Edge of Oblivion (24 page)

“Imagine what they’d do if they found out I was following him,” D said in a wry voice.

Lix gaped at him. “You wouldn’t. You couldn’t be that stupid. He’ll catch you!”

D had been spying on the King and Silas for several months now, trying to gain any kind of information that would satisfy the nagging feeling they were up to no good, but one glance at Lix’s horrified expression told D he shouldn’t have said anything. Not that he was going to stop.

Though he should have been used to it by now, he hated feeling like a chess piece, a dumb cog in the King’s machine. He planned to keep searching until he found some answers.

But to his brother he only said, “You’re right. I’m not that stupid. Bad joke.”

Better to have Lix ignorant, anyway. It was safer for him that way.

Lix relaxed back against the white leather booth and motioned to the hovering waitress for a refill of his tequila. “Jesus. Don’t scare me like that, asshole.”

The waitress darted over from where she’d been standing at the bar, staring, and leaned over Lix. A fall of bottlered hair spilled over her shoulders; her large breasts almost erupted from her low-

cut top.

“
Si, signore
?” she breathed, fluttering her lashes.

D rolled his eyes. Another human female throwing herself at a warrior’s feet.

Th e
Bellatorum
were larger and different and far more dangerous than their human male counterparts, exuding a primal power that parted crowds wherever they went, and they didn’t care who noticed. Dominus himself didn’t care. The King required only that they keep the location of their lair a secret, but as far as Shifting or standing out in a crowd...

“Humans are so stupid they can’t see what is right under their noses,” the King was fond of saying, “and even if the rare one does, all the rest will call him crazy.”

D grudgingly admitted he was right. Though those werewolf rumors had persisted for centuries, mistaken as they were. It was common knowledge they originated from some drunk Greek of antiquity who had seen an
Ikati
Shift; as if a
dog
would be able to change its shape.

He’d long ago tired of the attention. Yet the other
Bellatorum
hadn’t, so he found himself spending another night in this underworld playground, paroled from purgatory, watching the circus unfold.

Lix gave the human waitress a dangerous smile. His eyes lingering on her décolletage, he licked his lips. “
Alium
,” he said, low.

Her brows furrowed in confusion. Lix had forgotten he was speaking Latin, not Italian. He wasn’t thinking with the right head.

“Bring him water,” D said to the waitress in Italian and waved her away.

“
Gratias, matrem
,” Lix said sarcastically, then shouted after her swiveling derriere to bring him another tequila as he’d originally asked. He turned back to D, his expression sour. “Who shit in your cereal?”

He didn’t bother answering. Tense, he leaned back against the booth and stretched his arms out.

His gaze darted over the sweating, gyrating crowd on the dance floor below.

“Ah,” said Lix, drawing D’s gaze back to his face. The long-haired male was nodding. “I get it.

You saw Eliana today. You’re always in a piss-poor mood after you see the
principessa
.”

D sent him a baleful glare but didn’t respond.

“She likes you, you know,” Lix said, smiling.

Now D spoke, and his voice was like flint. “Shut up, brother.”

Unperturbed by the hostility that pulsed from D like another beat of the music, Lix shrugged.

“I’m just stating the obvious. You should make a move on that before one of those sissies of the
Optimates
mates her and she’s out of commission forever.”

“Speaking of talk that can get you killed,” said D pointedly, glaring at Lix.

Though the
Bellatorum
could have any female they liked and were highly sought after as breeding partners for unmated females, females of the
Supremus
—the King’s direct relatives—were strictly off-limits, on pain of death. And his only daughter...D shuddered to think of the punishment that would follow if it were discovered he’d bedded her. Or even kissed her, for that matter.

Lix made a face at him and stretched his legs out under the table between them. “Maybe Aurelio was right after all. You ever think of that? Maybe it
is
better to ask forgiveness than permission.”

D’s expression soured. “Forgiveness? Like the forgiveness Dominus granted Celian? Because that kind of forgiveness I can do without.”

It was Lix’s turn to scowl. He sent a glance over his shoulder to the corner Constantine had disappeared around. His voice low, he said, “I thought he was going to make Constantine kill him.”

D shook his head, ran a hand down the back of his neck, and squeezed the tense muscles there.

“Constantine would kill himself before he’d do any lasting damage to one of us, which the King knows. So making him whip Celian is all just part of his...”

Sickness
, he didn’t say. Cruelty. Insanity.

“...thing. And Celian heals faster than anyone. He’ll be up and around in a few days.”

But in the meantime, Constantine would punish and anesthetize himself in any way possible, including getting drunk, getting into fights, and having rough, anonymous sex with human females. As he did every time the King played one of his sick games on him.

For the thousandth time D wondered what the hell it was all for, anyway.

Lix sat forward in the booth, crossed his arms over his knees, and said, “You think Lucien and Aurelio are coming back?”

D met Lix’s intense gaze. The music pounded, lights strobed, bodies swayed and writhed.

“No.”

Lix didn’t even blink. “Me neither. So what do we do about it?”

D watched as Constantine reappeared around the dark corner of the nightclub, disheveled and grim, looking as if he’d just attended his own funeral. The human female stumbled after him, weaving shakily through the crowd. She headed to the bar and collapsed onto a barstool, trying in vain to adjust her demolished clothing. “We don’t do anything,” D said with a slight emphasis on the first word.

“Because?” Lix said, surprised.

Constantine moved closer. Though he was so beautiful Michelangelo could have modeled the
David
after him, a feeling of darkness moved with him, the subtle chill of death. The crowd parted to let him pass, shoving one another in their hurry to get out of his way.

“Because this situation is going to take care of itself.”

Lix’s face clouded, then cleared. “Your dream—that’s right. Dominus killed that male in your dream.” He sat back. “Not that it makes me feel any better. I’d like to get my hands on that bastard myself.” His gaze searched D’s face. “Did you see anything else? Anything before—or after?”

D shook his head and avoided Lix’s gaze. He just couldn’t chance the King’s finding out about his treason during one of his regular trips through Lix’s brain.

He’d learned how to hide things. He’d learned how to tuck things away into small, unseen places in his mind, places the King never bothered to go. There he kept his fantasies of Eliana, the visions of her soft body and soft eyes and soft mouth, there he kept his suspicions of her father, there he kept the snippets of dreams he edited, those dreams that hinted at terrible things to come.

There he kept his fear.

It was the fear that kept him awake nights, bathed in sweat, his body rigid and his mind a churning inferno. He didn’t know exactly what was coming, but he knew
something
was, something vast and dark and cold that felt like oblivion. And now that the two full-Blood Shifters had arrived just as his dreams foretold, he felt an unseen clock ticking down to zero hour.

But to what?
What?

“I need a drink,” said Constantine, who had arrived to stand dead-faced and hulking beside their table.

D was about to open his mouth to speak but froze, the breath stolen from his lungs. Constantine and Lix froze as well; then all three turned in unison to look down at the dance floor below as the crowd parted to let three enormous, muscled males pass.

Ikati.
Strangers.

Enemies.

The three strangers looked up at them just as Constantine said, “On second thought, a fight will do just fine.”

“A
bar
?” complained Julian from behind the wheel of the Maserati he’d stolen in Monaco. He, Tomás, and Mateo were randomly driving through the dark, rainy streets of Rome, making a game of seeing how close he could come to pedestrians without actually hitting any of them.

He was fairly sure that nun on the Via Veneto would survive.

“It’s a nightclub, not just a bar,” grumbled Mateo, staring out the window at the buildings flashing by. He still wasn’t over the incident with Xander, though it had been a good twelve hours prior. Those seven words were more than double what he’d spoken all day.

“And a good one at that,” added Tomás from the back-seat. “I heard Angelina Jolie was there just last week.”

“Please,” sneered Julian, steering the car around a corner so fast the two right-side wheels lifted a few inches from the ground. He narrowly missed crashing into an elderly couple crossing the street. “She’s too busy making movies to hang out in bars.”

The car fishtailed as Julian overcorrected. Mateo and Tomás were thrown against the windows.

“Do they even have food in a bar?” Julian continued, unperturbed by the curses that were being hurled at him. “Answer me this: What is there in a bar that I’d be interested in? Do I dance? No. Do I drink?

Well, okay, yes, but I’m not paying twenty bucks for a shot of watered-down whiskey. Do I like loud music? No. The only thing I’m going to find in a bar is—” He stopped speaking abruptly, but it wasn’t the Vespa he’d just clipped with the right front fender, sending its helmeted driver into a tailspin that launched him over the handlebars and off onto the grassy strip beside the road.

He stopped before he could say
women
.

The only thing to be found in a bar was human women. Lots of them. Like the one Xander had loved so long ago. The mere mention of which had caused the entire day to turn into a steaming pile of shit.

“He’s got a hero complex,” muttered Mateo to the window, knowing exactly why Julian had shut up so quickly. “Always looking to save the damsel in distress.”

But in reality, she hadn’t been in distress until she’d fallen in love with Xander.

It was a tragic tale, a cautionary tale, one still whispered about in their colony in Brazil, though of course never to Xander’s face. Esperanza had been the bright, captivating daughter of Karyo, their capoeira master, whom Xander had gone to live with at six years old when his father remarried and his dead wife’s offspring was banished from his new wife’s sight.

The five of them practically grew up together, there in that joyless compound and its morbid array of weaponry. No one ever knew what happened to Karyo’s wife or if he’d even had one; no one cared. The
Ikati
cared only that their human pet kept his mouth shut and kept churning out trained killers like the ocean churns out waves. And so he did. Karyo was a brilliant teacher. His students were brilliantly Gifted. Everyone was brilliantly pleased.

Everyone except Xander and Esperanza, who, as the years progressed, in between his grueling training and her schooling and subsequent betrothal to an older man she’d never met, had somehow found the time to fall in love.

It was said later that it had been inevitable. Take a damaged, wrong-headed boy like Alexander Luna—warped beyond repair by his father’s savage beatings, beatings that were soon transferred to his wife when he saw how quickly Xander toed the line when his mother’s pain was used as a deterrent —and put him in the path of temptation, give him a taste of forbidden fruit, as it were...what did anyone expect?

For years, Xander and Esperanza kept their secret well hidden. As of course they should. Had the relationship been discovered sooner, the
Ikati
would have moved to terminate it.

Permanently.

But as it will, fate had its own cruel way of dealing with things.

Karyo discovered them. The details of how and where, the other members of the Syndicate never knew. The only sure thing was the fact of Esperanza’s lovely, broken body discovered one misty morning lying in a pool of her own blood on the cobblestones in front of the training center.

Her neck was broken. She’d been thrown from the roof.

Julian, Mateo, and Tomás had all been there when Xander found her, when he confronted Karyo, who stood by watching, his face like a slab of stone.

“You killed her!” Xander screamed at the wiry old man.

“Better that than see her defiled by an animal,” Karyo coldly responded.

And then, at sixteen, Xander committed murder for the first time.

Afterward he was inconsolable. The
Ikati
didn’t much care that he’d killed Karyo. Humans, after all, were expendable. His own father, however, cared about the gossip it brought and came to the compound to give Xander a ruthless beating.

Then Xander committed his second murder.

After his father’s death—judged by the Assembly a justifiable homicide for reasons of self-

defense—his half brother, Alejandro, had been installed as the new Alpha of Manaus, and Xander had forsaken any shred of mercy, had slaughtered any tender feeling within himself that would ever allow him to feel pain, love, or happiness.

He died.

He walked, he talked, he became the best assassin the tribe had ever seen. But he was nothing more than a corpse. A zombie.

“FUBAR,” Julian muttered under his breath, then blew out a long, hard breath. “All right, show me the way to this joint. I suppose I could use a watered-down drink.” He banked hard left, turning down a one-way street, scaring pedestrians into squealing, scattered flight. “But don’t expect me to like it. And you’re paying, Tomás.”