Paradise couldn’t stand it. She had to see who it was.
Inching out, she curled her body around the archway and looked past her father’s stiff shoulders. Her first thought was that the male’s leathers and ragged button-down shirt did not match his intonation. Her second was that his eyes were bruised, they were so tired.
He did indeed appear to have come from the war’s front lines, something sickly sweet staining the air that brushed by his body as it entered the house.
The male noticed her immediately, and his face registered something that he quickly hid.
Her father glanced over his shoulder and shot her a glare. “Paradise,” he hissed.
“I can understand why you hesitate,” the male said, his eyes never leaving hers. “Indeed, she is precious.”
Her father turned back around. “You must go.”
The male dropped down to one knee and bowed his head, putting one hand over his heart and lifting the other, open palmed, up to the heavens.
In the Old Language, he said softly, “I hereby swear upon our common ancestry that I shall bring no harm to you, your blooded daughter, or any living thing within these walls—or may the Scribe Virgin cut my life off afore your very eyes.”
Her father looked back at her and slashed his arm through the air, an order for her to get out and stay gone.
She put her hands up and nodded, all, Okay, okay, okaaaaay.
Moving quickly, she went back into the library and across to the panels by the fireplace. Reaching under the third shelf from the floor to the hidden trigger point, she pressed the lever and was able to push the entire load of books out and over on the well-oiled track. With a quick slip, she emerged into the fully finished hallway that ran in a square around the first floor of the house, providing access, both visual and actual, to every room through hidden doors and viewpoints.
It was like something out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
Closing herself in, Paradise went to the shallow stairs that were all the way in the back, and as she ascended them, she wished she could hear what they were saying. As usual, though, she was in the dark; her father never told her anything about anything.
It was part of his old-school mind-set: Well-bred females didn’t need to be bothered with things like mysterious, long-lost relatives who showed up unannounced and armed to the teeth. Or, say, where the head of the household was working, how much he was earning or what his net worth was. For example, when her father was appointed First Adviser to the King, that was all she was told. She had no idea what his job was like, what he did for the King and the Brotherhood—heck, she didn’t even know where he went each night.
She believed he truly thought he was sparing her. But she hated being in the dark about so much.
At the top of the hidden staircase, she went forward about fifteen feet and stopped in front of an inset panel. The latch was to the left and she flicked it free.
Her bedroom was everything girlie and soft, from her frilly bed to the lace at the windows to the needlepoint rugs that were like slippers you didn’t have to wear.
Going over, she turned the lock on her door, knowing it would be the first thing her father would check whenever he came upstairs—and if he didn’t make it to the second floor because he was staying with their “guest”? He was going to make Fedricah come and do a test-turn of the knob.
At her bed, she sat down, kicked off her loafers, and flopped back on the duvet. Staring up at the canopy, she shook her head.
Locked in her room. Cut out from any action.
Immediately after the raids, it was the only place she had wanted to be, the only way to feel safe. But those nights of terror had turned into months of worry . . . which had transitioned into an uneasy normalcy . . . that had devolved into just plain life in general.
So that now she felt trapped. In this room. In this house. In this life.
Paradise glanced at her closed, locked door.
Who was that male? she wondered.
ELEVEN
Selena became slowly aware that she was no longer in the Sanctuary. She did not recognize where she was, however: Her brain was slow to process both the signals from her body and the cues from her environment, as if the attack had frozen not only her flesh, but her mind.
Gradually, however, it occurred to her that there was no more grass in her face. No trees or temples off in the distance. No soft sound of running water from the baths.
She tried to shift her head and groaned.
“Selena?”
The face that entered her vision brought tears to her eyes. It was Trez . . . it was Trez. . . .
Sure as if she had conjured him out of a dream, he was right before her, and she drank him in: his smooth dark skin, his almond-shaped black eyes, his tight-cut black hair, the looming presence of his heft and height.
Her first instinct was to reach out to him, but a blaze of pain stopped her, making her gasp.
“Doc Jane,” he barked. “She’s awake!”
Trez? she said. Trez, wait, I need to tell you something—
“Doc Jane!”
No, don’t worry about that. I need to—
“She can’t breathe!”
Things happened so fast. All at once, a mask was pushed onto her face, and something forced her lungs to inflate. Voices exploded around her. A shrill beeping sound suggested an alarm was going off—
Someone tried to straighten her out, and her joints roared in protest. Oh, wait, it was her trying move—she was trying to sit up to see what was going on.
“She’s moving!” That was Trez—she was sure of it. “Her arm moved!”
“She’s in cardiac arrest. Can you flatten her chest?”
The pain that came next was so great, she screamed.
“I’m sorry,” Trez said into her ear, his voice cracking. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry, but I’ve got to get you flat—”
Selena screamed again, but she didn’t think it registered as sound. And then her vision blurred, starting with the peripheral and heading to the center, as if a fog were rolling in from all sides.
Suddenly, she was staring at the medical chandelier—which meant they’d somehow managed to get her on her back. Then came pressure on her shoulders, spine, arms. Her vision went in and out, that blurriness receding and returning as great waves of pain racked her.
“I don’t want to break anything,” Trez gritted out.
So it was his hands on her wrists, forcing her flat.
“I need to get in there. Now.”
Doc Jane appeared on the opposite side of the table, and in her hands were palm-size blocks with curly cords hanging from the ends.
“Get her robing off.” Doc Jane looked in another direction. “You males gotta leave or he’s not going to let us get to her torso.”
That alarm was so loud now, a solid continuous sound, no longer broken by intervals.
“Clear!” Doc Jane ordered.
A lightning strike hit Selena’s chest, popping her torso up off the table, cracking each and every one of her vertebrae, busting her spine out of its hold.
As she slapped back down on the exam table’s thin mattress, there was a brief, striking pause during which the three people around her, Doc Jane, the nurse, Ehlena, and Trez, all stared at her. She focused on Trez—and that was when she saw a fourth who was standing directly next to him, a big body turned away, a dark head tilted down and to the side.
iAm.