Page 102 of Rapture's Edge (Night Prowler 3)
Or God help them. He’d slaughter them all.
The manor was vast and luxurious, a labyrinth of drawing rooms and music rooms and sitting rooms, everything lavished in silks and velvets and gilt. Eliana was led down corridor after corridor, past a dual staircase that wound up to the second floor, her bare feet touching cool, polished wood between the soft pile of the Turkish rugs placed everywhere, until finally she arrived at the entrance to a grand, gilded room. It was cavernous, outfitted with even more attention to finery than the rest of the place.
And something else quite unique from the other rooms she’d passed: thrones.
A matched set of them, two glossy, elaborately carved mahogany thrones with cushioned seats, set on a dais at the far side of the room.
Her lips twisted ruefully. Back in the catacombs beneath Rome, her father had sat on one almost identical.
The thrones were empty, but the long tables that flanked them were not. A group of men sat facing her in substantial wooden chairs of their own, arms crossed over cashmere sweaters or silk jackets, or hands spread on the fine linen cloth of the table or clenched into fists at their sides, each one with a face that didn’t bode well for the state of her health. Their expressions were uniformly hard, hostile, and grim.
One at the end—a younger one, boyish and bookish with a lock of dark hair flopped over one eye, glasses he kept pushing up the bridge of his nose—looked a little green around the gills.
Must be his first execution.
They didn’t stand as she was brought forward, only watched her approach with eerie, vivid yellow-green eyes, lucent and piercing in the wan sunlight that slanted through the far windows of the chamber. They were the same eyes as the one she’d met outside, the brother of the Alpha, and they chilled her in exactly the same way.
Her people’s eyes were the color of a tropical midnight, or the richest, loamy earth—dark but warm and full of life. These people’s eyes were clear and glacial, and they sliced through her like gusts of killing cold wind.
They were wealthy and elegant and refined, but beneath all of that, they were killers, to a one.
She lifted her chin. I am Eliana, daughter of the House of Cardinalis. The women of my lineage are lionhearted; I won’t be intimidated. I won’t let them see me beg.
In a bone-jarring move that snapped her teeth together and elicited an instinctive snarl from her lips, Keshav shoved her to her knees in front of the men.
“Silence!” one of the men at the table commanded. Older, gray-haired, and pompous in formal, outdated clothing that included a brocade vest and cravat, he stood, and Eliana let her snarl subside to a low, warning grumble in her chest.
The one who’d stood glanced at Keshav behind her and nodded. Without warning, pain speared through her and her breath was knocked from her lungs as he kicked her, hard, in the kidney.
She fell forward, gasping, tears of anger and humiliation burning her eyes. She rested her forehead on the cool wood floor for a moment to regain her balance. The air was frigid on the backs of her bare legs.
I won’t beg. I will not.
The pompous one spoke, and his British accent somehow managed to make him seem even more arrogant than his posture and expression attested.
“I am Viscount Weymouth, Keeper of the Bloodlines. I will be in charge of these proceedings, and if at any time your answers do not satisfy me, I will order Mr. Keshav to administer another motivational little prompt, and another, until they do.”
There was a pause. “Do you understand?”
Eliana said to the glossy parquet floor, “No. I thought I was supposed to be silent. How can I answer your questions if I’m supposed to be—”
There came another kick, this one more vicious, to the ribs.
She moaned with the pain and would have curled into a little ball around it, but she was roughly dragged back to her knees by a hand fisted in her hair. She couldn’t right herself, though, because pain had absconded with her motor skills—and her ability to breathe. She gulped hoarse, hacking breaths, waves of agony radiating through her like fire. The only thing that held her upright was the fist in her hair.
She tried to go to the place of peace and relaxation in her mind where she went when she did her daily katas, but it was no use. Adrenaline and fear lashed her with the crack of a bullwhip, and it was no use.
“Attempts at humor,” intoned Viscount Weymouth, “will not be tolerated.”
Eliana heard Mel’s snarky reply in her head: Evidently.
“What the bloody hell is this?”
Eliana looked toward the shocked voice. From the door beside the end of the table, the Alpha’s brother had appe
ared, and he now stood staring at the viscount in livid, unblinking outrage.
Unapologetic, the viscount looked at him down the end of a long, aquiline nose. “It was agreed that I would oversee—”
