Page 23

CHAPTER 23

Maarja whiplashed herself back, away from this…this…this omen. “What was that ?”

Dante’s lips were red and swollen, his eyes smoldering in a primitive display of ownership. “You know what that was.”

Did she know? In that ancient part of her brain that sucked in the knowledge of an object’s past, did she comprehend what he’d done? “Did you perform some kind of voodoo marriage?”

“ We. We performed an ancient ritual that wiped the ancient stain clean and restarted our worlds. This is it. This is all. You and me—we began in fire and explosion. We continue with sex and union. Now…now we are fused, together, one.”

We? No! “ We did not!”

He lifted her hands and the bottle to her eye level. “You’re not the only one who knows a few of the bits and pieces of history. The Arundel family has always known the past could be resurrected and changed.”

“The fuck !” She wasn’t usually a hardline swear-girl, but by God, this situation required it.

“Yes. The fuck will happen.” Dante smiled, all half-crooked-up corner of the mouth, sexual anticipation, and amused, smiling eyes. “It’ll be good, too. If I could, if we had time, I’d shove our pants down and push you against the wall, and together we’d celebrate our new world.”

She clenched. Thighs pressed together. Breasts nipply and hard. Coochie, damp and flexing.

Damn him. He had her thinking like him, reacting to him, wanting him.

He knew it, too, but he knew what she didn’t, and he got serious in a hurry. He glanced around at the walls and again at her cove molding. “We don’t have time. We’ve got to get out of here.”

She looked, too. Her cam…yes. He had definitely positioned them for optimum viewing, and all of this had been recorded. For whom? They? Why did they care? “Why do we have to get out of here?”

He turned her toward the back door. “I told you—I’m not the only one who can hack your cameras. They saw us do this.”

“As you meant them to!” Who were they?

He didn’t argue. “They’re our witnesses, and they’ll want to kill us and destroy the proof of what we did.” He plucked the bottle out of her fingers and did that stiletto magic disappearing act with it. “Not everyone believes in fate, and if they do, they also believe they can change it. They think they can be èrthu, and seize the future for themselves. If we let them. We will not let them.”

* * *

They turned away from the monitor that showed the interior of Maarja’s bedroom, and faced each other. “Dante’s move to bring this Romani into the family signifies a change in plans. We cannot permit that. We have to eliminate him, too, before she carries his child.”

“Too? We didn’t eliminate Raine. Somebody else did.”

“There are more participants playing this game than we realized. Think like Benoit. We’ll eliminate them all.”

“Benoit died.”

“We will survive. We will conquer. They will all die, and we will own our world.”