Page 107 of Darkness Bound (Night Prowler 5)
This Queen of theirs was craftier than he’d given her credit for.
With a curse, he threw the phone at the wall, whereupon it immediately shattered with a satisfactory crash, spraying bits of plastic and metal over the dusty stone floor. He began to pace, seething.
“Filthy spy! You think you can come here and sneak around? You think there won’t be consequences? You think you can outsmart me?”
He knew it was her now, that night when the desert air felt alive. Weymouth had just warned him in his hushed, hurried call that s
he wasn’t with their party in the jungle, and was probably headed his way.
He wished he’d known earlier to watch out for anything white.
“Fucking falcon!” he shouted to the empty room. “Fucking SPIDER!”
She’d heard everything. She knew everything. Now there was only one thing left for him to do.
“Marcell!” Caesar roared. In moments he appeared, bowing, in the doorway of Caesar’s chambers.
“Sire?”
“We’re going into Marrakech. Tonight. You, me, that mercenary friend of yours who’s such a good tracker. And the big bald one, the deserter from the Nepal colony who recently joined us.”
“The Firestarter?”
“That’s him.”
Marcell’s brows lifted.
Caesar said, “There’s been a change of plans. We need an airplane.” His eyes met Marcell’s and his lips, cold and red, curved to a smile. “We’re going to make a little unscheduled visit to Brazil.”
Hawk had a lot of experience repressing his feelings. Before he met Jacqueline, he was profoundly uncomfortable even admitting he had feelings, and went to great lengths to smother, bury, or otherwise ignore them out of existence. Feelings were for the weak. Specifically, tears were for the weak.
He never cried. Never. Even as a boy, when his father gave him a vicious beating for some infraction, imagined or real, he bit his tongue and endured it, dry-eyed as a marble statue adorning a grave.
Only now, listening to the Queen speak, he thought he would.
“. . . as soon as possible. I understand why you did it, Morgan, I know your heart was in the right place, but it’s not for us to make a believer from a critic with kidnapping and coercion. She leaves first thing tomorrow morning.”
Morgan stood in front of Jenna, head lowered, looking appropriately cowed.
Directing her fierce gaze in Hawk’s direction, the Queen quietly added, “And those pictures will be destroyed. Immediately. Tonight.”
Her tone indicated exactly how despicable she considered him for his part in the whole wretched operation . . . an opinion with which he wholeheartedly agreed.
“It’s already been done.” He felt as though he’d been swallowing rocks. His voice sounded like it emanated from the depths of a well. Pull yourself together! he screamed silently to himself. You knew Jacqueline would be leaving! You knew this would come!
He just didn’t think it would be happening quite so soon. He began a serious discussion with himself about the merits of slitting his wrists versus saying or doing something to make the Queen turn him into a charcoal briquette, as she had with Weymouth, eventually deciding he deserved nothing more than to live a long and healthy life, alone, wallowing in his own misery.
He deserved to suffer. How he could’ve gone along with the plan in the first place was making him too sick to even consider.
Along with him and Morgan, all the other Assembly members and the Alphas from each colony had gathered in the Queen’s lavish new home. The tri-level structure was built around the trunk of a Brazil nut tree so large it would take ten men with outstretched arms to encircle its massive girth, and the tree grew right up through the center. Hawk and Morgan stood before Leander and Jenna, who were seated together on a cushioned settee in the main living area on the second floor. Though it was upward of eighty degrees, Jenna was wrapped in a thick blanket. The occasional shiver wracked her body, and Leander, beside her, looked tense and unhappy, as he watched her with a frown.
As they were rocked listlessly by Olivia Sutherland, whose haunted eyes stared out of a wan face, the twins cooed happily in a bassinette nearby.
“That’s what prompted his challenge against the Alpha.” Morgan shot Hawk a sympathetic look. “He refused to turn over the pictures to Alejandro when ordered to do so. He’s become very . . . fond of Jacqueline.”
Fond.
Hawk closed his eyes. He wasn’t fond of her. He was balls-out, soul searingly, madly in love with her. And she didn’t even remember him. And she was leaving tomorrow.
