J. Geissinger - Edge of Oblivion

He made a noise of interest and gestured for D to continue.

“He was here, in the fovea .” He licked his lips. “With the female.”

The King’s eyebrows shot up. He leaned forward, put his elbows on the desk. “Go on.”

“She was naked,” he said tonelessly, “chained to the wall.”

At that, blood began to pound through the King’s veins. Naked. Chained. Two more beautiful words could not be found in any language. He’d think more on that later on, when he was alone.

Perhaps when he was with one of his human concubines; they were so much easier to scare than their Ikati counterparts, and he loved them to be scared when he took them. He loved them to scream. “And the male?”

Here D inhaled and dropped his gaze to the edge of the King’s desk. “You stabbed him in the back. You killed him.”

“So I win,” he said, very soft. D glanced up at him, stone-faced. His voice came very low.

“You always win, sire.”

Dominus sat back in his chair, pleased beyond measure. That male he’d encountered had powers he’d never heard of and smelled of death and carnage and the kind of hardened soullessness he’d only ever found in himself, all of which had given him considerable worry.

But this made everything so much easier. The warrior’s dreams were never wrong, and like the one that had alerted him to the arrival of the two strangers, this one had been so strong he’d felt the echoes of it from half a mile away. He watched as Lix shifted in his chair, still uncomfortable, and abruptly decided the two of them deserved a little reward.

“It’s three days until the next Purgare ,” he said, thinking of the ritual burial ceremony that took place at midnight under every full moon for all the Liberi who hadn’t survived their treacherous first Transitions over the previous month. Their mothers, the Bellatorum , and the rest of the upper classes gathered to scatter the ashes into a secret spot of the river Tiber along with flowers and murmured farewells, and he’d come to hate each and every Purgare as a personal affront to his pride.

But not for long. This next could be the last.

“Take the next few days off,” the King continued, gratified when the two warriors looked at him, shocked. “Go out, get drunk, Shift in the Villa Borghese if you like. Silas will give you money.”

He motioned to his most trusted servant, who glided forward silently from the shadows of the room and bowed in their direction. “Enjoy yourselves.”

“Thank you, sire,” said Lix, sounding more than a little confused, and he tried not to smile again. The King wasn’t known for leniency or charity, but he dearly loved to keep them guessing.

“Take Constantine as well,” he added, in a rare swell of benevolence. The male had taken his task of punishing Celian exceptionally hard and might not leave his bedside until he healed. A small gesture of generosity would go a long way toward mending his raw emotions. After all, a king needed his warriors loyal. And as the very intelligent human Niccolo Machiavelli once said, “Severities should be dealt out all at once...but benefits ought to be handed out drop by drop, so that they may be relished the more.”

“Father,” said a female voice from the door. The two warriors leapt to their feet and stood at attention, eyes fixed on some far-off point behind the King’s head.

Dominus rose from his chair. “Eliana,” he said, his voice warm.

She walked toward him over the hand-knotted Persian rug with the poise and grace of a runway model and paused beside him, offering her cheek.

He leaned down and kissed her, thinking she was too thin. Her cheekbones stood out in the perfect oval of her face, which made her dark eyes look even larger than normal. He brushed a lock of her choppy black hair from her forehead and wished she’d grow it longer. He didn’t like this modern look on her.

As beautiful as her mother had once been, his only daughter was twice that and had his intelligence and drive to boot. Trained in martial arts—unnecessary, but it kept her occupied—an expert in computer science, and fluent in several languages, she was worth a hundred of someone like her older brother, Caesar. The boy was cowardly and unGifted and had he not been his son Dominus would have given him over to the Castratus . But Eliana was his pride and joy. Unfortunately she chafed just as her mother had at the life of sheltered privilege she’d been forced to lead.

But Dominus would never risk allowing her the leniency to roam free in the world. She was the only thing he truly loved, the only precious spark of light in his life of war and darkness, and he protected her from the dangers of the outside world just as he protected her from the ugly truth of what he was and all the things he’d done to get that way.

But someday, if his plan worked, she could live free as a bird. As could they all.

Forever.

She turned to the warriors. “ Bonum mane, Bellatores ,” she murmured, gazing at D. Lix gave a murmured hello, but D remained silent. His gaze flickered to hers, and he inclined his head, then glanced away. That muscle in his jaw flexed again.

Dominus smiled. He’d noticed it before, the hunger that wafted from the tattooed warrior like perfume whenever his only daughter was near, and he welcomed it. Eliana would never find him attractive; of that he was sure. She had suitors aplenty and was quite literally out of his class. And Demetrius—rebellious, insubordinate, combative Demetrius—had more than once been induced to follow some order he found egregious simply because he’d had Eliana utter it for him.

Oh, how he loved to prey upon weakness. Just thinking about it warmed the frozen cockles of his heart.

“I heard a rumor a strange full-Blood male was spotted near the Vatican,” Eliana said, turning back to him with a little furrow between her dark brows. “An Alpha. Are you in any danger?”

He smiled down at her. Out of necessity, he’d told her—everyone, actually, he’d told everyone long ago—that they were being hunted by others of their kind, that they’d be massacred if found by these savage interlopers.

That his own father had been killed by one of them.

“That’s nothing for you to worry about, love,” he said with a meaningful glance at D. The big male met his gaze straight on.

Isn’t that right, my friend?

Slowly, D nodded his head yes, and the King’s smile grew wider. “That’s nothing for you to worry about,” he repeated, and sent the warriors on their way.

When Xander opened the door to the gym and stuck his head inside, the perfume that hit his nose was so lusciously overpowering he sagged against the jamb, momentarily stunned.

“Who’s there?” came Bartleby’s aggravated voice from behind a folding screen erected in one corner of the darkened room.

Morgan’s scent, a voluptuous bloom of heated woman and exotic dark loveliness, drew him forward, had him salivating like one of Pavlov’s trained dogs. Following it was a compulsion, a decision made in some deep, animal part of his brain that overrode all logic and restraint. He pushed off the doorjamb and let the door swing shut behind him.

It was hot in the room, a tropical heat, the air humid and perfumed. Along with the lack of light it reminded him of a night he’d spent once in Bali, but there hadn’t been this amazing, sensual force pulling him forward then. There hadn’t been this need .

Because it was need. As basic as the need to eat or breathe or Shift, the urge to mate with the source of all that lovely, deep, feminine scent was a lashing demand in every cell of his body.