Silent Warrior (10 page)

Silence settled heavily on the floor, unwilling to sully the clean linens. She wouldn’t lie down until after she’d bathed and tended her thigh. That sounded an eternity away. So much effort. Hark slumped beside her. The shield and the satchel containing the
nighnor
clanged against metal bedposts.

“So . . .” He cleared his throat. They sat hip to hip, leaning heavily against the wall and against each other. “In all that madness and brain-mushy non-talking weirdness, I think I proposed.” Hark pinned her with his shattering flame-blue gaze. “The Ritual of Thorns. I remember thinking it. Do you remember thinking it, too? Or do you need me to ask aloud?”

10

H
er reply wasn’t what Hark had hoped, although what he hoped meant he was certifiable.

“You were delusional,” she said. “Two minutes before that, you’d been pointing a gun between my eyes. I’d sooner believe Hark the Gunman.”

He wiggled his brows. “Not Hark the Fantastic Lover?”

“You’re making light of the one thing that shouldn’t be—”

“I’m not making light of it. Not about this. But just think. We’ll be making the most spontaneous choice any Sath has ever made.
Ever
.”

“That’s something to be proud of?”

Hark stood and stretched the aches out of his body. Already his Dragon-blessed physiology was kicking in. Nothing hurt too badly. “
I’d
be proud of it. And having you as my partner would be something to be very proud of.”

Her jaw dropped in a gesture that might’ve made him smirk the evening before. Now her confusion made him doubt what had felt so real when their minds had touched. Rather than hear more of her protests, he set about finding clean water. She washed herself, while he tried to be a good man.

He wasn’t. Not really.

When Silence had undressed, he turned to watch her scrub the grime from her slim, strong body. A blush tipped her ears and the tops of her cheeks, with more pink where her collarbones met. Seeing the exact color of her skin was a daylight revelation.

Crazy. Crazy. Crazy.

No. Wanting to be with this woman was the least ridiculous, most confident impulse he’d ever known. They would be amazing together.

“How’s your leg?” he asked.

“It’ll heal.”

“I know that. But do you need help?”

She’d been washing her shin, balancing against one of the bed’s metal posts, when she glared up at him. “I need you to stop looking at me as if I were dinner.”

“Breakfast.”

The gentle slope of her breasts gleamed gold in the dawn light. Her hips were slender, but he remembered being able to hold them in his palms and set the pace of their thrusts. She was willowy and exotic. The red weal circling her upper thigh was sacrilege.

“Stop it!” She tossed a washcloth at him. He ducked aside. “I’m not even close to considering it.”

“Then I’ll go.”

“Where? Out where another eighty-five thousand people are waiting to take your head off? Stop talking nonsense and I’ll tell you how I can get you out of Hong Kong.”

He knelt before her, washed out the shirt that had been her tourniquet, and wrung out the filthy water. Another rinse, another wring, until he could wash her skin and rebind the wrapping. That his mouth was mere inches away from her pussy never left his mind. She’d stood before him. He’d licked her. She could’ve come using only his mouth, but she’d chosen to sink onto his cock.

No matter what happened, this would remain one of the most memorable nights of his life. He wanted more. He wanted daylight and twilight and night once again. Endlessly.

He washed her and made sure her body could heal. Only when she was lying in bed, naked beneath the sheets, did Hark retrieve new buckets of water and start on himself. He washed in front of her, of course. He could feel the warm weight of her stare as he ran the cloth over his chest, under his arms, down his stomach. His legs were filthy. He rinsed again, washed his hair, rinsed, and finally stroked his prick with the washcloth.

Silence inhaled.

“Run away with me,” he said. “We’d do more than do up the town. The whole Dragon-damned world. It’d be great.”

“We’d have no protection.”

Hark shook his head. “We’d go to the Honorable Giva. He leads the rabble of our kind—all of the Five Clans. He’d offer protection.”

“Last I heard, he was up in the Himalayan fortress. The guards wouldn’t welcome a Cage warrior, and certainly not you. Besides, I have to return to the Asters.”

He threw the cloth against the wall. “Fucking servitude.”

She sat up on her elbows, expression fierce. “I have more resources as a good little slave than I ever would as a free woman. Do you think I could’ve afforded to come here? I’ve played along for years. Now I have the Old Man’s respect. I catch his prizes. And I spend the rest of my time looking for . . .”

A flash memory from their moments of connection returned to Hark. “An idol. The idol your guardians sold for a slave girl. Tell me what I saw. Orla, I want to understand.”

Her blush was a tidal wave of pink now. She looked away, unwilling or unable to speak. But she was an incredible woman. He counted himself lucky that she pushed past obvious distress and met his eyes.

“I wanted to wield the sword to kill them both.” Her voice was lifeless, yet she held eye contact—just as he’d done when fighting Jawahar’s poison. “But I was already being hunted. The torture of a Sath virgin . . . Shrouded like a mummy, my mouth stuffed with linen, locked inside one of the underground temples and paralyzed for centuries. Starvation, thirst, madness. I would’ve been imprisoned until I revealed the location of the idol.”

“Did you know?”

“Yes.”

“So you ran.” Grasping at those thoughts was like catching a cobweb. Sticky little pieces, but never the whole thing. “Wait. Obsidian. An interpretation of the Dragon. I saw your memories of it.”

Silence flinched. “That’s it. The idol. But it fractured. I have one half.”

He grabbed a blanket off the bed and wrapped it around his naked body. More than he wanted to show off, he wanted to get warm. The cooling water, and maybe the shivering aftereffects of shock, were more distracting than he would’ve liked. “I’ve had it all along.”

After removing the
nighnor
, he dumped the contents of the bag on the bed—a single bed, where they’d practically need to sleep on top of each other to have enough space. That had infinitely more appeal than the tight quarters of the warren. Cleaner. Fewer impoverished people. Fewer gunmen.

She gasped. “There.” Her hands were shaking when she reached out for a misshapen piece of obsidian no longer than her hand. “See? These sharp edges are where it cracked—but, not exactly
cracked
, like dropping a glass. It split. I was in Tunisia somewhere, holding it as the sun caught flecks of silver, and it simply cleaved in my hands. This carved side is half the length of the Dragon’s body. I lost this half when I crossed the Mediterranean.”

“You’ve been hunting for it. An obsession. Why?”

“To fit the halves back together and return it to the Sath.”

Hark shook his head as he sat beside her. “So our fickle Leadership can decide
not
to inflict ancient cruelties on innocent young women? You’re asking too much of their forgiveness.”

She looked toward the far wall, black eyes unreadable. Hark was vaguely offended because the wall was filthy and he was feeling quite smug about getting clean and being so ready.

“But I want the burden of that idol out of my soul. All of it gone and forgotten.”

“And forgiven?”

She nodded.

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Tell that to the twelve-year-old girl I was. She’s still part of me, running and ashamed. If I’d known . . . if I’d told someone . . . maybe that slave girl—Dragon be, Hark, she was barely older than me—maybe she wouldn’t have been so abused. Maybe the idol would be safely at home with our clan.”

“How do you know that’s where it belongs? Think of the coincidence. You and me. Some bar fight. You with one half, me with the other.”

“You don’t seem the type to believe in destiny.”

“Believe me, I don’t. Free will happens to be a cherished tenet of mine. But this—” He gestured to the broken idol Silence still held. “It’s . . . It’s the Dragon. And doesn’t that just give me a case of the heebie-jeebies.” He sat beside her on the bed, gratified when she faced him. Even daylight didn’t lighten the pitch black of her eyes. She laid claim to more than one mysterious defense. He guessed most couldn’t—or didn’t take the time—to read the emotions that brimmed in those impossible eyes, but he did both. “That doesn’t mean we’re out of choices. I’d go gallivanting with you. It’d be fun. Some purpose to my life.”

“No,” she said with more conviction. “I’ve hidden the piece of the idol in the Asters’ compound. I need to get it back. And . . .”

“By the Chasm and the Dragon—what now?”

“There’s a soothsayer. She said I need to wait for ‘living gold.’ Then it’ll be time to go.”

Hark took hold of the split obsidian dragon. He’d carried it around for years and couldn’t remember where he’d first acquired it. To think it meant so much to this woman was still unnerving. “ ‘Living gold’ is any less crazy than talking about the Ritual of Thorns? Or your obsession with a broken figurine our people would kill you for possessing? They want their secrets back, no matter the cost. I’m betting that after what they did to your guardians, this is one helluva secret.”

She looked at him with imploring eyes as dark as the idol, which contrasted with her shimmering skin. She was the same warrior he’d battled and satisfied. He
knew
that. Yet he saw her in that dawn light as if she had never been Silence. As if she’d always been Orla of Sath.

“Fine,” he said on a frustrated huff. “How do I get out of Hong Kong?”

“Come with me. Become a Cage warrior. Help me see this through.”

“Me? You’re kidding.” Hark laughed outright, which wasn’t the right response.

Silence curled into herself beneath the bedsheets. He adjusted his body on the bed and leaned close. She’d be able to feel how much he wanted her, with his cock pressing against her side.

She held the cleaved dragon with both hands. “The jet arrives tomorrow. I hand over one disgusting prisoner for Aster to do with as he likes, and present a trophy: a skilled, willing warrior who’ll be my partner.”

“Just in the Cages? Because I’d need more to follow you down into the dark. That sounds the opposite of my fondest wish for the future. Unless you’re there, too. Tell me you’re not curious,” he added, tapping his temple. “I have an intriguing amount of junk up here.”

Without waiting for permission, he shed his blanket and slid beneath the sheets. Only after a slight struggle did he get her to part with her treasure. He reached up and laid it on the narrow windowsill. When he settled back against the thin, creaking mattress, he hooked a thigh between hers. She exhaled as if she was content.

Not in a hostel. Not in Hong Kong. Not in some cartel compound.

With me.

Tentative feminine hands stroked his chest and down his sides, until he wanted to purr like a cat or flip her onto her back and drive deep. It was the first hint that he was winning her over. Did he even want that? All because of a few tantalizing minutes inside her mind? He was asking her to be his partner for life—and the Sath didn’t take that shit lightly. Only when she stroked him again did the last of his doubts fall away.

“I’d be Silence again,” she whispered against his chest. “I cannot be this person when I go back.”

“This person?”

“Orla.”

Hark didn’t hold back. He cupped one bare breast and rolled half on top of her, which scattered the contents of his bag onto the floor. He kissed up from her navel, stopping at each nipple to suck and savor. Her gasps were an aphrodisiac he never would’ve imagined. They were sounds made by a woman everyone believed silent and beyond feeling. The collar was a reminder of what he couldn’t understand about her purpose and her fears, but that was the point of wanting more.

He’d never thought of himself so bound by the habits of his clan until he’d finally found a puzzle he couldn’t solve within minutes—a treasure meant to be kept forever.

“Down in the Cages,” he rasped against her shoulder, “you
are
Silence. You know, I actually want to see that. I want to see you take down badasses with just a glare. Then at night, like this, you’d give me what you give no one else.” He dotted kisses along her jaw. “You hide your body behind armor. You hide your voice and your smiles and your humor—although really, we need to work on your humor.” After a kiss that left them breathless, he pulled away and stared her down. One more test of wills. “But you won’t hide any of it from me. Not ever again.”

She swallowed. The warrior known as Silence would always stand as a champion. The woman named Orla of Sath looked at him with the vulnerability of the scared, fleeing child she’d once been.

“Tell me why, Hark.”

He held her head between his palms. He kissed her lips as if they’d already made their vows. “I spent only two minutes in your mind. Now I want to spend the rest of my life learning what I missed.”