Hostage to Pleasure

CHAPTER 52

In a large room in the sunken city of Venice, several people sat silently around a long table and considered the abysmal failure of their most recent operation.

“We wipe Aleine from the target list and go under,” the man at the head of the table said. “And we stay under until the furor dies down.”

A slow murmur of agreement. Some of them were grieving the loss of friends and colleagues. But not one, not one suggested that perhaps they’d taken the wrong path, that blood and death wasn’t the right way.

In truth, it was likely that the idea hadn’t even entered their minds. They were too blinded by the knowledge that the Psy Council was beginning to falter in its totalitarian rule, that the changelings were slowly gaining ground. Things were in flux, as they had not been for centuries. For a race that had spent eons in the shadows, it was a heady time, a time when empires might be felled… and power might be taken.