Whether the entire tribe became extinct because of it.

Hiding is for mice, she’d say, watching him steadily with her brilliant, yellow-green eyes. And we are not mice, my love.

No. They weren’t mice. They were beasts pretending to be people. They were animal and Vapor and stealthy, deadly predator, relics of a lost age before man ever walked the earth and magic still lived and breathed. He shuddered to think what would happen if humanity ever found out about them. Again.

“Shaved head. Tattooed. Big. Does that sound like anyone you know?” said Leander into the phone.

More silence. Then, “Excuse me?”

“One of the rebels, one of your colony who left with the daughter the night your king was killed…was he big and bald with tattoos?”

“No,” said Celian, but Leander heard the slight hesitation, and his blood rose to a boil.

“Do not lie to me,” he began, nearly spitting with rage, but Celian cut him off.

“That’s not one of the rebels. That’s Demetrius. One of my council. One of my most trusted brothers. What about him?”

“Are you trying to tell me you have no knowledge that your trusted brother blew up the Paris prefecture of police and took your missing princess?” said Leander, disbelief clear in his voice.

“Impossible,” Celian scoffed. “Demetrius is here. He wouldn’t leave without telling me…” He trailed off, thinking, and then resumed slightly less confident than before, “Blew up the prefecture of police?”

“So help me God, Celian, if you had any knowledge of this—”

“It must have been one of the others who ran away with her…it can’t be—”

“Are there many of you that are shaved and tattooed?” Leander cut in impatiently. The falcon outside descended in a slow looping arc, heading for Sommerley and the windows by which he stood. He watched, eyes unblinking, jaw tight.

“No,” admitted Celian after another pregnant pause. “But they’ve been gone three years; it’s possible one of them decided to get inked. And shaved his head.”

Without turning from the window, Leander moved the phone down to his jaw and said to Christian, “Any other details, Christian? About this male who took the princess?”

“Pierced eyebrow. Three silver rings in it,” came Christian’s answer from the other side of the room.

Leander lifted the phone back to his mouth. “Eyebrow pierced with silver. Ring a bell?”

He heard Celian mutter an angry, “Fuck,” and then direct someone nearby to go and look for someone else. The name was garbled, but Leander guessed who it was.

“Your brother. Demetrius. If you don’t find him there…if this was his doing—”

“If he was stupid enough to pull something like this, I’ll kill him myself,” Celian hissed, and Leander was satisfied by the conviction in his voice.

“See that you do,” said Leander as he watched the falcon descend just a few yards above the manicured lawn outside, talons extended, wings beating noiselessly, piercing yellow-green eyes avid on his face. “Or I will.”

Before Celian could reply, Leander clicked shut the phone and disconnected the call.

Outside the snowy falcon dissolved into a funnel of swirling mist and descended to the grass in a silken plume that began to coalesce into something else altogether as it touched down. Feet first, then legs, then a body—nude and breathtaking—a face that could make grown men cry for its beauty. Hair of spun gold bounced around her shoulders, cascaded in glinting waves down her chest.

Jenna. His Queen. His miracle. The only one of them who could Shift into anything she wished.

Her father’s daughter, to be sure.

She quickly crossed the few feet from where she’d landed, watching him watch her as she came. Sensual and unabashed as an odalisque, she waded through the waist-high rosebushes and thick beds of lavender and stood just outside the window. She had to look up a little, her head tipped back, her shell pink lips tipped up at the corners.

He pressed his palm to the glass. She mirrored it, her fingers spread open against his on the opposite side of the window.

“Come in,” he murmured, knowing she heard him clearly through the closed, double-paned window. “Jenna. Come in.”

She studied his face, and her lips lost their upward curve. A little furrow appeared between her brows. How well she knew him.

“Come inside,” he insisted, huskier than before.

Leander heard the door shut behind him, but he’d already altogether forgotten Christian was there.

For ten seconds in which the rage building inside him felt like he was being hollowed out with knives, Celian stood with the phone to his ear, listening to dead air.

Then, with a curse, he turned and threw it clear across the room.

It exploded against the bare rock wall with a dull metallic clatter and fell in a tinkling heap to the floor.

“Good news, I take it.” Lix’s dry humor, ever present, only served to enrage him even more.

“Smug son of a bitch!” Celian spat.

Lix’s dark brows shot up, but Celian waved his hand dismissively, indicating he hadn’t meant him. He sat down heavily into his carved wood chair, identical to the one Lix occupied across from him at the solid oak square that served as the Bellatorum’s version of a conference table. Like King Arthur’s famed round table, this meeting place of knights had no head, no hierarchy. Everyone was on equal footing.

Everyone but D, that is, because he’d missed the morning meeting. He could only be equal if he bothered to show up.

To Celian’s right sat Constantine, glowering. He even glowered prettily, which, at the moment, also pissed Celian off.

Today wasn’t starting off well. He’d already lost two promising young half-Blood Legiones to the Transition, and five more would have their twenty-fifth birthdays within the next thirty-six hours. If they didn’t make it…at this rate, they’d run out of the half-Blood caste of soldiers within a few years.

They were dying off faster than they could be replaced. Especially now since the Council of Alphas—even in his mind he said it with a sneer—had forbidden them to mix with humans under penalty of death. So breeding new half-Blood stock was out of the question.

You can’t be too cautious during times of war, Leander had said, smiling his smug British smile at Celian the one and only time they’d met. He spoke slowly, with cool condescension, as if the gathered Bellatorum before him would have a little trouble with the big words, looked at them like they were nothing but dirty barbarians living like Neanderthals in caves. Celian had wanted to smash his face in. Only one thing stopped him.

Leander, unfortunately, was right.

The dead king Dominus had turned out to be far more treacherous than anyone had guessed, plotting to take over as dictator of all the colonies, killing his own kind if it suited his needs. Even working with humans. There was no doubt his network of paid killers and spies was still out there, waiting for the chance to pounce.

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.