But he was a monster. Dominus might even have been the devil himself.

What she experienced reading the pages of his journal was a terrifying descent into the mind of a brilliant, evil creature, a creature with no soul and no conscience but with a very healthy appetite for vengeance and an iron resolve to turn the planet into his own personal playground. The serum she thought he’d created only to help half-Bloods survive the Transition had a far more sinister application.

Holocaust.

He was going to use it to wipe out the human race. Their dream of peaceful coexistence had been a lie written in the sand, meant to pacify her until the tide turned and reality washed all those dreams of peace away in a tsunami of blood and tears.

Oh, there would be a few left. Enough for slaves who would cook and clean and breed the next generation into servitude. But their entire gene pool would be wiped out within a few generations.

She realized then what the elders meant when they called her spem futuri, hope for the future. She realized with sudden, horrible clarity what he’d meant when he’d told her the night he died, “Your young will rule the earth.”

She was the last of Dominus’s Bloodline, a line that had sired kings for a thousand generations while humans were still busy making cave paintings. A line that until the failure of Caesar had produced males far more Gifted than any of their kind. A line that would go extinct without new heirs to continue it.

Her heirs. Her and her brother’s.

Her father had planned to breed them together.

That’s why he never insisted she marry though all of their kind married young. That’s why he didn’t kill Caesar when it was discovered he was unGifted. Dominus didn’t believe a female could rule, and the colony would never accept an unGifted Alpha, so the crown would skip a generation and go to the male child she would produce with her brother. An heir and a spare, because Dominus intended to ensure there would be more than one male offspring from the joining of his two children.

He intended to be there. He intended to watch.

The horror of it, the horror of all of it, had made her literally sick. She retched in a corner of her room at the abbey until there was nothing left for her stomach to eject except bile.

And Silas, trusted family servant before her father died, trusted friend after, had known about all of it.

His guilt was implicit. Promised a special place in the new world kingdom imagined by her father, Silas had improvised quite ingeniously when her father had been killed. He’d used her Gifts to get the money to develop the serum and stockpile weapons, used her ignorance to keep her under control.

One cold, undeniable fact remained, however; it was Demetrius she’d found standing over her father’s dead body, not Silas. Demetrius who’d been holding the gun.

Demetrius who claimed he didn’t kill Dominus but refused to say who did.

And something else left her feeling as if her blood had turned to ice water. There was still the possibility, however small, that Silas had told her the truth about the Bellatorum. That Demetrius not only killed her father but knew of his plans for the serum beforehand and saw an opportunity to seize power far greater than just assuming control of a single colony. He somehow knew about Mel and her husband. What if he knew other things?

What if he knew everything?

What if, as Silas had said, D’s Gift of Foresight had shown him a future in which he ruled the world?

It couldn’t be discounted, no matter how much it sickened her.

She didn’t want to believe it. She wanted to believe what her body told her, what her heart told her. She wanted to melt into his arms and let his heat surround her until she spiraled down into forgetting, into not caring what the truth might be.

But she wasn’t that girl. She cared about the truth. The Truth, capital T. And she was going to get it, even if it killed her.

“You’re not going back to sleep,” D gently accused, stroking a hand up her arm. She made a noncommittal noise and then sighed.

He seemed to sense her inner turmoil, because his hand drifted over her shoulder, and he spread his palm flat over her chest, feeling for her heartbeat. It thudded against her breastbone, fast and erratic. She could almost hear him thinking.

But he stayed away from anything too dangerous and said with a hint of a smile in his voice, “So you’re the invisible girl now. Pretty impressive, I gotta say. How’d that happen?”

“By accident, I guess. I mean, living underground in permanent shadow all my life I never really had the need to hide from anything…” She faltered, and D’s arm tightened around her. Eliana guessed they were both thinking of what she had to hide from now. “Anyway, the first time I saw the sun was the day we left Rome. We were walking through an olive tree grove in Mazzalupeto when the sun rose over the horizon, and I was so scared I hid in this ruin of an old barn, in a horse stall. When Mel came to look for me, she couldn’t see me, even though I was standing right there, not three feet away.” She closed her eyes, remembering Mel’s panic and her own. “It took awhile to learn to control it. At first, I had to be scared to disappear. Then, later, I could just think of something that scared me. And now I can do it at will.”

D lay there in silence for a moment, his breathing even, his chest warm against her back. “But your clothes disappear, too. When we Shift to Vapor, anything we wear or hold just falls to the ground. I don’t understand how—”

“Because I’m not changing myself. It’s not a physical thing, unlike turning to panther or mist. I’m changing the light, the way it bends around me. So I keep my clothes. Best of all, I can do it when I’m injured, unlike Shifting. But there has to be shadows. I can’t do it in full sunlight, or even in brightly lit rooms.” She’d tried, she’d tried a million different ways, but there was something about all that light that spooked her, that made her shrivel inside. She never knew daylight could feel so violent.

“Bending the light,” he repeated, his voice softly awed. He slid his hand from over her heart where he’d kept it while she was speaking and cupped it around her jaw. He turned her face toward him. He put his lips to her ear. “Do you have any idea how amazing that is? How amazing you are?”

Her heartbeat picked up again. She was grateful he’d moved his hand. She shrugged off his compliment with a wryly spoken, “You already got into my pants, cowboy. You can lay off the sweet talk.”

He chuckled, a deep rumble that reverberated through his chest. “You were always terrible with compliments. I see nothing’s changed.”

Nothing’s changed? God, what she could have responded to that. She bit her lip to keep from saying anything. Then with a gentleness that made her stomach clench, D released her jaw and trailed his fingertips over the back of her neck and shoulders, tracing the outline of her tattoos.

“This butterfly is beautiful. Blue and black, like your hair.”

“Like my mood,” she corrected. His fingers stilled, and she amended that to, “My…usual mood.”

She felt his smile. He stroked the place at the top of her spine just beneath the gentle bump of the seventh vertebrae, and she felt goose bumps form in the wake of his touch. “And what does this symbol mean?”

“It’s the kanji character for rōnin,” she murmured, staring at the slender yellow flame across the room as his fingers paused their slow tracery. “They were samurai—”

“Whose masters had died, leaving them adrift.”

She wasn’t surprised he knew about the ancient warrior class of Japan; he seemed to know something about everything. She sighed.

He said, “If a rōnin’s master was killed, the code of the samurai refused to allow their death to go unavenged, though they themselves must then commit ritual suicide for committing the crime of murder.” He was silent for a moment, contemplative, and then his fingers began to trace the pattern again, slow and light and almost…reverent.