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1032 Words
Just like her, this beautiful, unrepentant killer was in pain.
In the space of one moment to the next, something vital changed.
“Haven’t you ever wanted a different sort of life?” She blurted it, unthinking. It came out small and pleading. Raw.
“A different sort of life,” he echoed, hollow.
“That’s all I ever dreamed of, since I was a little girl,” she rushed on. “Something more. Something...else. Anything else.” She gestured to the people strolling past, the whistling waiters, the arguing chess players, a pair of nuns in black habits walking arm in arm up the steps toward the church. “What they have, but I never will.”
He sat in absolute stillness, watching her with unblinking eyes, his face rigid. “Freedom.”
“Yes,” she said, surprised he had guessed. “Liberty and independence and, especially, the choice over who we can love.” His face turned ashen when she said those words, but she pressed on, ignoring it. “ ‘One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.’ Do you know who said that?”
He didn’t hesitate. “Nietzsche.”
She laughed, surprised again. “An existentialist assassin! Yes, Nietzsche. And he was right. Death is always preferable to a life in chains. If nothing else, at least we should be allowed that.” Her hands shook. She pulled them into her lap, clasped them hard together. “But we’re not. We’re allowed nothing. And for me, for a woman...”
Her voice faded. There was silence between them for a moment before she resumed, low, to her hands. “I thought becoming an Assembly member would change that. I thought being more Gifted than most of the other men in our colony would change it. I thought if I worked hard and tried my best to be like them...to fit in...I thought things could be...different.”
He hadn’t moved or, it seemed, taken a breath. She looked up at him, searching.
“But I was wrong.”
“The new Queen—” he began, but she shook her head and cut him off.
“I didn’t know. It was before. And now...” She bit her lip, fighting the sudden, horrifying onslaught of tears. “Now it’s too late.”
“They promised you freedom. The Expurgari promised you freedom.” He said it softly, not as an accusation but as if he understood.
Morgan knew in her heart she was a coward. She was bold and smart and self-sufficient, she was many things her mother would have been proud of, had she lived to see it, but she was a coward because she couldn’t stand it. The isolation, the oppression, the secrecy, and the silence, the crushing weight of the legacy of her Bloodlines and her Gifts.
Everyone else in the tribe could stand it. They had for millennia. But not she.
She would rather die.
“When I first Shifted at fifteen,” she said, struggling to maintain her composure, “I was taken before the Keeper and the Matchmaker so they could determine who would be a proper Blood match for me. Because I had Suggestion, I was more valuable to them.” She looked up at Xander. “As a breeder.” She took a breath and went on. “They wanted to breed me into the Alpha’s line, but I knew what that meant—the least possible amount of freedom conceivable. So I threatened to kill myself. You can’t imagine the uproar it caused.” Her hand drifted upward to linger at the metal rings around her neck. “They threatened the collar, but I wouldn’t budge. They relented, in part I think because my father was too valuable to them—”
“Why?” Xander interrupted, intense.
She lifted her gaze to his. “Money. He handled the tribe’s investments. He knew everything, where it all was, how much we were worth. Everything. Day and night, counting, counting, counting. Ledgers and holdings and bank accounts. That’s all there was for him.” She turned her head and looked out at the bustling piazza, at a Gypsy child with huge dark eyes and dirty clothes, begging for money at the base of the Spanish Steps. “Especially after my mother died.” “He loved her?”
Startled, she looked back at him. He watched her with laserlike intensity, unblinking.
“Yes. They...it was Matched, but they did love one another.”
“So you were a child of love.”
She stared at him, blank. Love?
“You were conceived in love,” he insisted.
“I...yes. I guess so, if you put it that way. I suppose I was.”
He nodded, as if this pleased him, and she flushed red, embarrassed at the turn in the conversation and completely confused. Why the hell was she talking about love with the man tasked with ending her life if she failed her mission?
“Were you?” she shot back, defensive.
His face changed. A flicker of unnamed emotion, here then gone. “My mother suffered the fate you were lucky enough to avoid.”
She blinked, understanding. “The Alpha.”
He nodded. A muscle twitched in his jaw.
“She’s Gifted.”
“She was,” he corrected, flat, and now, realizing what he meant, she was sorry she’d asked.
“Oh. I’m—I’m sorry. What happened?”
He held her gaze for another moment, still intent, then inhaled and leaned back in his chair. He looked away and ran a hand over his cropped hair and held it there for a moment, an unstudied gesture, masculine and unconscious and somehow intimate. His voice came very low.
“He was not a gentle man.”
It chilled her. She could only imagine the atrocities behind those simple, succinct words. Even Leander, Alpha of Sommerley, with all his sophistication and elegance and finery, even he was a killer beneath all of that. All the Alphas of their kind were born and bred for one thing, and one thing only: domination.
- Writer
