She looked out the window of the limousine that had arrived at Heathrow to collect them and watched as the landscape slid by, emerald rolling hills bisected with low stone walls and dotted with black-faced sheep, thatched-roof cottages and thickets of ancient trees spreading their boughs over arched bridges, everything green and glistening with the gray, misty rainfall that had tapered off only minutes before. She’d never been to England, and she’d never been this far out in the countryside, and the thought that her bones would be buried so far away from home brought a sheen of tears to her eyes.

She wasn’t allowing herself to think about Demetrius. She knew that would start a waterfall of tears that could never be stopped.

“We’re here,” said the driver from the front seat, and the air inside the car electrified.

The car pulled to a stop outside a massive, scrolled iron gate. The gate was flanked on either side with rough-hewn stone walls—ten feet high and topped with barbed wire—which stretched as far as the eye could see in either direction. The driver rolled down his window, waved a hand at the stone gatehouse, and after a slight hesitation, the scrolled iron gates began a slow, outward swing.

And Eliana’s heart began a frantic, hummingbird beat.

Let me not beg.

Upon seeing the traitor, Christian’s first thought was, Blue hair?

As she was hauled out of the car by Keshav and shoved forward in bare feet over the groomed white gravel of the circular drive, hands cuffed behind her back, long legs bare, his second thought was, Is she naked under that coat?

His third thought wasn’t actually a thought at all. It was more of a garbled impression of several things at once, all rendered unintelligible by the fact of his utter astonishment.

She had her head down, eyes trained on the ground, but as she rounded the back of the car she lifted her head and looked straight at him, and Christian felt as if he would be knocked back off his feet.

Her face—lovely, arresting—held an expression of such bottomless desolation it was like a hand had reached out and seized his heart. There was misery and grief but also an awful sort of steely resignation, and beneath it all, a beautiful, haunting pride. It was clear she knew she was being led to her death, knew it would not be an easy one…and she was determined to face it with dignity.

Admiration blossomed inside him.

And the first, tiny pinpricks of doubt.

Keshav yanked her to a stop with one hand curled hard around her upper arm. She stumbled and gasped, then bit the gasp back and straightened her spine. She lifted her gaze to his, and he was pinned by the force of it, by her air of magnificent doom, both heroic and tragic. He had the fleeting thought she could be the inspiration for an epic Greek poem about battle and betrayal and love. Chary and intense, she looked like someone who had spent years wandering the darkest depths of hell, met all its inhabitants, and been given a job counting the incoming dead.

In a husky, accented voice, she said, “Are you the one who’ll do it?”

Keshav made a move to drag her back, but Christian stopped him with a curt, “Wait.”

She didn’t take her gaze from his. He’d never, ever seen eyes so black.

“No,” he said. “My brother, Leander. The Alpha.”

Something flickered in her black eyes at that, there and then quickly gone. It didn’t seem like fear…perhaps it was anger? Contempt?

“Too bad,” she said. “You have a kind face. I’m guessing your brother the Alpha will really make a meal of it.” Her voice grew bitter. “They’re always the worst.”

He wondered at her composure. In her shoes, he wasn’t sure he’d be quite so self-contained. “You’re not scared,” he said, and she blinked at him, surprised.

Her composure slipped. She swallowed, a flush crept over her cheeks, and her eyes grew fierce with unshed tears. “Yes, I am,” she whispered. “But only of being weak. I can’t stand the thought of…breaking.”

It moved him, this irrational admission of hers. This honesty. He fought the sudden urge to comfort her with some kind of platitude, but he knew it was useless.

She would break. They all did, sooner or later.

And—he sternly reminded himself, trying to push his doubts aside—she was a savage. They’d all seen the evidence of what she and her brother had done. They’d all seen the carnage, along with the rest of the world.

He motioned with his chin for Keshav to take her inside the manor, and she was jerked away and led up the marble steps toward the iron-studded doors twice the size of a man. They swung open, and Christian turned and followed them inside.

The air this high in the atmosphere was thin and cold, filled with ice crystals that bit at him and the occasional crosswind that blew him off course and threatened to tear him apart completely, but raw, ragged fear kept D going.

Fear that he’d be too late.

He’d found a fast-flowing, narrow air current that swept him over the English Channel in good time, but then it turned sharply east, when he needed to go west. He dropped out of it, lower, surging over steaming fields and rolling moors and small townships and villages, all of it a painted blur of green and purple and brown far, far below. He didn’t know his exact velocity, but he knew he’d never be as fast as a plane, and he hoped against hope that when he found her she wouldn’t be—

No. He wouldn’t allow himself to consider the possibility. He was going to find her alive, that was all there was to it.

Or God help them. He’d slaughter them all.

The manor was vast and luxurious, a labyrinth of drawing rooms and music rooms and sitting rooms, everything lavished in silks and velvets and gilt. Eliana was led down corridor after corridor, past a dual staircase that wound up to the second floor, her bare feet touching cool, polished wood between the soft pile of the Turkish rugs placed everywhere, until finally she arrived at the entrance to a grand, gilded room. It was cavernous, outfitted with even more attention to finery than the rest of the place.

And something else quite unique from the other rooms she’d passed: thrones.

A matched set of them, two glossy, elaborately carved mahogany thrones with cushioned seats, set on a dais at the far side of the room.

Her lips twisted ruefully. Back in the catacombs beneath Rome, her father had sat on one almost identical.

The thrones were empty, but the long tables that flanked them were not. A group of men sat facing her in substantial wooden chairs of their own, arms crossed over cashmere sweaters or silk jackets, or hands spread on the fine linen cloth of the table or clenched into fists at their sides, each one with a face that didn’t bode well for the state of her health. Their expressions were uniformly hard, hostile, and grim.

One at the end—a younger one, boyish and bookish with a lock of dark hair flopped over one eye, glasses he kept pushing up the bridge of his nose—looked a little green around the gills.

Must be his first execution.

They didn’t stand as she was brought forward, only watched her approach with eerie, vivid yellow-green eyes, lucent and piercing in the wan sunlight that slanted through the far windows of the chamber. They were the same eyes as the one she’d met outside, the brother of the Alpha, and they chilled her in exactly the same way.

Her people’s eyes were the color of a tropical midnight, or the richest, loamy earth—dark but warm and full of life. These people’s eyes were clear and glacial, and they sliced through her like gusts of killing cold wind.

They were wealthy and elegant and refined, but beneath all of that, they were killers, to a one.

She lifted her chin. I am Eliana, daughter of the House of Cardinalis. The women of my lineage are lionhearted; I won’t be intimidated. I won’t let them see me beg.