Rapture's Edge (16 page)

Constantine
. It was on the tip of his tongue, it was right
there
. He sucked in a breath…

And couldn’t say it. He simply could never turn on his brother whom he’d sworn to protect with his own life, not even to try and convince the woman he loved he wasn’t the murdering bastard she thought him. Caught between love and duty, the agony of divided loyalty was crushing, and it kept him silent.

The little glimmer of hope in her eyes winked out. It was replaced by fury and withering hatred. “You better kill me now, because the minute you let me go I’m going to cut off your balls and make myself a nice new pair of earrings.” She smirked at him. “A very
small
pair.”

“Dick jokes? Really?” he snapped, feeling as neutered as she threatened him to be. She’d never actually seen his balls, but he didn’t enjoy having his manhood called into question. Perversely, it made him want to strip just to prove her wrong.

“Get off me!”

“I’m not going anywhere until you take that back!”

“Kill me, or get off me!”

“Take it back!”

They glared at each other, neither one blinking. Fuming, she pressed her lips together and a tremor ran through her body. It took several seconds, but she seemed to garner some shred of her abandoned control. Then she said, “If your plan is to smash me to death, it’s working. I can’t breathe.”

“You seem to be doing a fine job of breathing, Ana.” D glanced down to her chest where the top of her breasts swelled invitingly over the scoop neck of her T-shirt. When he glanced back up at her, her face had gone cherry red. She turned her face aside, closed her eyes, and bit her lip.

The heat of her body against his, those beautiful breasts, her teeth sunk into that full lower lip…D couldn’t help himself. An erection sprang to rock-hard life in his pants. Because their bodies were pressed together, chest to crotch, she didn’t miss it.

“Unbelievable,” she said, outraged. “Just…
unbelievable
.” She squirmed beneath him, trying to get away, but the friction only served to excite him further, and she gasped, feeling him grow even harder.

“You bring the animal out in me, beautiful,” he said gruffly, smiling though he knew he shouldn’t be, elated to be near her. “Always did.”

“I’m going to throw up on you now. Get off me.”

Her look was absolutely murderous—and, he decided, utterly adorable. “Not before you apologize for scratching my face and saying I have a small dick.”

She growled in exasperation and said through gritted teeth, “Small.
Balls
. Now. Get.
Off!
”

“Something you need to know first, baby girl,” he said, but she stiffened beneath him as if she’d been slapped.

“NO!” She stared up at him, and her dark eyes blazed cold fire. “You don’t get to call me that! You don’t get to call me nicknames and pretend you care and lie right to my face, not after you used me and took away everything I ever had! You took away my
entire life
! And I hate you for it! I! HATE! YOU!”

D felt his face harden. “I didn’t take away anything, you
gave
it away. You ran away without a word, without so much as even a look backward, and I’ve spent the last three years of my life in fucking agony because of it. And your leaving like you did stirred up such an epic shit storm I don’t know how it can be fixed. Maybe it can’t. But I’m the one thing
standing between you and certain death right now, and I’m risking my own ass to keep you safe, so you’re going to be nice to me and
take it back
!”

They glared at each other, stalemate, until finally her lower lip quivered. Unbelievably,
impossibly
, her eyes filled with tears. “I wish you were dead,” she whispered miserably.

D could endure physical pain of any kind. He could take blows or cuts or falls, he could even take torture. What he couldn’t take was a woman’s tears. Especially
his
woman’s tears.

Like snow in the sun, his heart melted.

“No, baby girl, you don’t,” he whispered back, looking deep into her eyes. He was certain now beyond a doubt that beneath all that rage and blistering fury and wall of ice she’d erected was a tiny ember of tenderness that still burned just for him. “And I’ll prove it to you.”

He lowered his mouth to hers.

She gasped against his mouth, and he took the opportunity to slide his tongue between her lips. She made a little sound in her throat—horror or outrage, he couldn’t tell—and stiffened to the rigidity of a wooden plank and stopped breathing.

What she didn’t do was pull away.

D took that for a positive sign and deepened the kiss, still tender but seeking, tasting her, wanting her to respond instead of lie frozen, allowing him to explore her mouth with no resistance but no return, no answer to the question his lips were asking.

He pulled back and looked down at her; her eyes were squeezed shut tight. He lowered his head and gently kissed each of her eyelids, the place between her eyebrows, the tip of her nose. She made the little sound again, and this time it sounded closer to a plea. For what, he couldn’t tell.

Stop? Go on? A quick, merciful death?

Her lower lip began to quiver again. She was so beautiful, so fucking
vulnerable
like this, pinned beneath him, he felt a wave of heat envelop his body, desire burning bright as the noonday sun.

Open for me,
he thought, kissing first one corner of her mouth, then the other. He pressed the softest of kisses to the center of her lips, the little bow, the lower curve, a place he’d kissed in a million fevered dreams.
Open your heart for me, angel. Let me in.

Then she sobbed.

He froze on a breath, his body burning and aching and his heart stuttering along in his chest like something half dead. She convulsed and sobbed again, turned her head to the side and started to bawl in earnest, great wracking sobs that shuddered them both and the bed beneath them.

“Baby girl,” D whispered, mortified. “Ana, Eliana, stop, it’s okay, I won’t kiss you again, just please…stop.”

He released her and sat up. She folded her arms across her chest and curled into a little, protective ball, her knees pulled to her nose, her face turned to the mattress. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know if there was anything he
could
do. Seeing her like this tore a hole in his chest big enough to drive a truck through.

“G-get out,” she sobbed into the mattress. “Get away f-from me.”

He reached for her, touched her shoulder, but the second his hand was on her she jerked as if electrocuted and kicked him, hard, in the stomach. “Get away from me!” she screamed as he toppled off the bed. He landed with a jarring thump on the floor, and Eliana, eyes wide, shaking violently, scrambled up against the headboard and cowered
there, red-faced, staring at him but with a blank look as if she wasn’t seeing
him
, but someone or something else altogether.

“Ana—”

At exactly that moment, the security alarm went off with a high, electronic shriek, piercing his eardrums. Every nerve in D’s body surged into high alert.

Someone had just broken into the house.

Panic attack.

Eliana knew the symptoms intimately because she’d suffered from these terrifying episodes for years. Not that she’d ever told anyone. With her kind, showing weakness like that guaranteed an expedited route to the afterlife.

Survival of the fittest wasn’t just an evolutionary theory. It was an actual fact of
Ikati
Law.

The first time it happened was three days after her father was killed. She and Mel and the rest of their group were still on the run from the catacombs, trying to cross the border to France on foot, not knowing if they’d be caught, not knowing where their next meal was going to come from.

One minute she’d been fine, trudging along a dry streambed in warm twilight in the forested Gran Paradiso
National Park just miles from the French border, her feet aching, her stomach growling, her mind a tangle of thoughts and memories she kept pushing aside to concentrate on the increasingly difficult task of putting one foot in front of the other. Then, suddenly, from the dry shrubbery alongside the streambed erupted a shrieking knot of kestrels, driven in terror from their hidden nests by the group of much larger predators going by.

Their terror was infectious. For a blinding moment, Eliana couldn’t breathe. Her heart failed to beat. She broke out in a cold sweat, began to tremble violently, and felt tingly in all her limbs. Her chest felt like it was being squeezed by a giant, invisible hand. She thought she might be dying of a heart attack.

Which is exactly how she felt when Demetrius just kissed her.

The last year had been better; once they were settled in France—Silas had the foresight to stuff a bag full of money before they fled, not enough to last but enough to get them established—the attacks tapered off, and for the past year she hadn’t suffered even one. Not when she’d been caught by the police, not when she’d been tortured by Édoard and Dr. Frankenstein, not when the police station blew up around her and she was kidnapped and awoke with two sewn-up bullet wounds, locked in a strange room in a strange house, alone.

No, it took a kiss to bring one on. A kiss from
him
.

And this was the mother of them all.

Crouched on the bed like a cornered animal, she watched with wild eyes as D leapt from the floor, his huge body coiled to spring, his face tense, a look of pure, murderous rage in his eyes, which were trained on the bedroom
door. With a growled, “Stay here!” he moved silently to the door, looked out, and then disappeared though the doorway without looking back.

Once he was gone she felt a surge of relief, but she still couldn’t get her gelatinous legs to move. She gulped large swallows of air, willing her heart to slow its furious beat, telling herself she wasn’t dying, she was going to be fine, she just needed to
get out of this room
and away from him.

And whatever else had recently arrived.

Still shaking, she tried to step off the bed and instead fell flat on her face on the floor. She lay there panting a moment, listening hard to catch any noise above the hideous whine of the alarm, but she didn’t hear anything. She finally managed to get her legs to work and crept to the doorway. From the floor she snatched the dagger D had wrestled from her hand. She reached the door and peeked out.

A long corridor lined with doors, some open, a few closed. A spiral staircase at the end, leading up to another floor.

No windows. No other way out.

She crept down the hallway, glancing into each room. All were bedrooms, none had other interior doors. She’d have to go up the stairs.

Taking each step much more carefully than the adrenaline screaming through her veins wanted, she progressed up the steps until she reached the top, then peeked over the last step: Living room. Sofas, huge flat-screen television, modern, masculine décor. No one in sight.

The alarm screamed shrilly on and on, urging her forward.

With her heart in her throat, she eased up the last few steps and ran to the opposite wall, where she flattened
herself beside a tall bookcase and paused a moment to catch her breath. Her pulse throbbed through her head, pounding a staccato beat that nearly drowned out the alarm.

She heard voices. Male voices. Shouting. Her heart took off like a rocket, and her hands began to shake so badly she nearly dropped the dagger. She tiptoed across the floor to another spiral staircase that led up to who knows what, the only way out of the room.

When she reached the top of the staircase, she didn’t fall apart so much as implode.

Three huge males, black-haired, strapped with weapons, larger and more menacing than any human could ever be, were wrestling Demetrius down to the floor.
Trying
to wrestle him down to the floor, without much success. They were all snarling and shouting at one another in Latin, massive arms swinging, black hair and fists flying, a heavy oak kitchen table and wooden chairs knocked aside like children’s toys as they grappled with one another and staggered across the room.

D. Lix. Celian. Constantine. Her father’s personal guard.

Her father’s traitorous assassins.

A thermonuclear urge to kill them all with her bare hands forced blood to her face where it spread, throbbing hot, to her ears and neck. It warred with a deeply ingrained, stubborn survival instinct that screamed at her in no uncertain terms to get the hell out of there while they were busy doing whatever it was they were doing. It seemed like the other three were trying to take D down, but why, she couldn’t fathom. It occurred to her that possibly D had gone rogue and killed her father himself without the knowledge of the others, but she dismissed that thought as quickly as it came, knowing the
Bellatorum
were like the musketeers—all for
one and one for all and all that nonsense. If D had hatched a plot to kill her father, they were all in on it.

And this was her chance to get revenge.

Or—escape.

Which would it be? She couldn’t take them all at once, she only had the dagger—but their backs were turned, they were all distracted, she had the element of surprise—