“Of what interest is she to us?” he argued, standing before the sixteen men and one woman of the Assembly, his jaw set, his hands spread wide.

The East Library, where the Assembly regularly met, was filled with fractured, golden sunlight reflected from the crystal chandelier overhead. The room had a magnificent gilded ceiling and a seventeenth-century marble fireplace, a spectacular view of the river Avon snaking through the New Forest beyond, and was normally Leander’s favorite place at Sommerley. It was a place where he could hide from the world and think.

When the Assembly was not in session, that is.

“A half-Blood whose father was executed for treason?” Leander added. He shook his head in frustration. “She’s hardly worth a second glance. The probability she has any Gift is beyond remote. She’s displayed none of the signs—”

“She has the Eyes,” came the quiet response to his right from Edward, Viscount Weymouth. He reclined in a beige and ivory-striped silk Dupioni chair with his hands folded over his waistcoat. Spindly legs stretched out in front of him, round spectacles teetered on the end of a long, aquiline nose. “This has been confirmed by more than one scout,” he added.

Leander pursed his lips and considered him.

He was a trusted man, a man who kept a record of the ancestry of each member of the colony, a man who knew all their secrets and every facet of their history back to their ancient days of glory in the equatorial rainforests of Africa.

Viscount Weymouth was Keeper of the Bloodlines, as were his father and grandfather before him, and every other male of his line, back to the beginning.

It was an important job in the colony, a revered one. Because for the Ikati, Bloodlines were of secondary importance to only two other things:

Secrecy. Allegiance.

“I believe there have been other half-Bloods in our history who had the Eyes, and few of them showed any other sign. Even fewer were ever able to Shift,” Leander reminded the Viscount.

The Viscount stared at him, stony and silent, for one long moment. Then he uttered something that made the other members of the Assembly shift in their seats and murmur to one another in worried agreement.

“What you say is true. But none of the other half-Bloods were his.”

“Leander.”

His brother spoke his name, and the room turned to his voice. Christian sat in second position around the rectangular mahogany table, to the left of Leander, his gilt beechwood armchair with its carved wooden back only slightly less ornate than his brother’s.

He was pretending to relax, slouched slightly in his chair, a sardonic smile on his handsome face. His hair spilled in a silken jet tangle over his shoulders. He was the less physically imposing of the two, but equally intelligent, sloe-eyed, and lithe, with the height and grace and dusky coloring all the Ikati shared.

And like all the others, he gauged Leander’s reaction with every word he spoke. One poorly turned phrase could lead to very unpleasant consequences.

“Perhaps it would be wise to pay this half-Blood a visit,” he began slowly. “If only to assure ourselves that she is not a threat. Under normal circumstances, she would have been dealt with at birth. The mere fact that she remains free puts us all at risk.”

Leander’s only response was an arched eyebrow and thinned lips. Emboldened by Christian’s words, Robert Barrington leaned forward over the table, green eyes narrowed in a handsome, leonine face. “I agree. If she were to Shift for the first time outside the walls of the colony, unsupervised, perhaps in plain view of who knows how many people, the results could be disastrous.”

Another man, a set of belligerence to his jaw, sat forward. Grayson Sutherland. Newly wed, always confident, he’d competed as a young man against Leander for the attentions of one of the tribe’s most sought-after females, a raven-haired beauty with rose petal lips and notoriously free hands. Sutherland had lost.

“They’re right, Leander. This little stray could be the undoing of us all. She should immediately be brought here to face the Assembly and her fate.”

A few other men around the table made low noises of agreement, all of them privileged, all of them Gifted, every one of them stepping into very dangerous territory.

Leander’s face darkened with anger. He felt the blood rise to his face.

Shifter Law—ancient, iron-clad, and utterly patriarchal—was clear on this matter. Though it was allowed for Shifters to dally outside their race with humans—frowned upon but allowed—it was forbidden to marry, expressly forbidden to breed. The punishment for this very rare transgression was death for the human and the offspring and a lifetime of imprisonment for the Shifter.

With a single exception. If the Shifter gave his life in their stead.

Leander’s gaze, burning with cold fire, picked out each member of the Assembly, one by one. “A sacrifice was made to ensure her freedom. You know that.” Above all, he revered honor and courage, duty and discipline, and therefore admired what Jenna’s father had done. Though to admit his admiration would in itself be a kind of treason.

“You all know that. An oath was sworn and paid for in blood. My father, Charles McLoughlin, Alpha Lord of this colony before me, exacted the price himself. It was done according to the Law and will stand. She will not be taken.”

Though it was quiet and controlled, his voice cracked like a bullwhip across the room, silencing them all.

“Yes,” Christian agreed after a long and awkward moment in which the only sound was the ticking of the Belgian clock on the Chippendale burlwood desk. “We cannot break the oath of the Alpha. She and her mother were permitted to live, and so far she has given no other sign but the Eyes. But the risk remains.”

Although it was still a foolhardy thing to do, Christian was allowed to challenge Leander, who supposed it was good for him, in a way. It kept him grounded and reminded him he still had family, small though it was now. Since the accident that had claimed his parents three years ago last May, his older sister, Daria, and Christian were all he had left.

“So I suggest we find her current whereabouts and pay her a visit a few days before her birthday. Keep out of sight, no contact, just watch. On her twenty-fifth birthday we’ll have our answer, one way or another. I’ll go myself, if you like.”

He lifted his gaze straight to Leander’s and waited, expressionless, still casually slouched in his chair. But Leander felt what simmered beneath his brother’s air of casual indifference.

Excitement.

He narrowed his eyes, wondering at the cause, but his brother, still impassive, glanced away. Leander turned his attention back to the gathered men. “And if she is unable to Shift?”

It was Viscount Weymouth who answered him through the heavy silence that suddenly filled the grace and splendor of the East Library.

“Then you know what must be done.”

So it had been agreed. Christian and Leander would travel to observe the half-Blood until her birthday, and Morgan would accompany them. She was the only woman who served in the Assembly, a concession hard-won and resented by the old guard, men who were unused to having their authority questioned, unaccustomed to a female usurping their age-old dogma of male superiority. But it had been put to a vote and she had been approved, by a threadbare margin of one.

Leander’s was the deciding vote.

Securing her place in the Assembly had been a battle. She’d sustained scars and nursed deep resentments for those who stood against her. But Leander suspected ambition and a shrewd acuity kept her quiet. In truth, her Gifts and intelligence made her worth ten of the men who’d opposed her.

Savagely cunning, an expert hunter, and completely lethal, Morgan possessed the rare Gift of Suggestion, which would make it easier for them to convince an unwilling half-Blood to return to Sommerley, if the need arose. It was also the reason she had ultimately been accepted into the Assembly.