“We need to get everyone out of here, and Alexi’s place is big enough for all of us.” Her voice darkened. “Most of us.”

Mel stared at her, long and hard, through the shadows of the room. She smelled Eliana’s fear and rage like the sour tang of food left out too long in the sun, and something else that surprised and pleased her in equal measure: the dark, spiced musk and masculine power that could only be Demetrius.

“Tell me what’s happened. I know you saw Demetrius.”

Eliana started like she’d just jumped from behind a door and yelled, Boo! Mel said, “I spent a lot of time crying on his shoulder, sweetie. I remember exactly what he smells like. Spill it.”

Resigned to the fact that Mel wasn’t going to budge until she knew what was going on, Eliana let out a frustrated sigh and dragged her hands through her hair. She sat beside her on the bed and closed her eyes. “He brought me my father’s journal. I read it, and it was…bad.” Though a whisper, her voice grew hard, harder than Mel had ever heard it. “It was worse than bad. Your hunch was right, Mel. Nothing is what it seems.”

Mel didn’t know what to say. The way she was talking, just the way her lips shaped the words, gave her pause. “And…and Demetrius? What about him?”

Even in the dark, Mel could see the heat suffuse Eliana’s face. She chewed on her lower lip, then, in a motion so out of character it spoke volumes, hid her face in her hands.

Mel clapped her own hands together silently in a pantomime of glee and bounced up and down on the mattress. “Oh my God, you did it! Tell me everything!”

From behind her hands Eliana scoffed, “What are you, twelve?”

Mel was too busy swooning to care about the acid in her tone. “Was he gentle? Was he rough? Was it over too fast? Oh my God, I hope it wasn’t over too fast, he’s soooooo hot—”

“He told me he loved me.”

This was said with so much pathos, such bleak hopelessness, she might as well have just said, He told me to burn in hell. She stared at Eliana, who had dropped her hands to her lap and was staring at them as if she’d never seen them before, as if her own ten fingers were strangers, not to be trusted. Something huge and ugly seemed to be growing in her, an evil, cancerous blossom of rage or despair, flowering slowly to life.

“Why is that bad? What exactly happened?”

Weary, weary, Eliana answered, “He’s lying about something, Mel. I don’t know if it’s that, or if it’s about what really happened the night my father died or what, but he’s hiding something.” She paused, said more softly, “They know about the serum. I can’t help thinking…”

“No,” was Mel’s instant reply. “Not him.”

Eliana turned her head and looked at her with the kind of glassy eyes you see on victims of natural disasters or wars—shell-shocked, darting. Haunted.

“That’s what I thought about my father. That’s what I thought about Silas, and my brother, too. Apparently being a good judge of character is not one of my Gifts. In fact, I think we can safely say I suck at it.”

Mel took her friend’s cold, cold hand and squeezed it in her own. “I can assure you my perceived awesomeness is bona fide, however, so you’re not totally hopeless.” The ghost of a smile was her only answer before Eliana looked away. “What did you find out about Silas?”

Eliana’s face hardened again. The expression reappeared too quickly and easily, as if it were a default setting and every other look that crossed it just a transient visitor. It was eerie, and Mel didn’t like it at all.

“He’s a traitor and a liar, and very soon he’s going to become well acquainted with the edge of my sword.” She hissed a breath through her teeth, then stood and looked down at her with those glassy, shell-shocked eyes. Only now they burned. “That’s why we have to get you and the others out of here, quickly and quietly. Don’t take anything, just get everyone rounded up as fast as you can.”

“A traitor?” Mel whispered, hand at her throat. She stood, the bare stone floor a jolt of cold against her bare feet. “What has he done?”

Eliana stood and went to the wooden chest at the end of the bed where Mel kept her clothes and began rifling through it. She pulled out a jacket, pants, shirt, boots, and threw it all on the bed. “What hasn’t he done, is the real question. If you looked up the definition of evil incarnate in the dictionary, his picture would be next to it. Right next to my father’s. Get dressed.”

Mel pulled on the clothes as fast as she could, her heart pounding like a hammer. “So what are you going to do?”

“We’re going to get you all someplace safe, and then Silas and I are going to have a little talk.”

“Or,” said a voice from the doorway, “we could talk right now.”

Eliana and Mel spun around in unison, and horror descended on her, thick and hot, like a blanket dropped over her head.

In the darkened doorway stood Silas, robed in black. Radiating menace, he looked back and forth between them with a little unnerving smile, fingering the gun in his hand.

The gun he now raised and pointed directly at Eliana.

This is what love was to the warrior Demetrius:

Years long as lifetimes of yearning, a yearning so sharp and terrible and unrelieved it was like a sword of heated steel permanently embedded in his chest. Love was stolen glances and smothered hopes and vivid, illicit dreams that taunted him upon waking and the cold, unrelenting fear of discovery that followed him, sly and clinging like a shadow, during all his days and nights. Because if, somehow, the love that burned inside him like a swallowed sun was discovered by the wrong person, his life would be ended as swiftly as two hands clapping, and the flame that had sustained him for as long as he could remember would be snuffed out like a wick between wetted fingers.

That was bad but bearable. He was a soldier, after all, born and bred for battle. His life was not expected to be long, and, forbidden from taking a wife, it was also expected to be loveless. Even any children he sired from the anonymous encounters with the Electi or Servorum or random human women would never know him as a father; he was a sperm donor, nothing more.

He knew it. He’d hardened himself to stark reality long ago.

What was not bearable: If somehow, against all odds, his feelings were returned…his beloved would die, too. Only it would not be swift. It would be gruesome. It would be used as a lesson to all, an assertion of power so blatant its meaning could not be misunderstood. A spectacle that would make even the most fearsome of warriors tremble in dread as they watched.

Disobedience equaled death. Taking a woman above his own caste equaled death. Taking the king’s daughter—slow, torturous, epic death. There was no other way for a soldier of his station and hadn’t been in millennia.

So love—aside from being pointless—was agony. Love was a soul-eating demon. Love was the most terrible feeling in the world.

A close runner-up: despair.

He was filled with that now. Dead cold where love was red hot, despair clogged his throat and choked him as if he’d swallowed handfuls of crematory ash.

She’d come to him and they’d fought and made love and even slept together—simple things, normal things he’d wanted for years—and yet he’d awoken alone, and the simple fact of the silent room and the empty bed beside him filled him with such despair he wondered for a breathless, bottomless moment if this is what hell might be like. Not flames and screams and lakes of fire, but anguish and hopelessness and misery wound together like a wretched braid, cinched tight around his neck in an invisible noose from which he would hang for all eternity, alone.

D had no Foresight to anticipate this. His sleep had been deep and silent.