Page 85 of Shadow's Edge (Night Prowler 1)
“THIS IS RUBBISH!” Durga roared. He turned blazing eyes toward Leander. “Complete fantasy! How do we know this woman doesn’t have some kind of involvement with the dogs who took your sister! She kept herself locked in her rooms for days with the other one—” He jerked his thumb toward Morgan, who had dropped to her knees on the floor as the men who held her stared in shock at Jenna, their anger forgotten. “A female who just admitted treason, a female you allowed onto your Assembly, a female who now knows everything about us—our defensive strategies, our logistical strengths and weaknesses—everything!”
He leveled Jenna with a look of such pure, unmitigated hatred she nearly took a step back. “She cannot be Queen! She can’t even be trusted! The two of them were probably planning this all along!”
“No,” Christian said flatly. “She knows nothing of this.”
Durga growled, a low snarl of hostility that rumbled through the room. “We cannot know that! They both should be taken and questioned and we then can determine what to do with—”
“Jenna.” Leander’s voice came from beside her, spare and hard. “Is there something you need to tell me?”
She turned her head to look at him and saw it like an ugly blemish that marred his beautiful face.
Doubt.
He doubted her. And she had just realized what he meant to her, she had just begun to admit to herself how much she wanted and needed and cared for him and now...now he doubted her.
“Jenna,” he said again, an imperative.
Weak sunlight angled through the high windows, spilling pale across the gleaming floor, falling warm across his features. But there was no warmth in his eyes. They glittered diamond hard and cold.
He waited, silent. For all the gold in the world, she couldn’t find her tongue to speak.
“Just tell them, Jenna!” Morgan sobbed. “Just show them what you can do!”
Leander’s hand slipped from her shoulder, he slid one step away. And all the while, one thing hammered in her head, drowning everything else out with a cruel irony that would have made her smile if she didn’t want so very badly to weep.
Mate.
“You can’t possibly think I had anything to do with Daria’s disappearance, Leander,” she said as strongly as she could manage while everything inside of her was weak and floundering. All the new joy she had found in the forest was being sucked away, inch by inch, by a vacuum, a massive black hole of pain. “You can’t.”
He continued to stare at her, his eyes assessing and full of swift calculation, his face too savage, too far beyond human touch to be tamed. “You wanted nothing but the truth from me, do you recall?” he murmured. “You demanded that much, and now...” His voice was so soft, ever so dark and controlled, revealing nothing. “Now I must demand it from you, love.”
Not a sound was heard in the chamber. Not a muscle moved, not a breath was drawn as the Alpha of the Ikati turned to face her fully and pinned her in his green gaze, clear and cold as a dragon’s.
“Is there something you need to tell me?”
It was a curious pain she felt, witnessing the awakening on his face, the way doubt bloomed into something deeper, something darker as she kept her breathless silence while the seconds ticked slowly by. Leander held her gaze without blinking, without smiling. The curious pain burned and burned and yet she could say nothing. She couldn’t speak.
Leander finally turned away, and Jenna felt something within her chest fall and shatter, like the glass she had dropped to the floor. She lost herself then, lost the feeling of completion and satisfaction she knew only a short time ago, wrapped in his arms, his body filling hers, their forms fitted together as perfectly as if they were made one for the other.
She lost the only fleeting happiness she’d ever known.
She controlled her breathing. She controlled her shaking legs. She even controlled the bile that wanted to rise up into her throat as she turned to Morgan, who knelt pitifully on the floor, still surrounded by stunned, gaping men.
“Tell them what you know, Morgan. Tell them where she was taken.”
“I don’t know!” she wailed. “They didn’t tell me anything—I was only contacted once—they promised me they would just take the Keeper of the Bloodlines, just him and no one else!”
Viscount Weymouth gasped, then took two swift steps toward Morgan and slapped her very hard across the face.
Her head rocked with the impact of his blow, but she whipped it back and glared at him, her face streaked with tears and mascara, her pride not yet defeated.
“How did they get to you?” he demanded, trembling in fury. “Why would you betray us?”
Morgan smirked, her lovely face twisted into a mask of hatred. “Why would I betray you?” She let out a cold, mirthless laugh. “When every decision about my life is not my own? When even who I should marry is determined for me, by the Keeper of the Bloodlines, forced upon me and every other woman of our kind so we make a proper Blood match? We’re nothing more to you than breeders!”
Viscount Weymouth slapped her again, this time so hard she fell back to the floor on one elbow. A drop of blood welled up on her lower lip. She licked at it, then wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. The blood smeared over her chin.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Weymouth shouted. The other men began to advance around Morgan, staring down at her with flexed fists and faces black with fury. “They’ll kill us all!”
