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She glanced around her dark green prison. She was probably going to die here. Probably soon, too, as she hadn’t taken a vein in a while and she was under a great deal of physical and emotional stress.

The reality of her own demise made her think of the many faces she’d stared down into as lives had leached out of bodies and souls went soaring free. As an assassin, death had been her job. As a symphath, it had been a kind of calling.

The process had always fascinated her. Every one of the people she’d killed had fought the tide, even though they knew, as she’d stood over them with whatever weapon she’d palmed up still in her hand, that if they managed to pull themselves out of the spiral she was just going to strike again. Hadn’t seemed to matter, though. The horror and the pain had acted as an energy source, food for their fight, and she knew what that felt like. How you struggled to breathe even though you couldn’t get air down your throat. How the cold sweat formed on top of your overheated skin. How your muscles became weak, but you still called on them to move, move, move, damn it.

Her previous captors had taken her to the brink of rigor mortis a number of times.

Although vampires believed in the Scribe Virgin, symphaths had no conception of an afterlife. To them, death was an exit ramp not to another highway, but to a brick wall that you slammed into. After which there was nothing.

Personally, she didn’t buy the whole holy-deity bullshit, and whether that was breeding or intellect, the outcome was the same. Death was lights-out, end of story. For fuck’s sake, she’d seen it up close so many times—after the great struggle came . . . nothing. Her victims had just stopped moving, frozen in whatever position they’d been in when their hearts had halted. And maybe some people died with a smile on their face, but in her experience, that was a grimace, not a grin.

You’d think if they were getting a boatload of bright white light and kingdom-of-heaven crap, they’d be beaming like they’d won the lottery.

Except maybe the reason they looked so bitched was less about where they were going and more about where they’d been.

The regrets . . . you did think about your regrets.

Aside from the fact that she wished she’d been born under different circumstances, there were two transgressions among her many that weighed more than all the others.

She wished she’d told Murhder, all those years ago, that she was half-symphath . That way, when she’d been taken up to the colony, he wouldn’t have come to rescue her. He’d have known it was inevitable that the other side of her family would come claim her and he wouldn’t then have ended up where he had.

She also wished she could go back and tell John Matthew she was sorry. She still would have pushed him away, because that was the only construct under which he wouldn’t have repeated the mistakes of her other lover. But she would have let him know it wasn’t him. It was her.

At least he was going to be okay in all of this. He had the Brothers and the king of the race to look after him, and, courtesy of her shutting him down, he wasn’t going to do anything stupid.

She was on her own in this and it was going to play out as it would. Having led a violent life, it was entirely unsurprising that she was going to meet a violent end . . . but true to form, she was sure as fuck going to take out a pound or two of flesh with her on the way to the exit.

SEVEN

Shit, they were losing the darkness.

As John glanced at his watch, the time check was a waste of effort. The sting in his eyes was telling him all he needed to know about how little night they had left.

Even the promise of daylight was enough to make him blink fast.

Then again, the activity at the Xtreme Park was winding down for the evening anyway, the drugged-out stragglers getting vertical on the benches or ducking into the public bathrooms for a last fix. Unlike Caldwell’s other parks, this one was open twenty-four/seven, with fluorescent lights on tall poles illuminating the expanse