Rapture's Edge

32

Caesar was still out there. Silas was still out there, and he was craftier and therefore more dangerous than the king’s egotistical, Giftless son.

He didn’t know what those two were planning, if anything, but Celian hated feeling like a sitting duck. And now—if it was true—D had thrown an ugly wrench into this already colossally bad situation.

“What is it?” Lix leaned his bulk over the table and propped himself up on his elbows.

“Little Lord Fauntleroy is at it again,” Celian muttered, drumming his fingers on the wood.

“He’s still insisting you join the Council of Alphas?” Lix asked, surprised.

In the three years since they’d met, Leander and the other three leaders who comprised the Council of Alphas had attempted to persuade him by coercion and flattery and thinly veiled threat that not to join was a declaration of war. But Celian had lived long enough under one dictator, and he would never trade one for four, no matter how nice they pretended to be or how many flowery promises they made. Stronger together than apart. All for one and one for all. Duty to the tribe, etc. etc.

He wasn’t having any of it. He’d agreed to keep his people contained within the catacombs until the rebels were found, and that was enough to hold them off for now. But now this…

Celian looked at Constantine, who immediately dropped his gaze to the table and shifted his weight in the chair.

Interesting.

Celian watched him carefully as he said, “Actually, he had a bit of news about Eliana.”

A muscle in Constantine’s jaw twitched. He glanced up, then back down again.

“What?” exclaimed Lix, bolting upright. “Eliana? What is it? What happened? And why were you talking about D?”

Yes, that’s the correct reaction, thought Celian, staring at a very still, quiet Constantine. Aloud he said, “Apparently someone who looks a lot like our beloved brother has blown up a Paris police station and stolen the missing princess.”

Lix stood abruptly, shoving back the heavy wooden chair in the process. “WHAT?”

“What indeed,” Celian murmured, looking at Constantine. “Anything you’d like to add to the conversation, Constantine?”

Constantine took a deep breath, spread his big hands flat on the table, exhaled, and quietly said, “I owed him one.”

Lix looked at Constantine. “WHAT?” he shouted again.

The Servorum he’d sent looking for D chose that exact moment to burst into the room. Young and gangly, he skidded to a stop inside the arched doorway. “Gone!” he said, breathless. “He’s gone! The guards at the north gate were overpowered—”

Celian lifted a hand, and the boy instantly lapsed into silence. A wave of his hand and the boy backed from the room with a bow. The entire time, Celian’s gaze never left Constantine’s face. “Tell me all of it now, because if I have to hear it from that f*****g British peacock—”

“I was with him when we saw Eliana on TV being taken in by the French police—”

“WHAT?”

“Sit down, Lix, and shut the hell up!” Celian snapped. The long-haired warrior lowered his bulk to the chair, slowly, looking back and forth between him and Constantine with a look of horrified disbelief.

Constantine spoke, low, to his spread hands. “She was being arrested. They said on the news she was some notorious thief. They had her in handcuffs—”

“She was injured,” Celian deduced instantly. She’d never have been captured otherwise.

Constantine nodded. “D just…he just went crazy. There was no stopping him. I tried to talk him out of it, but you know how he is…about her…he was totally unreasonable…” He glanced up at Celian.

It was getting very difficult to hear above the adrenaline roaring through his veins. “Keep talking,” he said.

“Like I said, I owed him one.” His big shoulders hunched to a shrug, and he dropped his gaze again to the tabletop.

The room was utterly silent and still. Around his ankles, one of the hundreds of feral cats that ran wild through the catacombs twined back and forth, rubbing its whiskered face against his leg. “You risked all our lives,” Celian said very quietly, “you risked war with the other colonies because of a guilt trip.”

Slowly, Constantine raised his eyes and met Celian’s gaze. He shook his head. “No. I risked war with the other colonies because he’s my brother and he needed my help. I would do the same for either of you.”

Celian stood and began to pace over the bare rock floor. “It was hard enough convincing their Council that we didn’t have anything to do with the Expurgari, that we didn’t know what Dominus had been up to all those years. I still don’t think they completely believe it.”

Lix said to no one in particular, “Eliana is a thief?”

Celian kept talking. “And now I’ve got to convince them that we had nothing to do with D and this new clusterfuck—”

“A thief?” Lix interrupted, staring incredulously at a morose Constantine.

“Silas must have put her up to it,” he muttered, nodding. “She’d never do something like that on her own. She was too…”

Sweet, he didn’t say. Sweet and lovely and innocent as a fawn.

“We don’t know that,” said Celian, stopping in midstep beside the table. Lix and Constantine both looked up at him. “We don’t know who she is anymore. Or what she’s been up to the past three years since she disappeared.