Rapture's Edge (11 page)

Green Eyes addressed her directly. “You like to play games, don’t you.”

It was a statement, not a question. Beneath the soft tone of his voice, she felt the challenge and also sensed a dark, growing undercurrent of excitement.

Holding his gaze, she leaned back in the chair and crossed her legs. The shirt rode up even higher on her bare thighs, and that searing gaze flickered down to her legs. When his gaze traveled back to her face, it was bright and burning hot.

It did something to her, that look. An old memory flickered in her mind, beautiful dark eyes that looked at her with that same, fevered hunger. She quashed it as quickly as it surfaced.

The memory of those eyes and who they belonged to was even more dangerous than capture by humans.

“I like to do all kinds of things,” she answered, staring unsmiling at him. “What did you have in mind?”

He stiffened. His nostrils flared. Judging by the sour tang that suddenly permeated the air, she’d really pissed him off. In one swift motion, he shoved away from the wall. “Everyone out,” he snapped. He crossed his arms over his chest and stood staring at her, his face now hard as a slab of granite.

“Édoard,” Chubby protested, turning to him with knitted brows, but Green Eyes cut him a glare so vicious he snapped his mouth shut and rose stiffly from the chair.

“
Vous l’avez entendu
,” Chubby snapped to the other four standing officers, and one by one they filed out the door. Chubby slammed it shut behind him, leaving her alone with the unpredictable, agitated Édoard.

They stared at each other for what felt like an hour. The only sound was the whisper of air through a ceiling vent. A muscle in her bicep began to cramp and twitch, and she longed to stretch her arms overhead and massage it. But of course, the handcuffs prevented it.

Then into the tense silence he abruptly said, “What are you?”

Not who, but
what
. Startled, she blinked. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” he said, unmoving. He looked at her—really
looked
at her—as if trying to slip inside her body using only his eyes. It was unnerving. She knew it wasn’t the chill in the room that made her skin prickle.

“What I am is hungry, hurt, and not in the mood for word games,” she said flatly, trying to keep the sharp pang of worry she suddenly felt out of her voice.
What are you?

He just stared at her.

Her gaze skipped away from his and fell on the small camera above the door. There were no shadows in this harshly lit room; they’d have her on video now for sure.

Seeing the direction of her stare, Édoard turned, walked over to the door, reached up, and flipped a switch on the side of the lens. A tiny red light beneath the camera faded to black.

Her brows shot up.

He turned back to her with that intense green gaze and leaned over the back of the chair his chubby companion had just vacated, his knuckles white as they gripped the curved metal. Beneath the glare of the fluorescent lights, his brown hair shone a beautiful shade of burnished bronze.

“You’re different,” he accused, startling her again. “
Everything
about you is different,” he went on, his terse voice softened by the lilting French accent. His gaze scoured
her. “Your face, your voice, the way you move. Even the way you’re sitting in that chair looking at me is different than anyone else who’s ever sat in that chair looking at me before. I’ve been around a very long time,
belle fille
, and I’ve never seen anything like you.”

Belle fille
. Beautiful girl. It gave her a pang in the gaping hole in her chest where her heart used to be. It had been a long, long time since someone had called her beautiful.

“Is this an interrogation, or are you trying to ask me out on a date?” she said coldly.

His face hardened. He straightened and crossed his arms over his broad chest. “Interview,” he said, looking down his nose at her. “It’s called an interview. If this was an interrogation, there would be pain involved.”

“There
is
pain involved.” She leaned sideways and stuck her bandaged leg out, then bent her arms to give him a good view of the handcuffs behind her back, her wrists red and chafed inside them. Just to provoke him, she added, “And my bare behind is frozen to this chair.”

Again, he didn’t take the bait. His mouth just puckered as if he’d been sucking on a lemon. “You’re lucky Jean-Luc gave you his shirt. I’d have hauled you in as naked as we found you, and your bare behind would have been on public display for all those reporters. Your bare behind would have made the cover of
Le Monde
.”

Eliana flushed. “Charming,” she muttered. She sat upright and adjusted herself in the chair so her tailbone wasn’t flush against the cold seat. Her entire rear end was numb. And her leg
throbbed
. When she saw Caesar again, she was going to kill him.

“You’re the one who likes being naked so much. And I may be rude, but I’m not stupid,” he rejoined. Something
odd had crept into his voice, and she glanced up to find him still staring.

“I know who you are,
belle fille
,” he said, eyes glittering. “I know how you think. I’ve been studying
La Chatte
for years. I’ll admit you became something of an obsession for me. A thief who evaded all security systems, who never triggered a single alarm, who drifted in and out of locked buildings and rooms and vaults like…a ghost? Impossible. You made us look like a bunch of incompetent fools. You made
me
look like a fool. All those rich, important people screaming for your head, and not a trace of you to be found. So I studied your pattern, the things you took, the specific times and dates and places of the crimes. And I discovered something.”

Eliana waited, a growing sense of dread gnawing at her stomach.

“Even ghosts get bored.”

He smiled, and the predatory curve of his lips sent fear lashing along every nerve ending.

“Every theft was a little more daring than the last, a little harder,” he continued. “Either you were getting desperate, which didn’t seem likely as you weren’t under any heat from us, or you needed a challenge. It was me who predicted
La Chatte
would get tired of poaching from fat old goats and go for a bigger prize. I knew one day you’d hit the Louvre. And because, as you’ve guessed, we’ve never managed to capture you with normal surveillance video, I ordered a few special, very high-tech cameras designed by some old friends in the American military. Cost a pretty penny, too, and all very hush-hush top secret, but it was authorized by the prime minister himself. Because you,
belle fille
, are at the very top of his shit list.”

Cameras? Special cameras? She couldn’t be seen on cameras—

“He’s still holding a grudge over two Picassos you stole from his house while he was sleeping,” Édoard continued in a conspiratorial tone, as if they were two girlfriends talking over cocktails. “In fact, he’s given us carte blanche to do whatever is necessary to get them back, along with the rest of the things you stole, some of which were from his personal friends.
Whatever
is necessary, including resorting to the interrogation you so casually mentioned before. Which, by the way, I’m particularly well qualified to do having served as an interrogator the entirety of my ten years with the counterterrorism unit of the
bérets verts
.”

An interrogator with the green berets. High-tech cameras. Several things clicked into place, and the fear simmering in her bloodstream rose to a dark, violent boil. Her stomach lurched.

As an afterthought he added, “Did you know the word torture comes from the French word meaning ‘to twist’?”

His lips curved into a dark, triumphant smile, and she went ice cold.

“You’re bluffing,” she said, pulse racing. “You can’t lay a finger on me. There are laws against that, and the entire world saw you take me in—”

“I won’t go into the particulars of how photon cameras work, but the images are quite interesting, to say the least,” he interrupted as if she hadn’t spoken at all. He uncrossed his arms and pulled out the chair opposite hers, then sat with unhurried grace, crossed one leg over the other, and folded his hands into his lap. “Weren’t you curious how, in a seventy-thousand-square-meter museum as you so helpfully
pointed out, I knew exactly where to find an invisible woman?”

She didn’t answer. A cold trickle of sweat rolled down the back of her neck.

“So I’ll ask you again.” Still smiling, he regarded her with those green, glittering eyes. “And I’ll ask you nicely, one more time, before I hand you over to
un médecin
. And it won’t be for your injured leg, my dear. The good doctor and I are going to conduct a few…experiments.”

He emphasized carefully each next word he spoke. “What. Are. You?”

Horror tightened its sharp, freezing claws around her throat. She sat there like a statue, frozen, unable to answer, unable even to blink.

The doctor. Interrogation. Experiments.

Oh God.

D made the thirteen-hour drive from Rome to Paris in under ten.

He’d have been even faster on the Ducati, but his plan involved heavy explosives and those took up a lot of room, especially with what he had in mind. So the motorcycle was out, left behind in its usual spot in a parking garage not too far from the sunken church and the entrance to the catacombs where he and the other members of the Roman colony lived.

Where Eliana also used to live, until everything got so turned around his eyes would cross just thinking about it.

The Range Rover he drove—pitch black and growly, like his mood—belonged to a disbanded group of
Ikati
assassins from the colony in Brazil that used to go by the name
The Syndicate. The paranoid leaders of the four colonies who comprised the Council of Alphas never left anything to chance, so as soon as The Syndicate went off-line three years ago, The Hunt went live.

Because you had to have paid killers to round up and dispose of the inevitable deserters who couldn’t live by the most inviolable rule of
Ikati
Law: secrecy. Second only to allegiance, secrecy was paramount to the survival of them all. Now more than ever.

And his Eliana—in addition to being the daughter of the dead leader of the Expurgari, the
Ikati’s
ancient enemy, and the assumed new boss of the organization—had violated that ironclad rule of secrecy in a truly spectacular way, making her the Council’s public enemy number one.

And making him desperate with a capital D.

If The Hunt reached her before he did…

He gripped the steering wheel tighter and stomped the gas pedal to the floor. The SUV lurched forward, roaring over the empty, predawn Paris streets.

At the same moment, six men dressed exactly alike in tailored dark suits and mirrored aviators stepped off the high-speed Eurostar train at the Gare du Nord station in central Paris and without speaking to one another walked swiftly across the crowded platform and through the automatic glass doors to the pair of sleek black Audis awaiting them at the curb.

The six split into two groups of three. Two sat in the backseat of each car, one rode shotgun. The driver of each sedan said the identical thing to the new arrivals:

“Seventeen minutes. Lock and load.” And jerked his head to the stainless steel case in the middle of the backseat.

Both cars had government plates and so were allowed to idle in a no-stopping zone. If any of the railway police who prowled the station had run the plates, they would have found the cars registered to one Pierre Nettoyeur, senior medical practitioner with the French Defense Health Service and personal physician to the minister of defense.

Monsieur Nettoyeur was, of course, a fiction. Like others engineered by the Council of Alphas, he existed in digital form purely for the purpose of convenience. The leadership of the
Ikati
sometimes needed to travel and was occasionally forced to do it quickly and in close proximity to the humans who remained ignorant of their existence.

Largely ignorant, that is. There had been an incident a few years back involving a disco, a territory dispute, and an eyewitness with a cell phone, but though that particular video made it to the evening news, it was roundly dismissed as fake. And all those witnesses in the club were dismissed as fame-seeking drunks.

At least publicly. There were those who did not dismiss things like that so easily.

Nettoyeur was a bit of whimsy—it meant “cleaner” in French, and “cleaner” in certain circles like the ones the eight gentlemen in the Audis moved in referred to an assassin, specifically one hired to manage a bad situation with a very permanent solution—but for this mission the fabricated profession had a much more practical purpose.

If stopped by the police, the driver would easily be able to explain why he carried such dangerous tranquilizers and weapons, and in such quantity. Monsieur Nettoyeur reported
directly to the man who ran France’s entire military and had all the required paperwork to prove it.

So the paperwork was in order, fake identities had been assumed, travel had been arranged, and all the plans quite carefully made. And now The Hunt had arrived in Paris.