Page 38 of Into Darkness (Night Prowler 6)
Without lowering his arm, he said, “Yes, my associate now cooling on the floor of your cell is proof enough of that. However, you’d be dead before you could do any real damage to me. And I think you’re going to want to stay alive to hear my proposition.”
Still not afraid, just calm, cool, confident. She almost envied him his composure; she herself was feeling the first stirrings of an array of unpleasant emotions. He didn’t seem to care one whit she’d murdered his associate. Another “subject,” no doubt.
“You can’t really think I would shake the hand of my arch enemy.”
His brows pulled together. He lowered his arm, looking—the asshole!—wounded.
“There’s no need for us to be enemies, Jenna. In fact, I’d like to think we can become good friends.” He walked slowly to the windows, and clasped his hands behind his back as he contemplated the view. His tone offhand, he said, “As Leander and I have become.”
Everything inside her ground to a halt.
Leander! Leander! Leander! It began slapping against the inside of her skull, that name so long unspoken aloud, the name of the man she loved more than anything else in the world, and always would, regardless that she hadn’t seen him since she came to this place. He’d been ripped from her arms in that hellhole jungle in Brazil, both of them wounded and no longer able to fight, and she hadn’t seen him since.
He was here, somewhere nearby? And had been, all this time? And—she swallowed back the acid taste of bile in her throat—Sebastian Thorne and he were friends?
It was a trick. A lie. It had to be.
Only the thing was . . . he didn’t smell like he was lying. Everything in his posture and scent and bodily functions said he was telling the truth.
Very slowly, Jenna lowered herself to a nearby chair, just looking at Thorne. Waiting silently, while the animal inside her screamed for blood.
Still to the windows, he said, “One of my Enforcement operatives in New Prague captured one of your kind three weeks ago. Name of Alejandro Luna.” He turned his head and peered at her, his blue eyes as fathomless as the deepest reaches of space. “You know him.”
She did. Once the Alpha of the Brazil colony, Alejandro had been bested by his half-brother Hawk in a ritual power challenge. Alejandro disappeared into the jungle in shame just days before the attack by Thorne’s men, and she never knew what had happened to him.
“He was quite the fount of information, that one,” Thorne added with a faint, knowing smile, making Jenna’s skin prickle with dread.
She’d met Alejandro a lifetime ago when she’d gone to Sommerley in search of answers about her father’s disappearance. She hadn’t known what she was then, had only had her dead mother’s cryptic warnings of “If they ever find you, run,” as a guide. She’d been living in the human world with a human mothe
r back in the days when all that meant was that she was different, not marked for death. In the days when what she wanted more than anything else in the world was to solve the mystery of what had happened to her father, and had followed a beautiful stranger named Leander all the way to England to find the answer. Alejandro had visited them there, as had the Alphas of the other colonies, as they tried to determine if she was friend or foe.
So yes, she knew him. And he knew her.
He knew all about her.
Thorne said softly, “Tell me the locations of the rest of the Ikati, and you and Leander will be reunited. You can live here,” he swept out his arm, “in luxury and peace for the rest of your lives. With your daughters.”
Her heartbeat, loud as thunder. Tremors in her arms and legs, her mouth as dry as bone.
“We already know the whereabouts of one of your daughters. Lumina, she calls herself. She’s incredibly powerful, that one. Blew up a good portion of New Vienna the other day. She escaped, but we’re tracking her.” His gaze flicked to the collar around Jenna’s neck. He met her eyes again. “It’s only a matter of time. But you can expedite that process, because you know exactly where she is, don’t you? And where your other daughter is. And where each and every single Ikati on the face of this Earth is, right at this very moment.” His voice had grown softer and softer, until his final words were so hushed they were nothing but a breath of air past his lips.
“Don’t you.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of fact, because one of her many Gifts was that of Sight, and it allowed her to not only See inside people’s minds with a touch, but also to locate any living creature anywhere who had even a small percentage of Ikati Blood flowing through his or her veins.
Without the collar, she could See. With it, she was blind.
“You’re lying,” she said in a tremulous voice, watching him, smelling him, looking for any tic or tell that what he was saying was false.
There was none.
“I believe you can ascertain perfectly well if I’m lying or not,” he answered, still with that intimate whisper. “My offer is genuine. When Alejandro told us what you could do, I had this suite constructed in less than two weeks. Everything you can ever need is here; most anything you desire will be provided to you, you have only to ask. Your freedom will be restricted, of course, but I had my engineers design this interactive data screen specifically with you in mind. I call it the Oracle. It’s operated solely by voice; just tell it what you’d like to see and you can go anywhere in the world.” Without taking his gaze from her, he raised his voice and said, “Phuket.”
On the screens she’d thought were windows, a crystalline lagoon appeared, dotted with colorful canoes. Beach, sand, craggy cliffs covered with trees, fluffy white clouds freckling the sky.
“Fiji.”
A sun-bleached dock stretched over blue water. A thatched hut sat empty on the sand off in the distance. More fluffy clouds.
