Eliana waited, a growing sense of dread gnawing at her stomach.

“Even ghosts get bored.”

He smiled, and the predatory curve of his lips sent fear lashing along every nerve ending.

“Every theft was a little more daring than the last, a little harder,” he continued. “Either you were getting desperate, which didn’t seem likely as you weren’t under any heat from us, or you needed a challenge. It was me who predicted La Chatte would get tired of poaching from fat old goats and go for a bigger prize. I knew one day you’d hit the Louvre. And because, as you’ve guessed, we’ve never managed to capture you with normal surveillance video, I ordered a few special, very high-tech cameras designed by some old friends in the American military. Cost a pretty penny, too, and all very hush-hush top secret, but it was authorized by the prime minister himself. Because you, belle fille, are at the very top of his shit list.”

Cameras? Special cameras? She couldn’t be seen on cameras—

“He’s still holding a grudge over two Picassos you stole from his house while he was sleeping,” Édoard continued in a conspiratorial tone, as if they were two girlfriends talking over cocktails. “In fact, he’s given us carte blanche to do whatever is necessary to get them back, along with the rest of the things you stole, some of which were from his personal friends. Whatever is necessary, including resorting to the interrogation you so casually mentioned before. Which, by the way, I’m particularly well qualified to do having served as an interrogator the entirety of my ten years with the counterterrorism unit of the bérets verts.”

An interrogator with the green berets. High-tech cameras. Several things clicked into place, and the fear simmering in her bloodstream rose to a dark, violent boil. Her stomach lurched.

As an afterthought he added, “Did you know the word torture comes from the French word meaning ‘to twist’?”

His lips curved into a dark, triumphant smile, and she went ice cold.

“You’re bluffing,” she said, pulse racing. “You can’t lay a finger on me. There are laws against that, and the entire world saw you take me in—”

“I won’t go into the particulars of how photon cameras work, but the images are quite interesting, to say the least,” he interrupted as if she hadn’t spoken at all. He uncrossed his arms and pulled out the chair opposite hers, then sat with unhurried grace, crossed one leg over the other, and folded his hands into his lap. “Weren’t you curious how, in a seventy-thousand-square-meter museum as you so helpfully pointed out, I knew exactly where to find an invisible woman?”

She didn’t answer. A cold trickle of sweat rolled down the back of her neck.

“So I’ll ask you again.” Still smiling, he regarded her with those green, glittering eyes. “And I’ll ask you nicely, one more time, before I hand you over to un médecin. And it won’t be for your injured leg, my dear. The good doctor and I are going to conduct a few…experiments.”

He emphasized carefully each next word he spoke. “What. Are. You?”

Horror tightened its sharp, freezing claws around her throat. She sat there like a statue, frozen, unable to answer, unable even to blink.

The doctor. Interrogation. Experiments.

Oh God.

D made the thirteen-hour drive from Rome to Paris in under ten.

He’d have been even faster on the Ducati, but his plan involved heavy explosives and those took up a lot of room, especially with what he had in mind. So the motorcycle was out, left behind in its usual spot in a parking garage not too far from the sunken church and the entrance to the catacombs where he and the other members of the Roman colony lived.

Where Eliana also used to live, until everything got so turned around his eyes would cross just thinking about it.

The Range Rover he drove—pitch black and growly, like his mood—belonged to a disbanded group of Ikati assassins from the colony in Brazil that used to go by the name The Syndicate. The paranoid leaders of the four colonies who comprised the Council of Alphas never left anything to chance, so as soon as The Syndicate went off-line three years ago, The Hunt went live.

Because you had to have paid killers to round up and dispose of the inevitable deserters who couldn’t live by the most inviolable rule of Ikati Law: secrecy. Second only to allegiance, secrecy was paramount to the survival of them all. Now more than ever.

And his Eliana—in addition to being the daughter of the dead leader of the Expurgari, the Ikati’s ancient enemy, and the assumed new boss of the organization—had violated that ironclad rule of secrecy in a truly spectacular way, making her the Council’s public enemy number one.

And making him desperate with a capital D.

If The Hunt reached her before he did…

He gripped the steering wheel tighter and stomped the gas pedal to the floor. The SUV lurched forward, roaring over the empty, predawn Paris streets.

At the same moment, six men dressed exactly alike in tailored dark suits and mirrored aviators stepped off the high-speed Eurostar train at the Gare du Nord station in central Paris and without speaking to one another walked swiftly across the crowded platform and through the automatic glass doors to the pair of sleek black Audis awaiting them at the curb.

The six split into two groups of three. Two sat in the backseat of each car, one rode shotgun. The driver of each sedan said the identical thing to the new arrivals:

“Seventeen minutes. Lock and load.” And jerked his head to the stainless steel case in the middle of the backseat.

Both cars had government plates and so were allowed to idle in a no-stopping zone. If any of the railway police who prowled the station had run the plates, they would have found the cars registered to one Pierre Nettoyeur, senior medical practitioner with the French Defense Health Service and personal physician to the minister of defense.

Monsieur Nettoyeur was, of course, a fiction. Like others engineered by the Council of Alphas, he existed in digital form purely for the purpose of convenience. The leadership of the Ikati sometimes needed to travel and was occasionally forced to do it quickly and in close proximity to the humans who remained ignorant of their existence.

Largely ignorant, that is. There had been an incident a few years back involving a disco, a territory dispute, and an eyewitness with a cell phone, but though that particular video made it to the evening news, it was roundly dismissed as fake. And all those witnesses in the club were dismissed as fame-seeking drunks.

At least publicly. There were those who did not dismiss things like that so easily.

Nettoyeur was a bit of whimsy—it meant “cleaner” in French, and “cleaner” in certain circles like the ones the eight gentlemen in the Audis moved in referred to an assassin, specifically one hired to manage a bad situation with a very permanent solution—but for this mission the fabricated profession had a much more practical purpose.

If stopped by the police, the driver would easily be able to explain why he carried such dangerous tranquilizers and weapons, and in such quantity. Monsieur Nettoyeur reported directly to the man who ran France’s entire military and had all the required paperwork to prove it.

So the paperwork was in order, fake identities had been assumed, travel had been arranged, and all the plans quite carefully made. And now The Hunt had arrived in Paris.

In less than one hour, Eliana Cardinalis would be captured—or dead.

There was a rat inside her skull.

An angry, hungry rat, intent on devouring all the gray matter it could before she clawed her own eyes out to get at it. Eliana needed to kill it and she needed to kill it soon because the agony, oh gods, the agony.