Edge of Oblivion by J. T. Geissinger

shot back, defensive.
    His face changed. A flicker of unnamed emotion, here then gone. “My mother suffered the fate you were lucky enough to avoid.”
    She blinked, understanding. “The Alpha.”
    He nodded. A muscle twitched in his jaw.
    “She’s Gifted.”
    “She
was
,” he corrected, flat, and now, realizing what he meant, she was sorry she’d asked.
    “Oh. I’m—I’m sorry. What happened?”
    He held her gaze for another moment, still intent, then inhaled and leaned back in his chair. He looked away and ran a hand over his cropped hair and held it there for a moment, an unstudied gesture, masculine and unconscious and somehow intimate. His voice came very low.
    “He was not a gentle man.”
    It chilled her. She could only imagine the atrocities behind those simple, succinct words. Even Leander, Alpha of Sommerley, with all his sophistication and elegance and finery, even he was a killer beneath all of that. All the Alphas of their kind were born and bred for one thing, and one thing only: domination.
    “No,” she said quietly after a moment. “They never are.”
    He didn’t respond, and she sat staring at his profile, outlined stark against the morning sun, brutally handsome and hard. She’d met the Alpha of his colony once before, a man named Alejandro...
    “You’re the son of an Alpha,” she said, curious. Leander would never allow anything to come between him and his birthright. “Why aren’t you Alpha of the Manaus colony now?”
    That twitch in his jaw again, but that was all. He glanced back at her, his eyes searing gold.
    “Fate chose my path. And I followed it.”
    She frowned at him, waiting for more, but he only turned his head and directed his gaze to the passing tourists, bobbing by in a sea of color and noise.
    “You are the strangest assassin I’ve ever met,” she declared, undecided again if he was mocking her or just being evasive. This entire conversation made her head spin.
    “You’re acquainted with many assassins?” he said drily, to the view of the palazzo.
    She speared another ripe piece of melon, lifted it to her lips, and ate it. “Not any who’ve read Nietzsche and talk about love and fate all in the same breath,” she muttered.
    He chuckled softly. “I’ve had an unusual education.”
    She snorted. “I’ll just bet you—” He went rigid in his chair and whipped his head around so fast it was a black blur in her peripheral vision. He hissed, low, through his teeth, and a deep, warning growl rumbled through his chest. All the tiny hairs on her arms stood on end.
    “What is it?” she said, stiffening.
    The air around them seemed to warp and shimmer, and she felt his anger and adrenaline pulse over her skin in heated, dangerous waves. The arguing men at the next table fell silent, and she wondered if they felt the sudden atmospheric change, but she didn’t dare look over.
    “Open your nose,” he growled, scanning the palazzo. His lips peeled back to reveal a set of perfect, gleaming white teeth. His hand went to his waist.
    She glanced around. The café, the passing crowd, the bright, sunlit morning—she saw nothing out of the ordinary.
    “Your
nose
,” he hissed and shot to his feet. His chair skidded back and toppled over with a clatter to the cobblestones.
    There was a twitter from a table of young women as they noticed Xander for the first time; a few soft gasps rose from another. Conversation all around them ceased except for a few startled murmurs. And she could understand why. At his full height, on full alert, the assassin exuded a current of feral, crackling electricity, virile and potent, that rocked her back in her chair and left her breathless. Even the humans must have been able to sense it, but if not, there was still the fact of the taut, leashed lines of his body, those massive shoulders and arms, the face of a destroying angel, perfectly beautiful and perfectly cold. She stared up at him, startled, as an exquisite rush of heat flooded