Edge of Oblivion (10 page)

“No,” he said, quite serious. “I won’t.”

“Well, good then.” She still wasn’t sure if he was mocking her. But the way he looked at her was not mocking at all. His expression was at once grave and faintly confused, ineffably curious.

And...hungry.

A surge of heat passed between them, bright as danger. It made her take a step back, beyond the bathroom door. The marble was a cold shock beneath her feet.

“Ah, do you mind if I...?” She gestured to the shower, being careful not to allow her hand to shake.

“Of course,” he said, inclining his head. He stepped back, too, into the living room. “I’ll be waiting for you.”

That
, she thought, firmly closing the bathroom door,
is exactly what I’m worried about
.

Morgan was under much better control by the time breakfast was served.

The café was quaint and sunny, situated directly across from the Keats-Shelley Memorial House at the base of the Spanish Steps. It boasted an excellent view of the terraced garden staircase with its fuchsia riot of ruffled azalea beds, the imposing Renaissance bulk of the Trinità dei Monti church perched at the top, and the tourists that flocked past on the Piazza di Spagna like so many chattering, exotic birds. It was Xander’s choice; he had guided her to it with one hand held lightly under her elbow the entire four-block walk from their hotel.

They sat now in silence in the shade of a white umbrella, looking at everything but one another.

The aproned
cameriere
came with their demitasse cups of espresso and departed with a bow.

“So. What is your plan?” Xander took a sip from the tiny porcelain cup. In his big hand it looked like a child’s thing, small and easily breakable.

“I rather hoped you had one.”

Morgan shifted in her chair, settling better against its cushioned back, and lifted her own cup to her lips. She swallowed and tasted heaven: a tiny dose of coffee so fine and strong and sweet it was nearly dessert, topped with a creamy fluff of foam. “God, that’s good,” she said. She finished it in one long draught and sighed in pleasure.

Beside her, Xander smiled. “You don’t have espresso in England?”

“Tea,” she said. “Very fine tea, but nothing at all like this. This is—” She struggled for a moment until he supplied the perfect word.

“Decadent.”

He turned his head to look at her, and the sunlight behind his head caught in his dark hair and haloed it with blue flame. It struck her again how beautiful he was, how savagely graceful, at once mythic and menacing. There was something oddly doomed about him, too, an air of weary sorrow like the memory of too much sin.

Like a fallen angel
, she thought, and had to glance away.

“It’s better than what we have in Brazil also.”

She glanced back at him, watching as he drained his cup and set it down, every movement elegant and spare. He looked up at her, rested his elbow on the arm of his chair, then rubbed one finger across his full lips in a slow and thoughtful gesture that also managed to look profoundly erotic.

“Our espresso is grown at lower altitudes, in nonvolcanic soils. Italian blends are more refined.”

“Why does the altitude make a difference?”

“Like wine grapes, only coffee beans grown at high altitudes in rocky, inhospitable soil produce the best fruit.”

She lifted an eyebrow.

“It’s the struggle that refines them,” he explained, “the challenge. Give them too much water, sunshine, and fertile soil and they grow fat and tasteless, like a Concord grape, appetizing only when saturated with sugar and made into jelly. Or they wither and die of boredom. Like people. The best ones are survivors. Stripped of chaff, refined by struggle and hardship, they’re rendered complex and potent by their very endurance and ability to thrive in spite of deprivation.”

Poetic
, she thought.
My assassin is poetic.

“So,” Morgan said, gazing at him askance from beneath her lashes, “which are you, then? A fat jelly grape?”

He smiled, wry. “No.” His gaze flicked over her, once, hotly assessing. “And neither, I suspect, are you.”

The food arrived. Plates loaded with prosciutto and honeydew and
cornetto
, biscotti and boiled eggs with heir-loom tomatoes, toasted bread and more of the wonderful espresso. Morgan dug in, trying to avoid the burning stare Xander aimed in her direction.

“I thought perhaps the most crowded areas first,” she offered around a bite of buttered toast once the waiter had retreated. “The touristy areas. Ancient Rome, the Palatine Hill, places like that.”

“More sightseeing,” he said, with a tone that indicated his disapproval of this plan.

She swallowed her bite of toast and sent him a frosty look. “It’s just a numbers game. Jenna didn’t See their direct location, so I have to start somewhere. We can eliminate the bigger, more obvious tourist traps first, then move to the outer areas if we don’t find anything. But I have a feeling we will.”

“You think they’re hiding in plain sight?”

“Why not?” She shrugged. “We do.”

There followed a long, uncomfortable silence. She ate, trying to ignore him while he sat still as stone in his chair, examining her with a gaze so heavy it was
touch
. Heat across her cheekbones, fight-

or-flight adrenaline coursing through her veins. But she was not—
not
—going to look at him.

At last he spoke, and she instantly wished he hadn’t.

“Why did you do it?”

Concentrating on the contents of her plate, she speared a ripe piece of melon on the tines of her fork, folded a paper-thin strip of prosciutto over it, and lifted it to her mouth. It melted on her tongue, savory and sweet.

“I thought I told you. I wasn’t running away. I just wanted to look around a bit before we got started.”

“That wasn’t what I meant. Which you know.”

His voice was quiet, barely audible over two elderly gentlemen at the next table arguing vigorously over a game of chess. In spite of herself she glanced at him, expecting to find derision or contempt. But there was only curiosity, that and something deeper, something indefinable that glittered dark in the golden depths of his eyes. The air between them crackled.

Apprehensive and uncomfortable, she dropped her gaze to her plate. “What difference does it make? What’s done is done.” She savagely speared another cube of melon, then dropped her fork to her plate with a clatter and sat back against her chair, her appetite vanished.

“As a matter of fact, it makes a great deal of difference.”

“To
who
?” she replied, unhappy. Her sentence was iron-clad, her fate was sealed. Whys no longer made any difference to anyone.

“In the end, everything matters” was his cryptic response. “The big triumphs and failures are what we most remember, but all the little mindless moments, all the forgotten details of your life matter, too. It all matters, because it all adds up to who you really are.”

Surprised, she glanced up at him. That look of curiosity was still there, intense and unflagging, and she was held in it, suspended like a fossil pinned in liquid amber. All at once her apprehension and unhappiness disappeared and she felt only that odd bud of hope again, the one that had first taken root last night. It burned through her heart like a spear of fire.

“Who I really am,” she repeated, uncertain. Was this a test?

He nodded, the smallest motion of his head.

“I’m nothing. I’m no one. I’m...” she cleared her throat, wretched, “...a traitor.”

“Are you?” he murmured, with an almost imperceptible accent on the first word.

His eyes were hypnotic, sunlight and shadow, searching and searing and washed with ancient sorrow that darkened their pure luminosity but allowed her a glimpse into a well of torment so deep, so unfathomable, it was frightening. For a moment as he watched her, his mask of perfect indifference slipped and she glimpsed beneath it something that she recognized all too well.

Pain. Just like her, this beautiful, unrepentant killer was in pain.

In the space of one moment to the next, something vital changed.

“Haven’t you ever wanted a different sort of life?” She blurted it, unthinking. It came out small and pleading. Raw.

“A different sort of life,” he echoed, hollow.

“That’s all I ever dreamed of, since I was a little girl,” she rushed on. “Something more.

Something...else.
Anything
else.” She gestured to the people strolling past, the whistling waiters, the arguing chess players, a pair of nuns in black habits walking arm in arm up the steps toward the church. “What they have, but I never will.”

He sat in absolute stillness, watching her with unblinking eyes, his face rigid. “Freedom.”

“Yes,” she said, surprised he had guessed. “Liberty and independence and,
especially
, the choice over who we can love.” His face turned ashen when she said those words, but she pressed on, ignoring it. “ ‘One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to
live
proudly.’ Do you know who said that?”

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...