Rapture's Edge (45 page)

“Probably more dangerous,” the Queen said, still with that flat tone. “But for very different reasons.”

“Thank you!” the viscount crowed, vindicated, and then, to the circle of panthers, “
Attack!
”

“Stand down!” said the Queen forcefully, her hand held up. There was a moment of confusion, of hesitation, until she said, “He won’t be harmed, at least not yet. Everyone, stand down.”

“Majesty!”

“
Viscount
.” Jenna turned her head and gave Weymouth a look that snapped his jaw shut and sent him sinking back into his seat in lip-trembling, pale-knuckled fear.

Deadly soft, the Queen said, “Let me repeat myself
again
so there is no possibility of misunderstanding. I said,
stand down
.”

Leander sighed and crossed his arms over his chest.

There was disgruntled hissing, a slow slinking back on silent paws. D watched with wary eyes until they withdrew to a safer distance, but he still didn’t Shift back to human form, and Eliana waited, feeling like her heart was choking her, to hear what would come next.

To D, the Queen said in a reasonable tone, “Please, Shift. We need to talk.”

He looked from her to Leander to the viscount. Slowly, his muzzle curled back over his fangs.

“I understand,” she said, sounding as if she actually did, “but we really need to talk.”

He made a sound in his throat, a low, chuffing noise of discontent. The Queen waited patiently, unmoving, her expression revealing nothing. His flattened ears came forward, and he tested the air with his nose. Finally the enormous panther shimmered and dissolved to a floating cloud of Vapor, which then coalesced into the form of a man.

A tattooed, very,
very
naked man, muscular and tall and huge.

Everywhere.

The Queen spun around, turned her back on him. Her face turned red, and her eyes were enormous and round. Her hand flew to her mouth, and she coughed into it, ladylike. “Thank you. You’ll be needing clothes. I, um, I don’t
know what we have that will”—she coughed again—“fit you, but I’m sure the viscount can arrange for something.” She glanced up at him with a wicked glint in her eye. “Perhaps you could offer him your trousers, Viscount.”

This wasn’t a question.

Eliana didn’t even have to look at him to feel his outrage. She probably couldn’t have looked at him, anyway; all she could see was Demetrius. Beautiful, powerful Demetrius, staring past the Queen, at her, his eyes shining and ferocious and dark.

“
Majesty!
” The viscount was apoplectic.

“Your trousers,” the Alpha repeated icily, staring in open disapproval at his red-faced wife. Clearly this was not how he envisioned this meeting going. “
Now
.”

Seething, the viscount unbuckled his expensive-looking black pants, slid them over his legs, and handed them over. Leander tossed them at D, who caught them and put them on.

They were inches too short, the thighs inches too tight, but he managed to stuff himself into them and zip them up. The waist was too large and sagged down around his hips. He crossed his arms over his chest and stared with hooded eyes at the back of the Queen’s head.

He casually drawled, “All in, m’lady.”

Eliana fought the sudden, insane urge to laugh. Leander, however, did not appear to find any of this in any way funny. He watched D with the laser-like intensity of a predator contemplating a meal.

The Queen turned to face him again, her composure regained. “As the viscount so helpfully pointed out, you’ve broken quite a few of our most sacred laws.”

D said nothing.

“But Eliana has broken them all.”

“Your laws aren’t ours,” D said, steel in his voice. “And she is guilty of nothing except putting her trust in the wrong place.”

The Queen appeared unimpressed. “Even if what you say is true, that kind of misplaced trust has its price. Especially when it results in the death of innocent people.” Her voice darkened. “Especially when it means we will be hunted even more fiercely than before. Everything will change now, for the worse. There must be proper punishment.”

D stepped forward with a low snarl, and Leander did, too. The two of them squared off on either side of the Queen, who, judging by her expression, was more irritated than alarmed.

“By all means, Warrior, go ahead and try to intimidate me. But when I Shift into a dragon and eat you, it will be too late to regret your mistake.”

D looked at her a moment. Then, very quietly he said, “Dragon?”

Leander snapped, “Big as this room, you bloody oaf. So choose your words carefully, and show some
respect
.”

The Queen smiled sweetly. “Or maybe a Kodiak bear, so I don’t damage the frescoes again.” She glanced at the high, vaulted ceiling above, and D followed her gaze, as did Eliana.

There among the pastel clouds and feasting gods and dancing cherubs painted on the ceiling were long, deep gouges and cracks, and three craters where the plaster had been crushed and torn away as if something had smashed into it. Something big.

At D’s look of incredulity, she shrugged. “Learning how to fly is a nightmare, let me tell you. I should never have attempted it indoors.”

D said between gritted teeth, “Celian said you were reasonable, but now I can see he was wrong.”

“Oh, on the contrary! In fact, I have a very reasonable proposition for you.”

His jaw worked. With a livid, threatening glance at Leander, he said, “Which is?”

The Queen’s sweet, sweet smile never wavered. “Give your life in her stead, and we will let her live.”

This shocked the entire room, even Leander, whose head whipped around as he stared in confusion at his wife. But no one was more shocked than Eliana, who leapt to her feet.

“No!” she shouted. “He was only trying to protect me—”

“Well,
someone
has to pay,” said the Queen, drolly. “I’m sorry, but it’s one of our oldest laws. A traitor’s life is forfeit. So either he dies for you, or—”

“Yes,” said Eliana, instantly comprehending. “I will die for him.”

The Queen gave her the oddest of smiles then. Feral and eerie and satisfied, as if she’d just won a bet with herself.

D shouted, “No!”

Leander moved in front of the Queen, and he and D snarled at each other, crouching, readying themselves to spring. She said to Eliana, fiercely, “You will take the punishment he has earned by his own acts of disobedience?”

“Yes.”

“And you will not resist in any way? You will allow us to proceed as we wish?” She lifted a hand toward the draped machine in the corner.

Eliana nodded.

D snarled, “If any of you bastards lays so much as a finger on her, I’ll kill you all!”

“Demetrius—”

“No, Ana, I’m not going to let you do this!”

“This isn’t your decision!”

“You should know it will be much worse now that you’re paying for him, too,” interrupted the Queen, still smiling that strange smile, paired now with a withering stare. “It will take much
longer
.”

It was that smile that finally did it. It hardened something inside her.

In a voice that was cold and iron heavy, Eliana said, “Do. Your.
Worst
.”

It came from some place inside her that she didn’t know existed, a place devoid of fear or doubt, and the Queen knew the truth of it, as did D, who let out an outraged, deafening roar.

The Queen’s head snapped around. She said to him, “Just remember what she offered to do for you, Warrior. And remember it was
before
she knew.”

The Queen reached out and seized his hand.

And Eliana watched in horror as the proud, fierce warrior was consumed.

His eyes popped wide, unseeing. His mouth fell open. His jaw went slack. A tremor passed through his chest. Then, with slow, supple grace, he sank to his knees on the floor in front of the Queen and bowed his head.

The Queen closed her eyes and made a low, humming sound low in her throat. She inhaled, long and deep, and when she exhaled it was as if a weight had been lifted from her.

“Winston Churchill once said, ‘A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets a chance to get its pants on.’ And you’ve proven him right, Warrior.” She looked down
on D at her feet, bare-chested, dressed in another man’s pants, and laughed softly. “Literally.”

“Jenna?” Leander stepped forward.

She turned, glanced briefly at her husband, then finally let her gaze rest on Eliana, and spoke directly to her. “You were right. Truth
is
an absolute. Even with a minority of one. Or, in this case, two.”

So dry, her mouth, so loud, her heartbeat. And so, so wild, this thrum and chaos in her blood, like a windstorm descending. She tried to swallow and couldn’t. She tried to move and couldn’t. It was as if someone outside of her was controlling her entire body, some powerful force had ripped away her will and left her frozen. Breathless. Thunderstruck.

“Jenna.” Leander’s voice was firmer.

She looked back at Leander and smiled, a true smile, one that lit her whole face to radiance. “She’s innocent. And so is he. Neither of them are a danger to us.”

The tension in the room relaxed as if a held breath had been expelled. One by one, the panthers who’d retreated Shifted to Vapor and hung there in the silence of the great hall in small, glittering clouds.

“Eliana,” the Queen said, still holding D’s hand. “I apologize. That was a test, one I hope you can forgive me for. I’m not going to harm him, or you. Come here.”

Quaking, that wild hum still singing in her blood, Eliana found the will to move. She climbed slowly to her feet and crossed to the Queen, staring all the while at Demetrius, who was still on his knees, immobile, transfixed.

The Queen held out her other hand. Smiling, she murmured, “Are you ready for Truth with a capital T?”

Again, Eliana’s mouth would not work. Her lips would not form words.

“Don’t be afraid. There’s just something you need to see, if you’ll let me in.” Her gentle smile grew blinding. “Butterfly.”

And so Eliana took her outstretched hand and finally,
finally
understood.

Truth, like honor and courage and love, does not come in shades of gray. You either have it or you don’t—there is no in between.

Sometimes it takes a lifetime to uncover it, and sometimes it is clear and simple as a sunrise. Also like honor and courage and love, sometimes the truth can be lost, and you have to find your way back to it, crawling over fields of broken glass and dead bodies, your knees and hands bloody and raw, until you get to it and it’s even sweeter than before because of what you suffered on the way.

Eliana was filled with that grateful sweetness now, filled so full her heart could burst. She had seen and felt everything D had seen and felt in the past three years—in
forever
—and now she understood. She understood everything.

And she loved him all the more for it.

“You couldn’t tell me—you couldn’t tell me it was Constantine,” she whispered, voice breaking over every other word. The Queen still held both their hands, providing a connection that allowed her to see inside D’s mind, and him to see inside hers. “He was protecting you from my father…and you were protecting me from him, too. All those years, you watched over me, making sure nothing happened to me. Making sure I was always all right. And then, at the end…”

A scene like a painted picture in her mind: a circular, stone room, two men fighting, a naked woman chained to the wall. Her father plunging a knife into the other man’s back, the man falling to his knees, the woman screaming. D in one doorway and Lix and Constantine in another, watching in horror. Her father throwing another knife at D; its blade sunk deep into his chest.

Constantine, loyal and protective of his brother, broken down from years of abuse from her father, pointing a gun at him and pulling the trigger.

Her father falling slowly to the ground.

Then the
Bellatorum
helping a wounded D to his feet, Constantine handing him the gun so he could carry him, Eliana skidding to a stop just outside the door.

“He found out—about us—about you and I,” D said hoarsely, trembling as badly as she was, his face fraught with the weight of so many memories, so much pain and loss. “He would have killed me, he would have killed us all if Constantine—”

“I know,” she sobbed, on her knees beside him. “
I know
.”

She tore her hand from Jenna’s and threw her arms around D’s neck.

“But you didn’t when you said you’d die for me,” he whispered, his voice harsh. “You didn’t know and still you…you…”

“Because I love you, idiot.” She choked it out. Tears ran down her face and dripped off her chin, her entire body shaking. “It took thinking I’d lose you all over again to realize you’re all the best parts of me. I’m never as good as when I’m with you, and if I can’t be with you then I’m as good as dead anyway.”

Then his arms came around her, and they knelt there like that together in silence, rocking gently, until his lips found hers and he kissed her with all the hunger and possession and tenderness and love he’d always felt for her, all of it between them, bright and burning and so sweet it hurt.