She heard screaming, smelled smoke and scorched fabric, felt the ground shake as another thundering boom rattled the building, but the sound seemed to travel to her ears slowly, distorted as if from far away or underwater. In fact, everything had slowed to a crawl. She lifted her head, blinking through a murky haze of dust, and saw the doctor a few feet away, crumpled on the floor with a widening pool of liquid crimson on the white stone beneath his head. He was twitching grotesquely, mouth open in a silent scream. One eye was open, too, but from the other protruded a bent shard of metal. His broken glasses dangled from one ear.

Édoard shouted something from behind her that she couldn’t make out because there was another deafening explosion, somewhere close but out of sight. With a grinding groan, a large chunk of ceiling collapsed into a pile of rubble on the floor not ten feet away and sent another choking blast of dust into her face. Her ears rang. She coughed and sputtered, struggling against her restraints, trying to push the wheelchair nearer to the wall with her one free foot. A tangle of black electrical conduit hung down from the gaping hole in the ceiling and, with a zapping crackle, began to spark and twist like a nest of angry snakes.

The emergency lights in the hallway flickered out and then came right back on, stuttering intermittently as if they might go out completely at any moment. A siren began to whine.

And through it all, the pulse of Demetrius beat like a drum against her skin, stronger every second.

Get up! she screamed silently to herself. Get out of here or die!

She didn’t want to die. So with strength lent by fury and fear, Eliana snapped the binding around her right wrist.

Panting, she fell on the other wrist restraint and tried with trembling fingers to work open the clasp. She managed it just as a terrifying shock of electricity hit her, and she knew with sudden cold certainty that Demetrius wasn’t alone. There were six—she stiffened—no, eight more Ikati with him.

She struggled to sit up sideways and worked the ankle strap open, bent almost in half at the waist, holding herself up with one elbow. Dust coated her nose and eyelashes, making it hard to breathe and see. The strap gave, and she scrambled out of the toppled wheelchair on her hands and knees, scraping her palms and kneecaps on sharp chunks of brick debris that littered the floor. She turned and saw Édoard, disoriented, staggering toward her with his hands out. He was saying something, she knew because his mouth was moving, but her ears rang so badly all she heard was a painful, high-pitched buzz that made her eyes water.

She glanced behind him, and her heart stopped dead in her chest.

There at the end of the long corridor stood a hulking dark figure, impossibly huge, face in shadow, silhouetted by a wash of weak yellow light from the emergency lamps behind him. Booted feet spread wide, hands flexed open at his sides, enormous, muscled frame almost entirely blocking the open doorway to the connecting corridor from which he’d emerged. Though wreathed in shadow and smoke, terrifying details emerged.

Shaved head. A glint of silver in one eyebrow. Black, black eyes out of which stared an even blacker soul.

Her scream was an animal that clawed its way out of her, tearing her throat, alive. On instinct, she skipped back a step, and her heel caught on a chunk of stone. She fell in slow motion, still screaming, hands flailing, and landed on her rear end with a teeth-jarring jolt that knocked the breath from her lungs.

Time and motion, slowed to a crawl only moments before, suddenly sped up, and everything seemed to happen at once.

Édoard, seeing her back away but thinking it was from him, lunged forward with an oddly animalistic snarl. Before he could lay a finger on her, he was wrenched aside from behind and flung against the wall with such force he actually bounced off it and landed, sprawling and limp, facedown on the floor where he slid until stopped by the opposite wall.

Demetrius looked down at her with such savage fury in his expression it froze her in place like a mouse staring into the jaws of a snake. He crouched as if to spring, but then his head snapped up, his eyes focused on something behind her, and a hair-raising growl rumbled through his chest.

Faster than her eyes could track, he shot past her in a black blur. She rolled to her stomach and lifted herself up on her elbows in time to see shadowy figures emerge through the settling dust at the far end of the hallway, past the snarled electrical conduit and rubble from the destroyed wall.

His team.

In one lithe, lightning-fast move, she sprang to her feet, turned, and sprinted in the opposite direction toward the open door, thinking only of escape, her blood scorching like liquid fire in her veins and her vision narrowed to the rectangle of light at the end of the hallway.

In the seconds that followed, she heard just below the whine of the alarm and the ringing in her ears the distinctive muffled pop of a semiautomatic handgun fitted with a silencer. Then another. A bullet whizzed past her head with an acrid whiff of gunpowder and ricocheted off the stone wall with a piercing twang and a puff of smoke. She feinted left, then right, desperately trying to make herself an uncertain target, but another bullet flew past, then another, and before she could twist away again one of them found the tender flesh of her hip.

Eliana crashed screaming to her knees. There was a different noise behind her now, a horrible garbled snarling, vicious and wild, like a hungry predator tearing into a meal, but she didn’t turn and look and didn’t give herself the option of staying still. She struggled to her feet again, pain shooting in furious sparks down her entire leg, and limped, one leg dragging, forward.

Just as she reached the end of the hallway, something heavy hit her from behind.

She staggered, but didn’t fall because she was caught.

And held.

And turned around by a pair of huge, strangling tight hands wrapped around her arms.

Eliana stared up into Demetrius’s eyes. Black and wild, they burned down at her with the lucid incandescence of rage, and she knew this was the end. She braced herself for it, stiffening, ready for the snap of her neck or a knife through her ribs or a gun barrel shoved into her mouth.

And then a thought flashed through her mind, horrifying in its treacherous clarity:

I remember exactly how you taste.

Then the man who murdered her father leaned in close and growled, “Gotcha!”

As he’d been doing for the past hour, Leander stood, unmoving and silent, gazing out the tall, lead-paned windows of the East Library. Flanked by heavy silk drapes drawn back with tasseled ties, they offered a spectacular view of the rolling green expanse of lawn, the groomed rosemary hedges, the plashing marble fountain of Triton in the middle of the manicured gardens. Far beyond the boundaries of Sommerley Manor the dark line of the forest began, rolling hills dense with hardwoods and fir that went on for miles. It was beautiful today, warm and sunny, the air scented softly with the beds of lavender and garden roses planted beneath the windows. The sky above was a perfect, cloudless blue; the white falcon stood out against it like a swiftly moving star.

She was still high, but getting closer. Impatience cramped his stomach. He checked his watch.

Ten minutes. Perhaps twenty.

Unless she changed her mind, that is. His lips lifted to a wry smile. There was always the possibility she would change her mind. He clasped his hands behind his back and looked up again, subsiding back into himself with the patience of one accustomed to waiting.