the speech of the three members of the Syndicate who’d trained in the American military.
The abbreviation stood for
fucked up beyond all recognition
.
“Just remember,” Xander said without a hint of sarcasm, knowing from experience he was right about this, “things can always get worse.” Then he crossed the kitchen, clapped his hand on Julian’s shoulder, and took the stairs three at a time, heading for the gym.
21
D was dreaming.
A part of his mind—the part that was always lucid, whether he was asleep, awake, or stone-
cold drunk—recognized this fact and began to record the details of the dream so he could access them when he woke. Many of his dreams meant nothing; many more held fractured clues that he had to fit together like puzzle pieces over a few days or weeks in order to see the full picture of the future his dreams painted for him.
But some dreams, like the one he was enmeshed in now, arrived fully formed and presented him with an image of the future as vivid as a van Gogh.
He’d had the Gift of Foresight since birth, long before he was able to Shift to Vapor or panther, long before he realized what the dreams actually were. And though it was an incredibly powerful Gift —one he’d been careful to downplay just as he minimized his intelligence and maximized his ruthlessness because he believed that being underestimated and misunderstood put him at a distinct advantage with friend and foe alike—he hated it with every fiber of his being.
Because knowing exactly how and when everyone you loved was going to die was not a walk in the park.
Someone was dying in this dream, too, but not someone D loved. It was the strange male with the flaming orange tiger eyes Celian had fired on at the Vatican, the one who had so impressed the
Bellatorum
with his display of fearlessness and bravado, the one who had taunted them with lewd gestures and feigned boredom and a mocking smile.
The one who could walk through walls. Whose body filtered bullets like a fan filtered air.
In the dream a knife protruded from the male’s back, sunk hilt-deep between his shoulder blades. There was a great deal of blood, spurting from the wound and splattering over the black stone floor, running in tiny crimson rivulets over the fist clenched around the blade of the knife, the fist that twisted the blade and sent the male crashing to his knees with a bellow.
It was Dominus who had plunged the knife into the male’s back. Dominus who twisted it.
Dominus who stood grinning over the male as he collapsed sideways onto the floor and lay there, silent and still, leaking out his life in swiftly widening circles that pooled beneath him and glinted red in the candlelight.
The beautiful full-Blood female was there, too, chained naked to the
fovea
wall behind them where Celian had been whipped near to death at midnight when Lucien and Aurelio had failed to show up. Thrashing against the steel cuffs that held her wrists overhead, she screamed something he couldn’t make out, screamed with such force and anguish it sent a concussion like a detonated bomb through the room and buffeted Dominus forward several feet, knocking him off balance.
None of this surprised D’s dream self. Dominus always won. He always had. And clearly the male would have to die if the female was to be taken. Whoever he was, he was dangerous, and powerful, and wouldn’t give her up without a fight. She was obviously powerful, too; all you had to do was be near her to feel the unique, humming current exuded by the most pure-Blooded of their kind.
What surprised D was when a coldly smiling Constantine appeared behind Dominus, pointed a gun at his head, and pulled the trigger.
“D! D!
Demetrius!
Wake up!”
Lix’s voice pierced the dream like a dagger punched through skin. He sat up abruptly in bed and looked wildly around, weighing the darkness, feeling his heart like a hammer in his chest.
Everything was exactly as he’d left it when he’d fallen asleep—how long ago?—the six metal cots, the wood lockers lined at their feet, the bare walls, the spartan, undecorated space.
The catacombs where the
Bellatorum
lived and slept and trained were designed and decorated much like a military barracks, with sleeping quarters, dining quarters, armories, and meeting rooms, with training areas that included a gym, fighting arena, and shooting range. Because they were the elite of the King’s guard, they had more freedom and privileges than the half-Blood soldier class of
Legiones
who lived in the nearby chambers, but were given nothing in the way of luxuries that would make them soft.
So the blanket D had squeezed between his fists was scratchy and thin.
“What time is it?’ he said to Lix, his voice a harsh scrape in the quiet. He ran a hand over his head, breathing in deep to counteract the sudden dizziness—dreams like the one he’d just had took a while to recover from.
Crouched on his heels next to D’s low cot, Lix said, “Haven’t looked at the clock recently, but the
Servorum
are coming in. Must be close to dawn.”
Unlike the
Bellatorum
, who came and went as they pleased, the servant class was allowed out only at night. But at least they were allowed out: the chosen females of the King’s harem, the
Electi
, and the neutered males who guarded them, the
Castratus
, weren’t allowed to leave the splendor of their sprawling catacombs at all. Neither were any of the hundreds of offspring that lived with the
Electi
, offspring of various ages and strengths of Blood.
Only full-Blooded members of the
Bellatorum
, the
Optimates
, and the King’s close relatives—
with the exception of the
principessa
Eliana—were allowed to come and go at will.
D stood and yanked on the clothes he’d left folded atop the footlocker at the end of the bed. He laced up his boots and got his gear strapped on: Glock nine millimeter on his right hip, kukhri—tip dipped in poison—on his left, push daggers in each of his boots, other knives tucked into pockets in his pants. He looked at the two empty beds that belonged to Lucien and Aurelio, and his mouth tightened. He had a terrible suspicion they wouldn’t ever sleep there again.
“Where’s Constantine?”
Lix stood and crossed his arms over his chest, and D felt the other male’s anger like a burning weight in his own chest. “With Celian,” Lix answered, dark.