Page 100 of Shadow's Edge (Night Prowler 1)
She pressed a pale hand over her eyes. “God. If only I had gotten there sooner,” she whispered. “It took me so long to find her, nearly all day. If I had gotten there faster...” She drew a ragged breath and shook her head. She squeezed her eyes together. A line of tears beaded her lashes. She swiped them away with the back of her fingers.
“Jenna,” Leander said, his voice roughened. “It’s not your fault. If you hadn’t found her, if you hadn’t gone looking for her, she’d be dead. What you did, back there...”
He lost the words.
Staring at her now, so beautiful and fragile and visibly despondent, twilight sliding like a lover’s touch across her face, sent a terrible ache through his body, a fierce burning through his lungs that left him stunned and breathless. He tried to inhale, he tried to catch his breath, but he couldn’t seem to manage it.
How long did he have? How many more days or hours or minutes until she left him behind with a gaping hole in his chest where his heart used to be?
The thought of living without her was like acid in his throat.
“So...” She drew in a long breath, gathered herself, and sat up straighter in the chair, folding her hands primly together in her lap. She gazed down at her hands and spoke in a small, quiet voice. “When are you going to do it?”
The hopelessness in her voice snapped him back to reality. His eyebrows ruched.
“Do what?”
She sent him a dark, resigned look. “Imprison me.”
He stared at her, aghast.
“With Morgan,” she explained, when he still didn’t speak.
“Who...why...what?” he sputtered.
She waved a pale hand in the air in front of her face, weakly dismissive. “You don’t have to put on an act for me, Leander.” She sighed. “I know you think I helped Morgan. You accused me of it, that day in front of the Assembly. On top of that, I ran away—again—and broke the Law—again. That’s your job, isn’t it? Enforce the Law? Protect the colony?” She stared at him, her gaze grim and unflinching. “Punish the enemy?”
“Jenna,” Leander said, choked, his eyes full of shock. His face had gone very pale. He knelt down on the floor in front of her and grasped her hands, pulled them into his. “How could you ever think such a thing? How could you ever think I would hurt you?”
“Because you”—she began slowly, blinking—“you said it yourself, in the Assembly meeting that day. You said—”
“I asked if you had anything to tell me,” he broke in before she could finish. “You hate bullies, remember? I hoped you would stop hiding from me, stop keeping secrets. I was just giving you a chance to tell me yourself. You were always so stubborn, always so defiant. I wasn’t going to force you into anything, not again, not when you should have just admitted to me then and
there what I already knew—”
“What you already knew?”
She pulled her hands out of his grasp and stood up. The afghan pooled in blocks of primary color around her feet. She stepped over it, crossed to the bed, and sat down on the edge of the mattress with her back, rigid, to him.
Her voice came strange and unsteady across the room. “What is that supposed to mean? What exactly is it that you already knew?”
He came to his feet. His heart pounded against his ribs. “What you are. Who you are.”
She turned her head a fraction of an inch and he caught a glimpse of her profile. Pinched lips, flushed cheeks, long, downswept lashes. Fingers clenched into the glossy fur coverlet.
“And who might that be, Leander?” she said past stiff lips.
He crossed to her in slow, measured steps, never taking his gaze from her face. The scent of roses and her was warm in his nose, the glow of the sunset flooded the room, lighting her hair to fire. He stopped just in front of her and put a finger under her chin. Her head came up.
She lifted her eyes and a sunbeam fell across her face. It illuminated her eyes to a fierce, brilliant green, shining and lucent like an emerald held to the light.
“Well...” she whispered. “Who am I?”
“You are Queen of the Ikati,” he murmured, holding her gaze. “My Queen. My heart and soul...my true love.”
Her lips parted. She didn’t blink. She said nothing.
“You are the woman I’ve waited for my entire life, the woman who makes me want to be a better man, who makes me think I have a chance to be the man I’ve always wanted to be.”
