J. Geissinger - Shadow’s Edge

Leander kept his gaze on Christian as he stood from the couch, walked over to the glistening expanse of windows, and ran a hand through his thick hair.

“Son of a bitch,” Christian murmured, and nothing more.

“You seem...disturbed, brother.”

Christian turned to look at him. A muscle flexed in his jaw. “We’ve found the free-born, half-human, incredibly beautiful daughter of the tribe’s most powerful Alpha ever, and you’re telling me that not only do you think she can Shift, but that she might turn out to be more Gifted than us all. Yes. I’m disturbed. I’m definitely disturbed.”

Leander’s left eyebrow cocked. “Incredibly beautiful?”

Their gazes held for just a bit longer than Leander liked. Then Christian turned back to the window with a shrug. “None of my business, I suppose,” he muttered to the sunny view. “Second sons never get first choice.”

“Welcome to my world,” Morgan said from behind them as she swept into the room. “How’d you like to never even have a choice because what’s between your legs happens to not be a penis?”

“For God’s sake, Morgan,” Leander said sharply, his patience beginning to unravel. He turned to glare at her. “Enough of that! We need to focus on getting Jenna back to Sommerley before she runs away again. Before she Shifts for the first time. Right away. Today. Now .”

“No!” Morgan put her hands on her hips and glared right back at him, defiant.

She stood in the middle of the elegantly appointed suite wearing a dress he hadn’t seen before. It was made mostly of air, a thin wisp of black silk to her knees with diamond cutout patterns throughout, revealing large swaths of tanned, perfect skin and sculpted abdominal muscles. He narrowed his eyes and wondered how much it had cost him.

And were those python skin heels?

“Absolutely not! We’ve got another few days before her birthday! There’s no reason to rush this—”

“We are not on vacation, Morgan. Our purpose here is not to relax, sightsee, or shop —”

“Easy for you to say!” Morgan snapped, eyes flashing bright green and blade sharp. “You’ve been able to come and go as you please! You haven’t been cooped up your entire life, waiting for a chance to escape, hoping for—”

“Hoping for what ?” Leander enunciated, quiet and very calm.

They stared at each other across the room.

“If you think the life of Alpha is better than yours, easier than yours, you are very sadly mistaken, Morgan.”

For all his privilege and money, for all the power that came with his position, he often wished, in the secret dark heart of his soul, the role of Alpha had fallen to another.

He alone was the leader. He alone held all their fates in his hands. It was not, as Morgan imagined, an all-access pass to happiness and fulfillment.

No. It was closer to a curse.

Morgan lifted her chin. “And how do you propose we go about this?” she asked icily. She crossed her arms over her chest and tapped one python-clad toe against the plush carpet. “I could use Suggestion to get her to go along for a while, a few hours possibly, but that will only go so far. How are we actually supposed to get her back to Sommerley? Kidnap her?”

“I think we should just tell her the truth,” Christian said from his position at the window. “She must know she’s different. What if we Shift in front of her and tell her she’s one of us?”

“And then what?” Morgan shot back, turning to give him a frosty stare. “Throw a bag over her head and drag her off when she freaks out and runs away?”

Christian ran a hand through his mass of shining black hair again, leaving it in disarray. “No. But we could drug her.”

“I was being sarcastic , Christian,” Morgan said with an exasperated sigh. “There’s no way we’re going to manhandle her, she’s not some piece of—”

Leander gripped the carved wood arms of the chair he was sitting in with such force they splintered under his hands. Morgan and Christian fell silent and looked over at him.

“If either of you had paid any attention during the Assembly meeting, you would know the plan,” he snapped, eyes blazing. “We will get her alone. We will subdue her with your power of Suggestion, Morgan. We will—”

The phone on the desk rang, interrupting him. He inhaled a long breath, released his grip on the chair, stood stiffly, and walked over to yank the receiver from its base.

“Yes,” he said into it, curt and low.

“What’s a few days’ difference?” Morgan said quietly to Christian, lobbying for his agreement.

He stretched his long arms out and put both palms flat against the glass, looking down at the view of the city below. “Agreed,” he murmured, almost to himself. “We should stay here awhile and...get to know her better before we take her back. Before her mind is made up for her.”

“What?” Morgan said. “What does that mean?”

He didn’t answer, and the tension in his shoulders suggested he wasn’t in the mood for more conversation.

She unfolded her arms, and the slender ruby bracelets encircling her right wrist released a knot of fiery sparks in band over faceted band. She shook back a swath of long, glossy locks from her face and glanced over at the ruined arms of Leander’s chair. “Anyway, if she isn’t home,” she persisted, “do we hang around her front door for a few hours, waiting for her to magically appear? Like that won’t look suspicious? Or are we supposed to go try to find her—”

“We don’t need to find her,” Leander interrupted quietly, setting the phone back down in its cradle. He turned to gaze at both of them with an odd look on his face, as if he’d just considered something deeply arresting.

“She found us . That was the front desk on the phone. She’s in the lobby.”

Jenna remembered very clearly the last time she saw her father alive.

It was a few days before her tenth birthday and raining very hard. The water sliced like needles down from the sullen, slate-gray sky. This would have been unusual for the month of June in most places, but at that time her family was living on Kauai, one of the smaller of the Hawaiian Islands. It rained almost every day in that green and lovely tropical paradise.

They’d been there a few weeks, no more. Boxes were still half-unpacked in the living room. Her mother never really bothered with completely unpacking all their belongings. They’d be packing them up soon enough again, she knew.

The smell of green vegetation, blooming plumeria, and wet, loamy earth soaked through everything in their small home. Her mother had left all the lights burning to ward off the gloom of a tropical summer storm, but her father had gone around the house in silence, turning off the bulbs one by one, stealthy and taut and ever unfathomable.

It was one of the things Jenna remembered most vividly about him. The way he always preferred to move in the dark, like some nocturnal creature of the forest on the hunt for dinner.

She’d been watching him again from her favorite hiding place, the tiny space under the stairs she’d turned into a warm burrow with pillows and blankets and her love-worn teddy bear. One of Teddy’s eyes was missing, the other a jaunty speck of black against plush caramel cheeks.

Her mother said she was too old to keep carrying him around, but Jenna couldn’t bear to part with him. Teddy and the clothes on her back were the only solid proof that she had a past.

Her father caught her watching, as he always did. Even when he didn’t call her out on it she sensed he knew her eyes were on him. But this time he called her name, motioned with his hand for her to crawl out from under the stairs.