moving in the fifth dimension, she sensed enormous energy ahead. It wasn’t Ryodan, she’d left him in her dust in the study.
It was Fae/not Fae. Prince/not prince.
Thirty feet to go and nearing, twenty-five, twenty—
She slammed into a solid wall and bounced off it, exploding out of the slipstream, cartwheeling her arms for balance.
“Ah, Dani,” Ryodan said, smiling faintly. “Didn’t see you there.”
She went still. Her ass, he hadn’t. She didn’t press her fingers to her cheekbone, which she was certain would soon bruise. She was the eye of the storm, not the storm. Never the storm.
“I realized years ago your vision wasn’t as astute as I’d once believed,” she said without inflection. He’d been in the slipstream with her and she hadn’t even known. She would learn to sense him. She would eradicate that vulnerability.
His smile vanished.
Good. She hadn’t reacted. She’d responded. She was Jada. Not the one he remembered. In the periphery of her vision, wings unfurled and she turned to assess the visitor. The last she’d seen Christian, he was unconscious, being transported by his clan back to Scotland, along with his uncle’s remains.
Flakes of iridescent ice crystalized in the air and began to fall, dusting the Cruce-gilded floors of the abbey. The temperature dropped sharply and a six-light segment of the hall’s torchères went out. The prince in the Highlander was displeased, affecting the environment.
“Jada, he sifted in!” Brigitte exclaimed. Then mouthed silently around his back, Our wards didn’t work, what the fuck?
“At ease,” she told her first in command, which meant “hold your weapons for now.” Christian wasn’t who or what he’d been before his time on the cliffs. Though he’d been largely unconscious for the duration of the ride back from Germany, she’d seen enough to know something had changed him, tempered his wildness and madness.
There was a sudden commotion as more sidhe-seers joined them in the hall. She allowed herself a moment to bask in seeing the corridor of the grand old abbey lined with self-possessed, well-trained, heavily armed women, as it always should have been. Each face was a life, with a family, a vivid story, and she’d already made a significant dent in committing them all to memory.
Christian glided down the hallway toward her, part muscled Highlander, part sleek, dark Faerie, majestic black-velvet wings trailing the gold floor, and despite having been trained to stand their ground, a few of her sidhe-seers peeled back.
She didn’t fault them. He was formidable. She made a point of never underestimating either enemy or ally. His treatment of her now would define which one he was. His transformation seemed to have halted midway, leaving his skin golden, not white-blue, his lips pink, not blue-black, but he had the long midnight hair, muted tattoos, and majestic wings of a hauntingly beautiful, deadly Unseelie prince.
But his eyes! She fixedly avoided staring into them, blurring her focus slightly, absorbing his face as a whole with no clear features. His gaze leaned more toward Fae than human and she knew she would weep blood were she to meet it directly.
In faded jeans and a cabled Irish sweater split down the back to accommodate his great midnight wings that arced high and swept wide, he personified wolf in sheep’s clothing. At his throat, a torque writhed, glinting, not an adornment but rather part of his flesh and quite possibly bone.
He’d saved her once from what she’d thought would have been a hellish decision. She’d known nothing of hellish decisions back then.
“Dani, lass,” he said quietly.
“Jada,” she corrected.
He studied her, from hair to boots and back again but with none of the sexual heat she’d once seen in that sometimes-black, sometimes-whiskey gaze. With her slightly unfocused gaze, she noticed his eyes widen, narrow with anger and that all-too-familiar rejection, then go void of all emotion.
Oh, yes, trapped in unending pain, he’d learned control. Learned to pull his feelings back and box them so they couldn’t turn into fuel that would burn a person alive.
One did. Or didn’t survive.
“Fair enough,” he said. “I bring no quarrel to you or yours. You’ve my thanks and a favor owed for seeing me off that cliff. I would speak with that one.” He jerked his head toward Ryodan.
She inclined her head, granting permission, wondering what had brought him here tonight, if they might work together toward common goals.
Christian stalked past her to the bastard that could still knock her out of freeze-frame. “What the bloody fuck did you do with my uncle?”