Chapter Ninety-Three
The Dragon Factory
Monday, August 30, 5:02 A.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 54 hours, 58 minutes E.S.T.
Hecate and Paris lay entwined on the bed they had shared for ten years. The young black woman they had enjoyed lay between them, her chocolate skin in luxuriant contrast to the milky whiteness of theirs. The woman lay with her head on Paris’s arm, but she faced Hecate and her dark hand rested on Hecate’s flawless flat stomach.
Paris and the girl were asleep, but Hecate lay awake long into the night. Her blue eyes were open, fixed on the infinity of stars that she could see through the wide glass dome above their bed. The endless rolling of the waves on the beach outside was like the steady breathing of the slumbering world. In this moment Hecate was at peace. Her needs met, her appetites satiated, her furies calmed.
Except for one thing. Except for a small niggling item that was like a splinter in her mind.
Six hours ago she had finally let Paris talk her into inviting Alpha to the Dragon Factory. The conversation had been brief. He had sounded so happy, so flattered that they were inviting him, and he accepted their conditions without reservations because they were small: the windows of the jet would be blacked out. She teased Alpha, saying that he had taught them to always be careful and she was being careful. Alpha agreed to everything.
Too easily.
“He knows,” Hecate said to Paris after the call was ended.
“He doesn’t know,” insisted Paris. “He can’t know.”
“He knows.”
“No way. If he knew, then he’d never agree to come here, never allow himself to be that much in our power.”
“He knows.”
“No, sweetie. Alpha doesn’t know a damn thing. But he will once he gets here. I can promise you that.”
That had been the end of it. Hecate had to accept that Paris was too much of an idiot to recognize the subtle brilliance that made Alpha who and what he was. Not that she knew exactly who and what Alpha was—but she grasped the essence of their father in a way that her brother seemed incapable of managing.
“He knows,” she murmured to the infinite stars.
Yet he was coming all the same.