Page 91 of Dark Destiny: The Fates' Bargain

"How?" Navuh demanded. "And why would the clan accept you?"

Another insolent shrug. "That's none of your business. We don't answer to you anymore."

Anymore.

The word landed like a slap, and behind the sting of it, Navuh saw his opening, gleaming and perfect.

They'd refused to answer. Which meant that if they answered anyway, he would know if he still had what it took to compel.

He almost laughed at the elegant simplicity of it. One command, disguised as the kind of angry demand that was his style, which no one would question. If it failed, he'd look like nothing more than what they already believed him to be, a broken, angry male. And if it worked, he'd know that the most powerful weapon in his arsenal was still firing, and these eight unfiltered minds were his to harvest.

The question was whether he still had it at all.

He couldn't even get an erection, so perhaps his compulsion ability wasn't working either. What if it had died on those rocks along with everything else?

There was only one way to find out.

"Tell me how you left the island!" Navuh commanded, and he laced every word with every shred of compulsion power he could summon, opening channels he hadn't used in months, pouring through them everything he had, everything he was, the power that had bent thousands of knees and built a false god's throne on an island of slaves. "What did the clan promise you to betray the Brotherhood?"

It worked. He could see it in their postures, their expressions, their eyes.

All eight of them went still at once. Their faces slackened, their eyes turned glossy, distant, and fixed on him, and the old power sang up Navuh's spine.

Oh, it sang.

He was Lord Navuh again. Not a patient, not a prisoner, not a broken male being wheeled to water therapy by his mate.

For one glorious, expanding moment, the corridor was his throne room, eight powerful weapons stood before him awaiting his command, and the future unrolled itself at his feet in all its old glory.

The spokesman's mouth opened.

Closed.

Opened again. "We can compel now," he said, his voice sounding monotone and distant like a male controlled by a powerful compulsion. "We compel through thralling, not sound waves. We just walked onto a departing ship in front of a hundred men, and not one of them noticed us because we compelled them to look the other way."

Navuh's triumph curdled.

They could compel through thralling? He was the most powerful compeller in the world and he couldn't do that.

"That's impossible. No one can compel through thralling. Besides, compulsion is inherited, not manufactured in a laboratory."

"Oh, but it is possible." The spokesman smiled, and the glossy distance vanished from his eyes between one heartbeat and the next.

It had not faded. It had been switched off, cleanly, deliberately, and the light came back on in all eight faces at the same instant, eight pairs of clear, sharp, amused eyes trained on him in perfect unison.

He had a sinking feeling that they had toyed with him, and that his compulsion didn't work on them, or didn't work at all.

In the roaring silence of that realization, another one arrived, quieter and almost as bad. Areana was standing behind his chair, and she hadn't said a single word since the elevator doors opened. Not a gasp, not a question, not one syllable of surprise at eight enhanced soldiers stepping out of an elevator into the sealed world she shared with him.

He turned his head and looked up at his mate, at her beautiful, composed face.

She had known, and she had chosen not to tell him.

32

YAAF

They decided to cut their workout short and go see a movie with Dimitri, Petrov, and their partners.