J. Geissinger - Edge of Oblivion

He didn’t hesitate. “Nietzsche.”

She laughed, surprised again. “An existentialist assassin! Yes, Nietzsche. And he was right.

Death is always preferable to a life in chains. If nothing else, at least we should be allowed that.” Her hands shook. She pulled them into her lap, clasped them hard together. “But we’re not. We’re allowed nothing. And for me, for a woman...”

Her voice faded. There was silence between them for a moment before she resumed, low, to her hands. “I thought becoming an Assembly member would change that. I thought being more Gifted than most of the other men in our colony would change it. I thought if I worked hard and tried my best to be like them...to fit in...I thought things could be...different.”

He hadn’t moved or, it seemed, taken a breath. She looked up at him, searching.

“But I was wrong.”

“The new Queen—” he began, but she shook her head and cut him off.

“I didn’t know. It was before. And now...” She bit her lip, fighting the sudden, horrifying onslaught of tears. “Now it’s too late.”

“They promised you freedom. The Expurgari promised you freedom.” He said it softly, not as an accusation but as if he understood.

Morgan knew in her heart she was a coward. She was bold and smart and self-sufficient, she was many things her mother would have been proud of, had she lived to see it, but she was a coward because she couldn’t stand it. The isolation, the oppression, the secrecy, and the silence, the crushing weight of the legacy of her Bloodlines and her Gifts.

Everyone else in the tribe could stand it. They had for millennia. But not she.

She would rather die.

“When I first Shifted at fifteen,” she said, struggling to maintain her composure, “I was taken before the Keeper and the Matchmaker so they could determine who would be a proper Blood match for me. Because I had Suggestion, I was more valuable to them.” She looked up at Xander. “As a breeder.” She took a breath and went on. “They wanted to breed me into the Alpha’s line, but I knew what that meant—the least possible amount of freedom conceivable. So I threatened to kill myself.

You can’t imagine the uproar it caused.” Her hand drifted upward to linger at the metal rings around her neck. “They threatened the collar, but I wouldn’t budge. They relented, in part I think because my father was too valuable to them—”

“Why?” Xander interrupted, intense.

She lifted her gaze to his. “Money. He handled the tribe’s investments. He knew everything, where it all was, how much we were worth. Everything. Day and night, counting, counting, counting.

Ledgers and holdings and bank accounts. That’s all there was for him.” She turned her head and looked out at the bustling piazza, at a Gypsy child with huge dark eyes and dirty clothes, begging for money at the base of the Spanish Steps. “Especially after my mother died.”

“He loved her?”

Startled, she looked back at him. He watched her with laserlike intensity, unblinking.

“Yes. They...it was Matched, but they did love one another.”

“So you were a child of love.”

She stared at him, blank. Love?

“You were conceived in love,” he insisted.

“I...yes. I guess so, if you put it that way. I suppose I was.”

He nodded, as if this pleased him, and she flushed red, embarrassed at the turn in the conversation and completely confused. Why the hell was she talking about love with the man tasked with ending her life if she failed her mission?

“Were you ?” she shot back, defensive.

His face changed. A flicker of unnamed emotion, here then gone. “My mother suffered the fate you were lucky enough to avoid.”

She blinked, understanding. “The Alpha.”

He nodded. A muscle twitched in his jaw.

“She’s Gifted.”

“She was ,” he corrected, flat, and now, realizing what he meant, she was sorry she’d asked.

“Oh. I’m—I’m sorry. What happened?”

He held her gaze for another moment, still intent, then inhaled and leaned back in his chair. He looked away and ran a hand over his cropped hair and held it there for a moment, an unstudied gesture, masculine and unconscious and somehow intimate. His voice came very low.

“He was not a gentle man.”

It chilled her. She could only imagine the atrocities behind those simple, succinct words. Even Leander, Alpha of Sommerley, with all his sophistication and elegance and finery, even he was a killer beneath all of that. All the Alphas of their kind were born and bred for one thing, and one thing only: domination.

“No,” she said quietly after a moment. “They never are.”

He didn’t respond, and she sat staring at his profile, outlined stark against the morning sun, brutally handsome and hard. She’d met the Alpha of his colony once before, a man named Alejandro...

“You’re the son of an Alpha,” she said, curious. Leander would never allow anything to come between him and his birthright. “Why aren’t you Alpha of the Manaus colony now?”

That twitch in his jaw again, but that was all. He glanced back at her, his eyes searing gold.

“Fate chose my path. And I followed it.”

She frowned at him, waiting for more, but he only turned his head and directed his gaze to the passing tourists, bobbing by in a sea of color and noise.

“You are the strangest assassin I’ve ever met,” she declared, undecided again if he was mocking her or just being evasive. This entire conversation made her head spin.

“You’re acquainted with many assassins?” he said drily, to the view of the palazzo.

She speared another ripe piece of melon, lifted it to her lips, and ate it. “Not any who’ve read Nietzsche and talk about love and fate all in the same breath,” she muttered.

He chuckled softly. “I’ve had an unusual education.”

She snorted. “I’ll just bet you—” He went rigid in his chair and whipped his head around so fast it was a black blur in her peripheral vision. He hissed, low, through his teeth, and a deep, warning growl rumbled through his chest. All the tiny hairs on her arms stood on end.

“What is it?” she said, stiffening.

The air around them seemed to warp and shimmer, and she felt his anger and adrenaline pulse over her skin in heated, dangerous waves. The arguing men at the next table fell silent, and she wondered if they felt the sudden atmospheric change, but she didn’t dare look over.

“Open your nose,” he growled, scanning the palazzo. His lips peeled back to reveal a set of perfect, gleaming white teeth. His hand went to his waist.

She glanced around. The café, the passing crowd, the bright, sunlit morning—she saw nothing out of the ordinary.

“Your nose ,” he hissed and shot to his feet. His chair skidded back and toppled over with a clatter to the cobblestones.

There was a twitter from a table of young women as they noticed Xander for the first time; a few soft gasps rose from another. Conversation all around them ceased except for a few startled murmurs. And she could understand why. At his full height, on full alert, the assassin exuded a current of feral, crackling electricity, virile and potent, that rocked her back in her chair and left her breathless. Even the humans must have been able to sense it, but if not, there was still the fact of the taut, leashed lines of his body, those massive shoulders and arms, the face of a destroying angel, perfectly beautiful and perfectly cold. She stared up at him, startled, as an exquisite rush of heat flooded through her veins.

“Xander, there’s nothing,” she said, horrified by her body’s response. What the hell was the matter with her? “Will you please sit down, you’re making a scene—” But then she sensed it. Hot and heavy and peculiar, a wave of power unlike anything she’d ever felt. Enveloping. Burning. Surrounding. It felt at once intimate and alien, probing, and she knew without doubt it was meant for her. On instinct she inhaled and caught the scent of lightning and smoke, a lingering sting like gunpowder on the back of her tongue. Sweat and musk and succulence, masculine and heady.