Slowly, painfully, he rose from the bed he and Eliana had shared together, his heart like a wild thing in his chest, refusing to settle. He’d told her the truth last night; he had no idea where her colony was, he’d just followed those laughing men through a silent graveyard and then into the winding bowels of the earth. He could go back there, he supposed, but what hope did he have to find her in the same place? If she wanted to be lost to him, she would be. She wouldn’t go back to the same place. She might already be on another continent.

Or captured by The Hunt.

The thought sent an electric jolt of fear through his body, which was swallowed quickly by fury. Damn her. Damn her stubborn pigheadedness, damn her refusal to believe him when he said it wasn’t him who shot her father. Okay, he’d concede it didn’t look good, him standing over Dominus’s corpse with a gun, but she should know that his word was his oath—

He stiffened. The hair rose on the back of his neck. He looked around the darkened room, listening hard into the silence.

Was that a scream?

He held still, breathless for a long moment, every nerve alert, every pore attuned to any noise, until—

No. It wasn’t a scream. It was a pulse, an invisible push, palpable as a hand reaching out to shove him, which sent a shockwave of recognition through his body. It came again, fainter than before, but unmistakable.

D never dressed so fast in his life. Shirt, pants, boots, and blades, all of it donned without thinking, both ears attuned to the feeling that might come again at any moment, the vibration that would show him the way to find her.

Because it was her. He didn’t know how, but he knew it was Eliana, and she was in trouble, and she needed him.

And because she was his life, his heart—his soul—he would find her. He would.

It thrummed through him like the bloodlust he sometimes felt after a kill, bright and blinding. In the sharing of their bodies, their breath, in the consummation of a love so long unrequited, his soul had fused to hers the way a grain of sand accretes to the nacre of a shell, and something else had been born between them. Passion had always existed, but tonight a pearl of something deeper had formed, permanent and unbreakable.

Possession.

She belonged to him now. He’d find her.

Not even death could keep him away.

“Demetrius,” said Silas with a sneer, his handsome face contorted with anger. “Always this obsession with Demetrius. It’s beneath you, my dear. He’s nothing but the help.”

Eliana felt frozen to the floor. She didn’t have to look over at Mel to see she was frozen as well, her face reading white against the dark stone wall behind her, eyes wide and staring at the gun in Silas’s hand.

“So are you,” Eliana said calmly in spite of the blood roaring through her veins.

He clucked, disapproving, but it didn’t faze him. Silas smiled, a malicious specimen that pulled his lips flat over his teeth, and took a slow step into the room. “Probably not smart to antagonize the man holding the gun. However, you are incorrect. I was a servant—and a loyal one, at that—but now I’m something a bit more elevated, wouldn’t you agree? Your father’s death created a vacuum, my dear, and as we all know, nature abhors a vacuum.”

“My brother—”

“Your brother is a sock puppet.” It was hard, abrupt, and possibly louder than he intended, because his glance flickered to the doorway behind him before it settled back on her. “Not only is he unGifted, he’s a fool, unworthy of his position. Not even worthy of his name. Caesar, indeed. What a bit of wishful thinking that was! Didn’t it ever bother you, Eliana, that you were the one in the family with the brains but you were never allowed to be…anything…because you were a woman?”

He took another step forward, and she and Mel took corresponding steps back. He seemed to be enjoying this, their shock and patently obvious fear. His smile grew wider and more excited by the second.

“I would have changed all that, you know. I would have let you lead beside me. We could have made a glorious team, you and I.” His voice grew soft, while his eyes, ever dark and glittering, grew heated. “Unfortunately, I don’t team up with whores.”

He’d heard everything, then. It didn’t sting, him calling her a whore; it hardly even registered because she was too intent on formulating a plan for getting out of this that didn’t include getting shot.

She backed away another step as he moved closer. “What are you going to do?”

“I?” he replied with feigned innocence. “I’m not going to do anything. You, however, are going to kill your best friend.”

What?

She wasn’t sure if she spoke it aloud or not, but Silas answered as if she had, smiling his chilling, rabid smile all the while.

“Terrible how you just couldn’t adjust to our new life here. You never really got over the sudden death of your father, did you, my dear? Everyone could see how much it affected you. How depressed you’d grown. It won’t be much of a surprise when you finally go over the edge and kill your best friend, and then yourself. So tragic, really. Such a waste of life when we were on the verge of such momentous things.”

It hit her with sudden clarity, and she knew he’d be able to pull it off because he had a way of making people believe him. Mel’s dead body, her own beside it, his gun in her hand…she saw it with the detail of a photograph. How her kin would react with shock, how Silas would comfort them, how he’d use their grief to his own advantage and make them rely on him even more. He would kill the two of them, and no one would be the wiser to his treachery.

His callousness, his cunning, sent a surge of rage unlike anything she’d ever known singing through her body. There was a thrum of light and noise inside her, a sound like a thousand wing beats, a gathering that incinerated her fear and honed everything to a pure, crystalline sharpness.

Then Silas changed his aim and pointed the gun at Mel.

Literally translated, budō means “way of the warrior”. It is more than a fighting system, though it is certainly that. An ancient samurai practice from Japan, budō is a way of life, a philosophy. It is an art.

The art of killing.

As with all art, there is beauty in it.

Eliana had practiced ritual katas at dawn for years. It was a way of assimilating herself to a new life, and a way of acquainting herself with the sun. For a girl born and raised underground who’d never glimpsed the sky until she was twenty-three years old, the sun had been a terrifying thing to her, a monster of heat and light suspended against a canvas of blue so vast it had no edges but bled off into infinity. She cried the first time she saw the night sky, but the first time she saw the sun, she cowered in terror.

She was a child of darkness. For her, daylight was where the bogeymen lurked, not in the cool, comforting arms of the night.

So she practiced in the garden of the ruined abbey at dawn, the rhythmic, calming flow of steps and turns and sweeping moves with her sword, until the rising sun was no longer a source of fear and her mind had sharpened, her spirit deepened, her muscles hardened from the girlish softness they once held. She practiced with a budō master who challenged her concentration and her form, and she became his best student. She never achieved katachi, however, that state when the repetitive mold-making of katas becomes perfection of shape and all training is aligned so you arrive at the calm center of yourself, weightless and magical, where movement is effortless, everything is slowed and crystallized, and you see with perfect vision what is all around you.