Rapture's Edge

34

Slowly he went, down a set of spiral stairs to the bottom floor. The bedrooms.

He stood at the end of the carpeted hallway looking down the corridor. All the doors were open except one, at the far end, which was locked.

And vibrating. She was hitting—or kicking—it from the inside. If it hadn’t been reinforced she would have easily kicked the door right out of its frame, but as it was, she was doing a fine job of trying. He wondered what the inside of the door looked like.

Not pretty, he’d bet.

“Eliana,” he called. The blows on the door abruptly ceased. He took several steps forward, listening, hearing nothing but the pounding of his own pulse in his ears. “Ana, it’s me.” He cleared his throat, feeling suddenly like the biggest fool on the planet. Of course she knows it’s you. Nicely played, i***t!

Ignoring that snarky little voice inside his head that never failed to demoralize him, D reached out, put his big hand on the doorknob, turned it, and pushed the door open.

It swung back on silent hinges, revealing the room in all its chaos.

She’d torn the sheets and quilted duvet from the bed and upended the mattress against the bed frame so it stood on end, a queen-size padded wall concealing the far corner of the room. All the drawers in the bureau stood open, their contents rifled through, clothing pulled out and left in piles on the floor or hanging haphazardly from the backs of chairs or over the desk, which also had all its drawers ajar, a few upside down on the floor beneath it. The two bedside lamps had been smashed, though one had survived the attack and lay on its side against a wall, uplighting the room in a wash of intermittently flickering yellow.

The crystal vase with the flowers he’d brought lay shattered at his feet, the flowers scattered over the dark rug in bright confusion, drenched and half demolished.

That actually hurt.

“I’m coming in,” he warned, his voice harder than he intended because he was feeling sorry for himself about the flowers.

Silence. He took it as an affirmation and eased into the room.

His first mistake was assuming she’d hidden behind the mattress; he realized that as he saw movement from his right and heard something whizz by his head, parting the air with a sinister hiss just as he jerked out of its way. He whirled around and leapt back simultaneously, barely avoiding another slashing blow aimed at his jugular, and had exactly two seconds to appreciate the vision of Eliana—dark eyes ablaze, lovely mouth pinched in concentration—before she thrust again with the blade.

He wrenched away and got himself clear of striking distance before she could take aim again and left her standing, arm raised, dagger clenched in her fist, next to the open bedroom door.

“Hello, Demetrius,” she said coldly, gazing at him with what appeared to be perfect composure. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”

Insanely, he wanted to laugh. He was so happy he could have danced. She clearly hated him and wanted to kill him, but she was here and she was alive and she was all he’d wanted for so long he couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t, and the relief and euphoria he felt lit him up inside like a Roman candle.

His face split with a big, goofy grin, the first time he’d truly smiled in years. “Me, too,” he said. “But obviously for different reasons.”

Very slowly, never letting her intense gaze leave his face, she shifted from one foot to the other, repositioning her weight. He marveled at how she seemed perfectly poised and confident, totally in control, and then he noticed the throbbing pulse in the hollow of her throat that betrayed her.

Not so cool after all. Perversely, it satisfied him.

“I’m unarmed,” he said as she advanced toward him with the dagger held out. He took a slow step back and held his hands up, wondering where she’d found it while at the same time cursing himself again for not clearing the room before he’d settled her in it to sleep off the anesthesia. Rookie mistake, one even a less experienced soldier in the lower class of Legiones would have avoided. She short-circuited his brain, as always.

“An unfortunate oversight on your part,” Eliana replied, not sounding sorry for him at all, “as it’s pretty idiotic to come to a knife fight without a knife.”

Dressed in a black pair of men’s boxer shorts rolled over at the waist so they didn’t sag down her legs and a white men’s undershirt she must have found in one of the dresser drawers, with her choppy blue hair sticking up in every direction and her wild, glittering eyes, she looked like an insane, cross-dressing pixie.