Rapture's Edge (10 page)

For interrogation. For elimination.

D’s heart twisted at the thought. “You think I’m going to let them
touch
her,” he snarled, every inch of him bristling, “you’re crazy! I’m going.
Now
. With or without your blessing. So you better step back if you want to keep your head attached to your body.”

They stared at each other silently, two muscled, menacing males in black, both alike and yet so different. Same height, same breadth of shoulders, same air of danger, and those black, black eyes. Born and bred in darkness, they were warriors and had a warrior’s fearlessness and sense of pride, and also the willingness to die for what they believed in.

Constantine believed in duty. What D believed in was far more dangerous: love.

“Great Horus save us,” Constantine finally muttered, “from idiots in love.”

Though he doubted even the god of war and protection whose symbol all the
Bellatorum
had tattooed on their left shoulders could change D’s mind once it was made up. He ran a hand through his hair and stared at D another moment longer until he shook his head and sighed. “And you
are
an idiot, you know.”

“No argument here,” D answered, still bristling with anger.

Constantine’s mouth twisted. He regarded his brother, thinking of the pain he’d been in the past few years, though of course D had never voiced it aloud. Ironically named after an ancient Greek orator, D often went days without speaking at all. As if the shaved head, multiple tattoos, eyebrow piercings, and air of murderous rage weren’t enough, his silence lent him an even more frightening aspect. A glance from him sent most people running.

Constantine saw past that, though. They’d known each other since birth, and though not brothers by Blood they were brothers in spirit, and as D lost hope, Constantine saw him slowly, surely dying, day by miserable day. He’d thought D would get over her in time, forget her, but Eliana and the memory of what could have been haunted him like a ghost.

And now that ghost had been captured by the Paris police.

“But two idiots are better than one,” Constantine decided, loyalty winning out over logic. “I’ll go with you.”

D’s body relaxed a little, and the tension went out of his shoulders. Just because they’d sparred in the past didn’t
mean either one looked forward to another go-round. “No. I have to do this alone.” He paused. “You know why.”

Three years’ worth of history passed between them with a single, pointed look.

“Don’t be an asshole!” Constantine snapped.

D met his gaze head-on but didn’t respond.

“Are we really going to do this again? Here?” Constantine gestured to indicate their surroundings, the dive bar he despised but came to because he didn’t want his best friend and brother to drown his sorrows alone. “Fine, then, let’s do it! If I didn’t shoot that son of a bitch, you’d be dead. We’d all still be living like slaves. Your girl would be married to some idiot from the
Optimates
that you’d want to kill every time you got near him—”

“I know,” D interrupted. “You saved my life. You saved
all
of us. I know.”

“But you’ll never forgive me for it,” Constantine said flatly.

D paused for the barest of seconds. “I hated that bastard as much as you did. More.”

That was just an evasion, and they both knew it. A few more seconds of silence crackled between them while everyone else in the bar paid close attention to their drinks and pretended not to listen. Finally, Constantine muttered a low oath. He said, “I’ll cover for you as long as I can. Ten, twelve hours tops, then Celian will figure it out and send the
Legiones
after you. But The Hunt won’t wait that long, brother. They’re probably already on their way. So be careful. And be quick.”

There was a time when the two would have exchanged a quick, hard, back-pounding hug when one or the other was going off into battle. But now they only exchanged stiff
nods. Too much anger, too much blame, too much unsaid left festering between them. Now, finally, the real battle would begin.

D turned and made his way toward the door.

After only a few paces, he broke into a run.

If she wasn’t injured, Eliana might have Shifted to panther and torn the police officer’s head right off his body.

Unfortunately, she
was
injured. The bullet had gouged an agonizing divot in her leg, and tearing off his head would have to wait. Though she’d heal quickly from a relatively clean wound like this—within a day, most likely, as fast healing was common to all her kind, but even more pronounced in her immediate family—even a much smaller injury was enough to trap her in human aspect, so Shifting was impossible. The more pressing problems were getting her leg stitched up, getting the humiliating handcuffs removed, and getting something better to wear than the button-down shirt that stank of stale sweat and fried food. When standing, it fell to mid-thigh and did a decent job of covering her
nude body. When sitting, however…to put it delicately, her lady parts were about to make an appearance.

And the officer had definitely noticed. Though why he’d be so interested now was a mystery, as he’d already seen her entirely naked at the museum.

Damn it all to hell. She
knew
the Louvre was a bad idea.

The officer seated at the table across from her said something to her in French. She pretended not to understand him, so he switched to English. “How is the shirt for you, pigeon?”

Pigeon?
Cockroach of the skies? Deeply insulted, she asked, “How was the box of donuts you managed to smear all over it, pig?”

His cheeks flushed red. She was gratified to see it. In the corner of the room, another officer leaning against the wall snorted.

There were six of them in all. Uniformed, armed, obviously feeling very pleased with themselves that they’d finally caught the infamous
La Chatte
. The interrogation room was small and cold, devoid of anything except a metal table, two metal chairs, and a small camera mounted high on the wall above the door. A large window covered one wall, and though it was blacked out she assumed it was two-way glass. Her own reflection mocked her there, a testament to her first failure.

No matter. It was only a question of time. Just a short while until she healed and she could Shift to Vapor and slip out the door, the window, through a ceiling vent. She had only to survive long enough—

“Our little kitty has claws, eh, gentlemen?”

It was the officer in the corner who spoke, his voice soft and amused. He spoke in French, and though she’d
pretended not to understand it before, somehow she knew that he knew she actually did. She slanted him a sideways, assessing glance. He was good-looking, this one, tall and finely made with thick brown hair and penetrating green eyes that didn’t seem to miss a thing. He watched her with those avid eyes now, ignoring her bare legs and concentrating instead on her face.

She’d have to be careful with him. Human men didn’t have the keen senses her kind did, but every once in a while one of them surprised her. At the very least he was trigger-happy; he was the one who’d shot her.

And then, in a flash, she recognized him. The man from Gregor’s office that night a week ago, the one who’d threatened the subpoena—

“Let’s try again,” said the first officer seated across from her, the one whose shirt she was wearing. She turned her attention to him. He was shorter and chubbier than the rest of them, with hairy forearms and what could only be described as dead shark eyes. Black and flat, they bored into her like knives. “And for the sake of expediency, I’ll dispense with all the bullshit.” He paused, evidently for dramatic effect. “We know everything,” he said.

Eliana narrowed her eyes, waiting.

“Everything,” he repeated more forcefully, leaning forward over the table. Beneath the rolled-up cuffs of his shirt, the backs of his pudgy, pasty hands were damp with sweat. “We know exactly who you are…and exactly what you’ve been up to.”

“I see,” she said, feigning a calm she definitely didn’t feel. Her heart was beating so hard in her chest she thought they all must be able to hear it. “I must be in very deep trouble.”

His shark eyes narrowed. He didn’t like being mocked.

“As a matter of fact you are.” His tone dropped. “But if you cooperate, you may earn yourself some leniency come sentencing time.”

Eliana resisted the urge to respond with a withering comment about fat, donut-eating primates not being able to intimidate her.
Goddess Bastet,
she silently prayed, smiling at the officer,
please send a plague for this one. Preferably involving flesh-eating bacteria.

Holding his gaze, she murmured, “Oh, I’d
love
to cooperate. Cooperation is one of my favorite things, especially when it’s with someone like you. Someone so smart. And so obviously…” She glanced at his doughy arms, and her smile turned faintly mocking. “Strong.”

He blinked rapidly, and the flush in his cheeks deepened to scarlet. Like a preening peacock, his chest puffed out, and she had to restrain herself again, this time from rolling her eyes.

She’d never understand a man’s ego. It was their universal Achilles’ heel.

“But I’d like to ask a question before we get started.” She felt the lasered attention of the handsome officer in the corner as easily as she saw the chubby one in front of her lick his lips.

“Er…ah…yes,” he stammered, then cleared his throat. “What is it?”

She cocked her head left. “You don’t actually have any evidence against me, do you?”

It hung there in the following silence, reverberating like a struck drum. To their credit, the men standing around the room didn’t react, not a muscle was moved, but she tasted their sudden discomfort like a metallic tinge in the air and had all the confirmation she needed.

“No surveillance video, no fingerprints, no eyewitnesses. Nothing,” she said softly.

“We caught you red-handed in the Louvre, pigeon.” The chubby officer’s face had turned a mottled shade of burgundy. He was blinking fast again, and it made him look like a fat baby bird. “Trying to steal a famous piece of art. We have all the evidence we need to put you away for a very long time.
Échec et mat
.”

Checkmate? Clearly this one didn’t actually play chess. She did, however, and played it well. Her father had taught her when she was twelve years old, had told her every great general and military strategist in history had used the tools learned in chess to win a war: always keep your goal in mind; have a plan but stay flexible; think at least three moves ahead; protect your assets; and last but most importantly, don’t trust your emotions, because they lie.

She’d learned that final lesson the hard way. The very
hardest
way of all.

Her gaze went to the handsome, green-eyed man in the corner. He wasn’t smiling. In fact, his face had darkened, and his mouth had thinned to a grim, bloodless line.

“How do you know I was trying to steal a painting?” she challenged. “Maybe I just got locked inside the museum before it closed—”

“Naked?” Green Eyes interrupted, hard.

“—because I fainted in the ladies’ room and didn’t wake up until the lights were out and everyone was gone, and in my state of panic at being alone in the dark I wandered around the museum trying to find a way out—”

“Naked,” he repeated, even harder.

She lifted a shoulder. “Some people cry when they get scared. I get—”

“Naked,” he finished, and now he sounded like he really wanted to break something.

She smiled at him, a cheerless curve of her lips. “Exactly. It’s a tic. As I was saying, maybe I was trying to find a way out of the big, dark, scary museum—it’s over seventy thousand square meters, you know, which is a lot, especially in the dark—and I wound up in front of the Degas and was distracted for a minute from my extreme fear and disorientation and just stood there admiring it.”

“With your hands on the frame,” interrupted Chubby in a high, disbelieving voice. “Trying to lift it from the wall!”

Eliana looked at him. “I never touched that painting.”

He made a sound like he was choking on something and jerked his hand to indicate everyone else. “We saw you! You had your hands right on it—”

“It was very shadowy in there. Maybe your eyes tricked you. Have you dusted it for prints?”

No one said anything. One of the standing officers shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“No? Well, don’t bother. Because unfortunately you’re not going to find any.”

They wouldn’t because they
couldn’t
. Intangibility in shadow allowed her to sneak around undetected, leaving no fingerprints…she was as invisible as air.

In the shadows, that is. When pinned in the highly focused beams of flashlights—like the one Chubby and company had wielded—she could be seen plain as day.

She’d heard of this only once before. Her great-grandmother on her mother’s side was also a Shadow Walker and had also been an accomplished thief. That was where their similarities ended, however; to hear the story told, her great-grandmother stuck to jewels and absolutely loved thieving.
It was said she wore so much of her pilfered booty she jangled when she walked.