Silent Warrior (4 page)

4

S
ilence sat on the stairs of a shadowy, anonymous doorway, with her shield propped at her side. Apparently Sham Shui Po meant two armed Dragon Kings didn’t merit second glances. She and Hark ate roast duck as if food wouldn’t exist come morning. She’d taken for granted the rhythm of life in the Asters’ complex. After practice or a match, they ate. Simple as that. Hunger wasn’t part of her life anymore. She’d known it once, long ago, and had forgotten how quickly it could turn a rational being into a beast. Beg, steal, kill—she’d done it for less than scraps. Now she feasted.

This was different than living under the Asters’ auspices. Freer. Less . . . inhibited.

But Silence didn’t consider herself a slave. She could escape whenever she wanted. Trips like these . . . it would be so easy to disappear. She’d never failed the Asters because she had no reason to.

Living gold.

The Chasm isn’t fixed.

The soothsayer was a pawn of the Asters. She didn’t trust those words so much as tingle with possibilities. That meant doing the cartel’s bidding. For now. Until the Dragon showed her a reason to leave and never return. Only her personal mission made sense: unite the halves of the idol and restore her honor. She hated that the Sath were known as thieves, and she would not live under that yoke. She would not run forever.

“You gonna say something, or is this what we’ll call companionable silence? Heh. See what I did there?
Silence
. Now you’ll have to talk, or I’ll use your so-called name as a pun at every opportunity.”

“You make my head hurt.”

She took another bite of her greasy, salty, utterly delicious roast duck, if only to hide her smile. Good to know she could shut him up with nothing more than a random sentence. She wasn’t so stupid to believe that would last forever, but at least she was treated to the sounds of the live-wire city rather than his blather.

In truth, she liked his voice. More likely, she couldn’t help her fascination. It was a weapon for a reason. Smooth. Sinister. Smoldering. Harmonics as deep as marrow added a rich masculinity to the purr of a sleek jungle cat. His words were a jumble of unfiltered thought, but his delivery was lethally hypnotic.

She’d been right.

He recovered quickly. His grin might as well have been a green light to more banter. “You know what makes
my
head hurt?”

“You’ll tell me.”

“Of course. But see, I hate owing money to people. I hate having to fight in bars that hold all the appeal of fish guts. And I
really
hate coming up against an opponent who—”

“Kicks your ass?”

He leaned back on his elbows and kicked out his feet, ankles crossed. “You got close. I’d wager that without your collar, you’d have taken me.”

“You shouldn’t wager.”

“You’re telling me.” He shook his head. The doorway was shadowy, but rainbows of nighttime colors illuminated his blond curls, which just brushed his earlobes. “I’m through with gambling. You trust the wrong informant and boom—you wind up with a counterfeit emerald and a
very
pissed off buyer from the Kawashima cartel. Now those informants are living comfy lives in crack dens and minimum-security prisons, while I’m on the run from everyone I was supposed to pay back.”

Silence smirked but didn’t look back at him. She was too busy absorbing the magnetic cadence of his words’ low, singsong rhythm. “No one pays for cubic zirconia?”

“Especially not the Kawashimas.”

“Whoops.”

“Whoops?” Sitting up, he wound around so that she couldn’t avoid gazing into his eyes. His mention of emeralds turned her thoughts toward other precious gems. His eyes were sapphires. “You’re capable of a word as casual as ‘whoops’? And here I was just getting used to you talking. I’ll get woozy to learn you know slang, too.”

“Stupid bastard.”

“Ooh, and cussing. Nice.”

“No,” she said, fighting a grin. “You’re a stupid bastard for making wagers.”

“What have I done this time?”

He was unlike any other Dragon King she’d ever met. Everything a joke—until he turned into a hardened killer. She’d lived among hardened killers for half a decade, but none of them grinned as if the whole world were a pantomime. His face lit with humor, with a wide smile. White teeth could be amiable and friendly, or like a shark awaiting the approach of its next snack. Brows that matched his blond hair wiggled with every new expression.

She hated to admit that she wasn’t able to keep up with the vast array. Dragon Kings were not known among their kind as being very animated. Perhaps that’s what had kept the Five Clans from slaughtering one another across the millennia. Far easier to kill someone whose mien invited violence.

“You said you’d wager that without my collar, I could’ve taken you.” She offered what she thought of as a gift: a full-blown smirk. “My collar has been temporarily deactivated.”

Hark laughed, which was full and rich—not as lightning-punch sharp as when they’d run out of that alley. “So had that Pendray entered the bar about five minutes earlier?”

“Then he’d have been right about us . . . borrowing?”

He threw up his hands, as if exasperated. “That’s what it should be called. Borrowing. Not like we keep anyone’s gift forever. Thieves don’t give stuff back.”

I will.

The idol wasn’t hers. She intended to give it back.

“So when your cartel sends you out into the world . . . ?”

She lifted her chin. “You assume I belong to one of the cartels.”

“Kinda obvious, sweetheart. That isn’t a fashion statement.”

Hark leaned in. His lips nearly touched her jaw, and she didn’t push him away. Following that fight and their run to safety, her body was a rocket. Anything he said was likely to set her off. “I’d have thought that after those bouts, you’d be complaining about your ankle. Maybe a chatter-induced headache is a welcome distraction from a more substantial injury. I can keep at it, if you’d like. I can keep at it all night.”

“I’d rather fuck.” Silence tossed the stripped remnants of her dinner into the street. She used his sleeve as a napkin, stood, and picked up her shield. “So let’s go.”

Without a backward glance, she crossed the street. A car with one headlight passed in front of her. She sidestepped a clot of . . .
something
and wound past three men playing a dice game against the curb. Shady merchants sold suspiciously inexpensive goods, while tourists stared wide-eyed, perched on the realization they’d wandered down the wrong street. The government thought they’d cleaned up these narrow back alleys and places like the Chungking Mansions. Crime was crime. It needed a place to flourish, and this was as good a place as any.

Compared to the Aster compound, with its sterile scent and industrial fluorescent lights, Hong Kong was a beautiful, vital, filthy cornucopia of life. Even the worst gangsters and pimps didn’t train to kill with every waking hour. They took the time to enjoy the spoils of a free, if despicable, life.

That included the freedom to eat in a doorway. To feel disgust and wonder.

And to be pursued by a man with whom she would share the night.

Her comrades among the Cage warriors thought her mute, and they thought her without sexual passion. The kindest assumption was that she preferred women, although she could’ve taken a female lover had she so desired. More often she’d been called a hermaphrodite or an asexual freak. She was anything but. She craved sex as much as any living creature, perhaps more so because she denied herself the opportunities. Cage warriors were awarded their choice of partners after a victory. Some chose humans they could abuse—venting a month’s worth of pent-up sexual frustration. Some preferred sparring with a fellow Dragon King.

Silence kept to herself. Sex was a vulnerable act, and she would
not
be vulnerable among the company of the Asters’ trained elite.

Instead she took a lover during each of her outings. Always after her mission was complete. Just before returning to the compound. She did so with the abandon of a woman who possessed nothing of value but her body—to use and be used. That included her voice.

She was pent up, edgy, and running high on the adrenaline of the violent evening. After such a long bout of celibacy, she would’ve spent the next hour searching for a suitable partner. Her body didn’t care, and eventually, as it did with the throbbing, elemental compulsion of hunger, her mind wouldn’t care either.

Tonight, she didn’t have to search. She didn’t have to compromise.

Hark was her choice.

He jogged to meet her, picking up her pace with his long, confident strides. “You’re being serious?”

“You’re being terse. Surprising.”

“All I’m saying is, it’s not polite to screw with a guy’s head about stuff like
giving
head.”

Warming up her vocal cords and venting a hundred unspoken retorts always took time. She no longer liked the sound of her own voice. It sounded like weakness. But with this man, with the speed of his replies and his dizzying wordplay, keeping up was a challenge as much as fighting. On this night, she was up for it.

“We’re not polite people,” she said.

“Very true.”

“And I didn’t mention giving head.”

“If we’re going to fuck, that definitely involves giving head. One direction or the other. Me you. You me. Preferably both. Admit it. You want everything you can milk out of me. You want us used up like ragdolls left in the rain. We both know what’ll happen come morning, so we might as well enjoy the night.”

“What will happen come morning?”

“I’ll make a play for the cash you’re carrying. We’ll have another tumble that may result in broken limbs or another fuck, and then I’ll never see you again.”

“Sounds right.”

“Cool. One hotel room, right this way.”

“No alley?”

“I’m done with alleys for the night. Unless that’s your thing, and you took my comment about ragdolls in the rain literally. I can adapt.”

Silence grabbed him by both shoulders and pushed him against the nearest upright surface—a shoddy cement wall painted with graffiti and wallpapered with ads for sex clubs. The décor of the streets. “But can you shut up, Hark?”

“Is that required for us to get it on? Tough request. I can compensate in different ways. For example.” He glanced left, then right, at where she pinned him flush against the wall. “You can lead and I can follow. But we’ll like it better if that isn’t how this shit goes.”

“No?”

“Nope. Let’s just say you seem pretty damn high-strung. When was the last time you got your rocks off hardcore? I’m guessing a
very
long time.”

Silence flinched and started to pull away. She’d find another partner if he meant to keep digging at her that way. But he snatched her wrists in his fiercely strong hands and spun their bodies. The breath in her lungs huffed out when her back hit the concrete and her shield hit the ground. The loose ends of a few sex-club flyers fluttered by her face.

For a moment, she thought about fighting back—and maybe she would, when it came down to letting this man take her. Just enough. They both wanted it rough. She could tell by the intent set of his mouth, so different now that he wasn’t grinning like a lunatic high on ether. His lips were slim and wide, but with dramatic arches and swoops. Narrowed blue eyes reflected shards of color from the night neon and the flash of a rattletrap car’s passing headlights. His cheekbones were broad and high, as if taunting her with the infuriating, tempting smiles yet to come. Right then, however, his skin was stretched taut and haloed by loose blond curls that were damp with sweat and humidity.

He was devastating.

Hark pressed into her space. Outside of combat, she was rarely this close to a man. The urge to fight gave over to a different primal impulse. He spread her feet with his, and she let him. His wide, sensual mouth brushed hers. “How long?”

She swallowed, then pushed into his kiss. Just a taste to see if she desired him with another of her five senses. He tasted like their dinner. Of course he would. She smiled at how easily her impulses were running ahead of logic. One hunger sated. Another hunger was desperate to be assuaged.

“I’d nearly let you off the hook for another one of your smiles,” he said. “But it’s important to me.”

“Why?”

“I want to know how eager you are. For the sake of my fragile ego, I hope you’ve been shagged thoroughly and regularly. Then I’d know you were choosing me for my fantastic body, amazing skills, undeniable good looks, and seductive . . . prattle?” For all his humor, which was weaving into her bloodstream like a dangerous narcotic, his expression retained that serious quality. He was talking like a madman, but he remained a madman on the hunt. “So, how long?”

“You’ll be disappointed. I only want you for your fantastic body. It’s been eight months.”

His pale brows lifted and his eyes widened. “And you’re still walking around sane? Dragon damn, that’s just cruel. You’re a masochist? Maybe I should be the one slapping you.”

“Does it matter how this goes?”