Dreams of a Dark Warrior

before he could shoot her, blowing out the glass of this aircraft. She might survive a crash. Aidan would be done for.
    Even now she hesitated to harm him. “I can’t tell you how much you would regret that.”
    “Because your kind will exact revenge on me?” He cast her that cruel sneer, a twisting of his lips. “And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that.”
    She shook her head. “No, not because of revenge. You’ll regret hurting me.”
    “Regret? I despise your kind. I savored hurting you, anticipate the next time I can.”
    Once he remembered, his actions would put him to his knees with misery.
    “Why did you act as if you know me?” he asked.
    How to answer that? The sooner he remembered, the sooner he died. In the past, she’d done everything she could to keep him from remembering.
I can’t tell him.
“I thought you were someone else.” When she shrugged as best as she could, the wound in her side erupted in fresh pain. Between gritted teeth, she said, “Since you’ve brought it up, my kind
will
exact revenge. They’ll unleash hell on you for this.”
    He leaned in as if imparting a secret. “Then they had best do it fast. Because we’re going to interrogate you, and examine you, and then we’ll behead you. You’ll beg for mercy, but I’ll grant you none.”
    Icy dread shivered over her. “What the hell,” Regin whispered, “did I ever do to you?”
    He shoved the tape back over her mouth and yanked the hood down. At her ear, he rasped, “You exist.”
    Another shot in her arm, and unconsciousness took her once more.

FOUR

    B ack at the facility, Declan signed over his unconscious prisoners to the warden, a stout, beady-eyed arsehole named Fegley.
    The man hated Declan. The feeling was mutual.
    Fegley was in charge of processing the inmates, removing their effects and any hidden weapons, formally ID’ing them, and collaring them. While he worked, a physician from the research arm would take biological samples for an initial workup, then the prisoner would be transferred to one of the three hundred cells spread out over two containment wards.
    “Which cell are you putting the Valkyrie in?” Declan asked.
    “Seventy.”
    “Why there?” Two inmates already occupied that cell. Yes, the facility was overcrowded, and they’d been doubling up, but prisoners were usually placed with much forethought.
    So why put the Valkyrie with a female fey assassin and a semi-catatonic male halfling?
    “More prisoners came in while you were gone.” Fegley shrugged. “Webb ordered her into that one. And I don’t question orders,” he said pointedly.
    Stifling his long-denied urge to strike the man, Declan turned toward the research ward and his own suite of rooms.
    Though he didn’t understand Webb’s reasoning at times, it wasn’t his place to question an order either. Or to question
anything
. Even when he itched to know how Webb acquired new information about their foes. Or how this island was kept hidden from their detrus soothsayers and oracles. …
    When Declan reached his suite, he unlocked the executive office he used as a reception area. From that room, two corridors branched off behind concealed panels. One led to a storage warehouse—with an emergency escape tunnel—the other to his private quarters. There he had a sizable multilevel space with a gym, a kitchen, a work and sleep area, and an adjoining bath.
    The only home he’d known for nearly a decade.
    Inside his inner chamber, he removed his gloves and jacket. There were only two places in the world he felt comfortable enough to shed the layer of clothes that kept his ruined skin hidden: here within this sanctum, and out in the desolate forests on the island.
    Releasing a weary exhalation, he sank into the chair at his control console. Above the curved desk and computer keyboard stretched a ninety-six-inch LCD screen. Across that extended monitor, he could pull up multiple broadcast feeds from the facility’s cameras.
    With the click of a button, he could view—and hear—the occupants in any of the holding cells, could deploy security measures against them.
    From this console he could run the entire base. In fact, he often did.
    This military installation had once been used only to secure and interrogate prisoners. Now the facility also housed a research arm in a dedicated ward. A team of scientists lived on-site, investigating the immortals’ innate defenses, their physical strengths—and especially their