Zael.
And the traitor wasn’t alone.
They were among other Atlanteans. Faces Selene hadn’t seen for thousands of years but would never forget.
Exiles who’d chosen to desert her in favor of creating their own community.
Jordana was at the colony this very moment.
Nuranthia quietly cleared her throat. “Your Grace, those people . . . aren’t they--”
Selene dropped her hand into the water with a splash. The vision dissolved, nothing but small, rippling waves in the bottom of the bowl. “Say nothing of this to anyone, Nuranthia.”
The seer nodded and bowed. “Yes, Your Grace. As you wish.”
Once she was gone, Selene let go of a furious curse. She could think of only one reason that Zael and Jordana would be at the colony: They wanted the crystal.
So, the Order was not opposed to using her own granddaughter against her? Using Jordana against her own people?
It was no surprise that a faithless defector like Zael might attempt to charm his way into the colony’s good graces, but had Jordana’s time among the Breed corrupted her so thoroughly too?
Selene fumed at the very notion.
As for the colony and its council of elders, Selene harbored more than a little bitterness for them as well. Many of them she had considered friends once. Perhaps that was why she had permitted their insult to stand when they broke away from the realm to form their colony.
They had thought themselves so clever, stealing away to their private haven with one of Atlantis’s crystals. Selene had known of its location within the colony all along, yet resisted the temptation to reclaim it.
Ripping it away from them would be tantamount to sealing their doom, because like her own realm the colony was only hidden and protected as long as they had a crystal in their possession.
If the Order had sent Zael and Jordana to recruit an alliance with the colony in hopes of winning the crystal for Lucan Thorne, they were in for disappointment. The colony could never give it up willingly and hope to survive.
Unless the Order intended something more underhanded.
Would they stoop to stealing the crystal?
There was nothing more heinous to her mind than duplicity. Yet as she thought about the thinly veiled threats flung at her by Lucan’s arrogant son not so long ago, a sick kind of worry built in her gut that the Breed warriors might, indeed, stop at nothing to obtain enough crystal power to rule everything in their sight.
She could not let that happen.
But even more piercing than that fear was the ache in her heart that lingered after glimpsing Jordana in the seer’s bowl. How she longed to hold her only kin again. It was a right she’d been deprived of for more than twenty-five years, first by Jordana’s father Cassianus when he abducted the precious infant from the realm and hid her away among the Breed and mortals, and now by the Order.
To think her grandchild was practically under her nose at the colony.
The urge to summon her royal legion and storm the island en masse beat like a war drum in Selene’s ears. But the same veil that sealed off the colony to outsiders would also shield it from her army.
Only another crystal could breach the veil’s protection.
Or something nearly as powerful.
Her.
CHAPTER 13
Gabrielle was burning up and freezing at the same time.
On a groan, sleep still weighing her down with unnatural heaviness, she pushed the coverlet away from her shivering, yet feverish, body. Darkness surrounded her in the quiet bedroom. No sound at all but the wet patter of rain sluicing down the shaded windows and the pair of French doors on the other side of the room.
Tess had pulled the curtains away from the glass doors the last time she’d come in to check on Gabrielle and to administer another dose of the strong tranquilizers that were barely managing to keep the worst of her pain at bay.
