Heart Of Atlantis

generation of Atlanteans to worry about now. That Prince Aidan was going to be a handful . . .

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    Keep reading for a special preview of Alyssa Day’s new paranormal romance series
    THE CURSED
    Coming in May 2013, from Berkley Sensation!
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On top of the Ramble Stone Arch, Central Park, New York, three A.M.
    Getting stabbed is hell on the dry-cleaning bill.
    Luke Oliver looked down at the silver blade stuck between his ribs and then up at the only person still alive who’d known him back when his name was Lucian Olivieri. “I’d kill anyone else for that, Maestro.”
    He pulled out the knife, wincing as it scraped a rib, wiped it on his jeans, and then put it in his pocket. “You didn’t want it back, did you?”
    The other man, his face hidden by the shadows cast by his fedora, laughed. His laugh sounded like rock being crushed beneath a giant’s boots and was just as appealing. Luke suspected the maestro knew it, too, and used it as one of a lifetime’s worth of weapons.
    “Consider it a gift. And I was just checking,” the maestro said. “When silver starts burning you like acid—”
    “I know the terms of my own curse,” Luke said, cutting off the reminder. Beating back the past. “What do you want? I have a job to get back to.”
    “Still doing those jobs? Trying to save the world from your hideaways in the dank, dingy corners of Bordertown?”
    It was Luke’s turn to laugh. “No hideaway. A crappy office. And I’m only trying to save one person. The world can go to hell for all I care, but right now I’m too busy to reminisce about old times.”
    “We didn’t have any old times. We were on opposite sides. Your mother was a thug.”
    “Even enemies have old times. And my mother was an
aristocratic
thug. Never let it be said that Lucrezia Borgia didn’t do her murdering with class,” Luke countered, as he silently watched a trio of gang bangers, smelling of cheap booze and acrid smoke, saunter underneath the arch while trading raucous and profane insults. Secure in their mistaken belief that they were apex predators in the darkest hours of the night. He wondered briefly what they’d do if he dropped down among them and showed them the face and power of a true predator.
    Wet their pants and run screaming for Mommy, no doubt.
    “Do you still do it? Hunt the criminals?” The maestro’s voice held only a calm curiosity, as if he were asking about the weather. “Do you feel the pull to stalk them as prey and crush them? Burn them to cinders?”
    Yes.
    Always.
    No.
    Never.
    Never
again
, at least.
    Luke settled on a nonanswer. “You have one minute to say something relevant.”
    The other man pulled an envelope out of his coat pocket and held it out to Luke, and then he said the two words Luke had never wanted to hear again.
    “Black Swan.”
    Shock knocked Luke back like a crossbow aimed at his heart, and he fell off the arch, but recovered in time to land with his characteristic grace on the path thirteen feet below.
    The maestro laughed once more and tossed the envelope down through the night air before he disappeared. Luke caught the envelope as it fell, almost in spite of himself. The glossy black-and-red logo was embossed on one corner, as he’d expected; the sinuous arch of the swan’s neck stark against the Templar cross and mocking him with its elegance.
    He needed to get back to his office. His client’s missing child was far more important than anything that could be inside this envelope. He’d burn it. Destroy any evidence that the League had ever reached out its slimy tentacles, and move on with what was passing for his life these days. He told himself all that, even as he tore open the envelope right there on the path, and pulled out its entire contents: a single photograph.
    The moonlight seemed to caress the woman in the photo, highlighting with vivid, shocking clarity her perfect bone structure, the curve of her cheek, and her wary expression. The world tilted on its axis, and the edges of Luke’s fingers shimmered with blue flame, nearly incinerating the photo before he extinguished the fire. He stared at the picture—still perfect but for charred edges—and another kind of fire flashed to an inferno inside him. It was Rio. Rio Jones, the one woman he’d ever truly wanted.
    The one woman he could never have.
    The League of the Black Swan was back and it wanted him to get involved with Rio Jones. It was the end of the world, all over again. An immortal just