Marked by an Assassin (7 page)

A swift death was surely preferable.

He tipped his head back and stared up at the ceiling.

He certainly preferred it.

But the thought of Archangel doing anything to a snow leopard turned his insides and hollowed him out, scraping away all of the softer feelings she had stirred in him and leaving him raw with a need to butcher them all.

And he would.

The hunter shoved him into an empty cell and the glass barrier dropped from the ceiling before he could turn to attack him. The male stared coldly at him and pressed a button on a small black device. The shackles beeped and opened, dropping to the ground behind Harbin. He slammed his palms against the thick glass, right in front of the hunter’s face, but the male didn’t even twitch.

Harbin placed him right at the top of the list of people he would kill the moment he was free.

And he would do it with the very shackles the male had placed on him.

He turned towards them, a smile playing on his lips as he thought about using them to rip open the bastard’s carotid.

A panel in the ceiling swished open, a hum sounded, and the shackles shot up into the dark opening. A tugging sensation in Harbin’s left thigh had his fingers dropping to stroke the neat inch-long surgical scar there. Magnets. He should have known they would have a way of retrieving the shackles.

He hobbled across to the back of his cell, eased down to the floor, and kept stroking the scar, sensing the tracker buried deep beneath his skin.

Hartt would be coming.

Hartt would find him.

He had two days.

He could bear whatever Hell Archangel intended to put him through in that time.

He would survive.

And he would make sure his mark survived with him.

Harbin closed his eyes, seeking the rest he needed to heal his body and ensure he was fit to fight when the time came.

But only horror awaited him.

The sound of screaming wrenched Aya from the tight grip of her nightmare. She breathed hard, sweat trickling down the valley between her breasts and her spine under her silver halter-top, her wide eyes fixed unseeing on a point across the room from her.

It took her a moment to remember where she was and realise that she hadn’t been the one to scream.

The harrowed sound came again, a desperate bellow that made her shiver and chilled her to the bone.

The male snow leopard.

Whatever tormented him, it was infinitely worse than the nightmare she had been living in her sleep. Were the hunters hurting him?

Or were his agonised screams the product of a deeper suffering?

Aya hadn’t failed to notice the darkness in him when the big hunter had marched him past her cell.

She had thought him more handsome in the full light, but there had been ice in his eyes that had made her cold inside.

One look into his pale silvery eyes had left her feeling he had no emotion in him, no shred of feeling, that whatever life he led, it had drained him of all light and left only darkness behind.

But the way he was screaming, each bellow speaking of agony and suffering, left her with a different feeling. Whatever emotions he had, they had been buried deep beneath that mountain of pain.

She could relate to that.

She had fallen into a violent abyss of nightmares shortly after seeing him paraded past her cell, stripped bare and exposed to the eyes of all, as if the hunters wanted to humiliate him for some reason. The twisted visions of her past had held her firmly in their grasp for the gods only knew how many hours, and mingled in with them had been images of the other captives being tortured by Archangel, experimented on as the scientists attempted to uncover their species’ deepest secrets to use as weapons against their kind.

Rocky.

Aya pulled her knees up to her chest, rubbed her fingers over the smooth denim of her jeans, and brought her focus to the world around her.

Rocky was somewhere in this cellblock, trapped in a tiny white box just like her.

What would Archangel do to him?

The need to see him pushed her onto her hands and knees and she crawled to the glass front of her cell. She pressed her cheek to the barrier and peered down the corridor, but she couldn’t see into the other cells. She could only see the one opposite her, and it was empty right now. She felt sure it had been occupied last night by an unfamiliar woman. What had Archangel done with her?

Had they released her?

Aya scoffed at that and her misguided hope. She knew Archangel and she knew better than to believe them capable of releasing their captives without a damn good reason. They said they merely studied species in order to understand them, to document them and discover methods of swiftly dealing with any from their kind who broke the laws and became a threat to the humans or other fae.

They lied.

She had seen the other side of Archangel with her own eyes.

She knew that most of the captives in the cells around her would never see the outside world again.

“Rocky,” she whispered and laid her left palm on the several inches of glass, trying to reach through it to the other side so she could sense whether he was nearby.

Her stomach churned, hunger and fear combining to turn the acid into a bubbling pit. She closed her eyes and sighed out her breath, clinging to the fragile strands of hope, because she couldn’t give up. She had to keep believing that Rocky would be fine and so would the others.

A hot shiver coursed through her.

Aya opened her eyes and lifted them, settling them straight on the male in the corridor.

Gods, he was handsome.

The bright lights made his sweat-soaked scruffy silver hair shimmer and his eyes almost glow as he hobbled along the stark white hallway, his lips firmly pressed together in a way that spoke of pain. He was trying to control it, but the edge to his gaze said that he was losing that battle. His expression twisted and darkened, and his shoulders and biceps bulged as he shifted his bound wrists behind his back, as if he was flexing his fingers.

Readying his claws.

The ice-cold look in his stunning eyes as they fell to her sent a warning arrowing through her, causing her instincts to fire back a response that told her to keep her distance from him. This male meant war.

She could almost read every dark fantasy running through his mind, could almost smell the blood of these hunters and see it splashing up the walls, streaking the pristine white with crimson. He wanted to kill the men behind him, and gods, there was a part of her that wanted to see him do it.

Profane lips peeled back off his short fangs as he growled and she instinctively lowered her gaze, obeying his command to avert her gaze from him.

Big mistake.

Taut square slabs of pectoral muscles, dusky nipples, and ropes of abdominals caught her eyes. She swallowed hard and tried to look away, but the way his muscles shifted with each step he took held her fast and fascinated her. Each bunch and stretch, each flex, spoke of power, and she couldn’t stop her body from responding to it, heating and beginning to burn as her eyes betrayed her and slowly drifted down the length of his eight-pack to the dusting of silver hair that trailed onwards.

A stark reminder that he was naked.

One that had her eyes finally leaping away from him and fixing on the floor at his bare feet.

She frowned as he limped past, her eyes drawn to his left leg and the mottled skin above his ankle. He had broken it. How?

Her mind supplied that it had been in a fight, because by the looks of his body, he fought often. She might have been enraptured by his incredible physique, but that instant spark of lust he had ignited within her hadn’t made her blind. She had seen the silvery streaks that covered his skin.

The sight of them stirred remembered voices in her head, whispers that had gone through the club the first night he had appeared in it.

He was an assassin.

Who was his target?

His gaze burned into her, but this time she felt only cold.

She knew the answer to that question.

The hunters weren’t the only ones in this building that he was thinking about killing.

She
was his target.

Aya lifted her head and pinned her gaze on the back of his head, refusing to let her instincts rule her. She wouldn’t back down where this male was concerned. He had no power over her and she was going to show him that he had chosen the wrong female to target.

She was stronger than she looked.

Snow leopard females were weaker than their male counterparts, but what she lacked in physical strength, she made up for in mental. Males were ruled by their animal side, driven by it to get physical in a fight and tackle things head on. If he wanted to tussle with her, she would use all of her wits and agility to place him at a disadvantage and emerge the victor.

She watched him until he had disappeared from view and lingered for long minutes afterwards, her mind churning, a collision of wondering about the male’s history and wondering what Archangel would do to him.

A weight settled in her stomach as she thought about him strapped to a black padded table in one of the small medical rooms, sedated and at the mercy of Archangel scientists.

Memories bubbled up and she fought to suppress them, tried to keep them shoved down deep inside of her where they couldn’t hurt her. They were too powerful, easily breaking to the surface of her mind and swallowing her. The world around her faded, replaced by a startling splash of crimson on white tiles and the horrifying whirr of a bone saw.

Aya shoved away from the dark memory, pushed away from the glass and threw up.

A passing guard merely glanced at the mess she had made, and then her, and continued on his way down the white corridor.

She backed away into the corner of the room where she had slept and curled into a ball, wrapping her arms around her knees and bringing them up to her chest. Time trickled past as she stared at the corridor, not really noticing the guards as they came and went, or the fae they escorted. It was only when she felt the male snow leopard’s eyes on her that she came out of her daze and lifted her eyes away from the spot on the tiled floor.

His eyes were even colder now.

Glacial.

They froze her with just a look.

Blood tracked down his bare chest from several dark marks, running in drying rivulets over his stomach, where they disappeared beneath a pair of black cotton trunks. Aya stared at them. It seemed Archangel had deemed him worthy of a little dignity. A reward for playing along and letting them run tests on him?

She would have done anything they asked had their positions been reversed and she had been the one stripped naked.

Just the thought was enough to have her trembling, memories of her previous time in Archangel’s hands surging back to the surface to torment her. She hugged her knees harder and rocked as she fought the onslaught, refusing to let it own her. She was stronger now.

A survivor.

Nothing would destroy her.

The male’s eyes narrowed, a flicker of curiosity breaking through the ice, and then he was gone, stolen from view as the two hunters dressed in black fatigues marched him back to his cell.

An assassin.

She still found that difficult to believe.

Whenever she looked at him, she saw a dangerous male, one that she knew she should keep her distance from, but one that she found impossible to put out of her mind. There was something about him, something held just beneath the surface, that told her he wasn’t all he appeared to be.

He was more.

Maybe she had been wrong about him.

Aya lowered her head and squeezed her eyes shut. It didn’t matter what feelings she had about him. He was an assassin and he was after her, and that was reason enough to keep her distance and remain wary of him. She had to stop thinking about him as anything other than an enemy.

A male who would kill her in a heartbeat.

She needed to get her mind off him.

A welcome distraction from her dark and worrying thoughts appeared in view from the right side of her cell.

A huntress Aya knew.

The pretty blonde led a group, her pale eyes fixed ahead of her along the corridor. Behind her, a large shirtless male trudged, his hands shackled in front of him and two guards at his back. Long rich brown hair laced with gold and held at the nape of his neck by a leather thong, and the smooth but sculpted contours of his face, painted a picture of sinful perfection.

An image even she wasn’t unaffected by as his wicked lips quirked and he briefly glanced her way. Heat speared her, spreading outwards from her chest, and she muttered a curse.

An incubus.

The effect he had on her, and the lines of markings that ran up the underside of his corded forearms and snaked over his biceps and shoulders were definite traits of an incubus, but it was his eyes that were the dead giveaway.

No other fae species had eyes that swirled gold and blue like his were.

He shifted them back to the woman in front of him and Aya couldn’t miss the brief tensing of the huntress’s shoulders.

His markings shimmered with hues of bright gold and cerulean.

Was he using his charms on the huntress?

Aya had seen her more than once in the city, but had never seen her shaken as she was now. She wasn’t the usual confident and cold female Aya knew. Her face was a mask of cool and collected, but her eyes betrayed her.

They edged to her left, as if she wanted to look back at the incubus behind her.

Maybe he had already used his charms on the huntress and she was still fighting the effects.

Aya’s gaze drifted back to the incubus.

The way he was looking at the huntress though, and his calm demeanour, left Aya feeling that something was going on and stirred her curiosity. She uncurled and leaned forwards, eager to study the male as much as she could before he too disappeared from view.

There wasn’t a scratch on him, and the relaxed way he walked said he was comfortable with his situation. He hadn’t fought Archangel when they had captured him.