No joyful name that, no hopeful one, but he would give her this one choice when she’d had so many others stolen from her. “Sorrow, then.” Leaning forward he pressed his lips to her forehead, her bangs blades of silk against his lips, her bones fine, fragile, so vulnerable under his hands.
In that instant, he knew why he hadn’t killed her yet. Age notwithstanding, she was a child to him. A dangerous child, but a child nonetheless, scared and trying so hard to hide it. And the murder of a child . . . it left a scar on a man’s soul that could never, ever be erased.
4
Arriving back at Guild Academy after midnight, Honor put her laptop bag down on the small table tucked in beside the wardrobe in her quarters. The bed took up most of the remaining space. The room was adequate, and that was it—most hunters only used the quarters when they needed to do a short, intense session of instruction at the Academy. Honor had been here since the day they allowed her out of the hospital.
It wasn’t because she couldn’t afford anything better. Given the fees hunters commanded as a result of the high-risk nature of their work, and the fact that she hadn’t really had much downtime in which to spend that money, she’d built up a considerable nest egg before the abduction. None of it had been touched during her convalescence, as the Guild covered the medical costs of all its hunters. Truth was, she could move into a penthouse if that was what she wanted.
It just hadn’t seemed worth the effort to move out.
Except tonight, the room was suddenly a cage. How could she have been so numb that she hadn’t noticed the claustrophobic confines? The realization of the depth of her apathy was a slap, one that made her head ring— but not enough to settle her sharp response to the walls around her.
Beginning to sweat, she ripped off her sweatshirt and dropped it on the bed, but that did nothing to cool her down.
A few minutes after that thought passed through her head, she was dressed in a sleek black one-piece swimsuit, a toweling robe around her body. The night owls she ran into on her way to the Academy pool stopped only long enough to say hi before continuing on their way—and she was soon sliding into the pristine blue waters that promised peace.
Stroke, stroke, breathe. Stroke, stroke, breathe.
The rhythm was better than meditating. It took ten lengths, but by the end of it, she was calm. However, the feeling of suffocation struck again the instant she returned to her room—now that she’d noticed its tiny size, she couldn’t get it out of her head. And there was no way she’d be able to sleep even if she forced herself to bed. Her nightmares—malevolent, clawing things—were bad enough without adding claustrophobic panic to the mix.
Having showered at the pool, she pulled on fresh clothes and picked up her laptop.
The library was quiet at this time of night, but not deserted. There were a couple of instructors working on research papers, and a hunter who looked like she’d come in from active duty.
A single glance at that shining dark hair, those worn boots, and her lips curved in joyful surprise. “Ashwini?”
The tall, long-legged hunter put down the book she’d been examining and swiveled on her heel. Face cracking into a smile that turned her from beautiful to breathtaking, she gave a “Whoop!” and vaulted over a library table to grab Honor in a tight hug. No sign remained of the knife fight that had left her seriously injured not long ago.
Laughing, Honor hugged her back—Ash was one of the rare few people she’d never had trouble allowing close, even directly after the assault. Perhaps it was because the other hunter was her best friend . . . and perhaps it was because Ashwini was the one who’d ripped off her blindfold and shot off the chains that had held her trapped and helpless, her body a piece of meat for her captors.
“What are you doing here, you lunatic?” she asked, focusing on the fact that her friends had never given up on her, rather than the putrid miasma of a far more vile memory.
A smacking kiss on her cheek before Ashwini drew back. “I came to see you—you weren’t in your quarters so I came here to wait.” Glancing around when one of the instructors said “Shh” in a loud voice, she rolled her eyes. “Funny, Demarco. Didn’t they call noise control on your last party?”
The rangy hunter, his hair the streaky blond of a man who loved the sun, grinned and pointed a finger. “I
“This is a library, people,” said the last man in the room, scarred boots on a reading table and a leather- bound book open in front of his face.
Ash and Demarco hooted. Because Ransom was the last person you’d expect to find in a library—except word was, he was shacked up with a librarian.
Ashwini sauntered over to play with Ransom’s gorgeous black hair, tugging it out of its usual queue to run it through her fingers. “What conditioner you using, Professor Ransom? I’m thinking of changing brands.”
“Fuck you.” Said without heat as he glanced at Demarco. “I’m hungry.”
The other hunter paused, nodded decisively. “Yeah, me, too.”
That was how Honor found herself sitting in an otherwise deserted dining hall with three other hunters, talking shit. It was something she hadn’t done for months, even pushing Ash away when her best friend tried to draw her out, and now she couldn’t understand why. For the first time since she’d escaped that hellhole where she’d almost died, she felt real, a person, instead of a forgotten shade, a translucent illusion.
She’d felt very much real, very much alive, at the Tower. Chilled by a fear that had left her skin sticky with sweat, and by her deep-rooted compulsion toward a vampire who had looked at her with sex—the dark, screaming kind—in his eyes, but alive nonetheless.
Her hand clenched on the handle of her coffee mug. She’d already eaten a toasted cheese sandwich and a banana, truly hungry for the first time in months—though the Guild nutritionist’s stringent eating plan meant she’d slowly returned to a healthy weight over the past half year. She’d tasted none of those things, complied only because it was easier than arguing.
Dmitri’s gaze had made it clear he appreciated her curves, that he had no problem with the fact that her natural body shape was too much of an hourglass than was currently fashionable. He would, she thought, take exquisite pleasure in stroking his hands over every inch of a woman’s body . . . if he wasn’t in the mood to hurt her a little.
“Any of you met Dmitri?” she found herself asking during a lull in the conversation, disturbed by the fact that even knowing beyond any doubt that he’d be no good for her, she couldn’t stop her mind’s eye from tracing the slightly full curve of his lower lip. A dangerous indulgence, a small madness.
“Yeah.” Ransom swallowed the bite of Pop-Tart in his mouth. “When Elena went missing. Cold son of a bitch. Not someone you’d want to run into in a deserted alley.”
It would’ve been easy to tell herself that he’d been playing with her, amusing himself at her expense . . . except she was fairly certain a man didn’t look at a woman with that kind of slumberous heat in his eyes unless he was planning to have her naked and helpless beneath him, her thighs spread wide.
“Hey.” Ashwini’s voice, pitched low to skate under Demarco and Ransom’s conversation. “I heard you were consulting for the Tower. Dmitri?”
“I cut him,” she whispered, the memory of the actual act still a black nothingness in her mind.
Ashwini’s grin was feral. “Good for you. Bastard probably deserved it.”
Staring at her best friend, Honor started to laugh and it was the first time she’d done so since Ash and Ransom carried her out of that filthy pit, bruised and violated and bleeding from so many bite marks torn into her flesh that the doctors had put her into an antiseptic bath, not wanting to miss one of the wounds.
