The Hunter (35 page)

Perhaps more so.

“I’m no better than
them
.”

“Than who?”

“I held you down. I made you bleed. I—I
forced
you to fuck me.”

“
Forced
is a rather strong—”

“I
forced
you to fuck me so I wouldn’t
murder
you.” He swiped at the basin, sending it crashing into the far wall with a terrible cacophony of splintering wood and shattering porcelain.

“Well, if you put it in those words, it does sound a little—”

“I slaughtered them for it. They were my first kills.” He resumed pacing. “And now I’ve become one of them.”

Millie was certain no one had ever seen him like this. Wild and distraught. Working himself into a frenzy. She wanted desperately to understand his meaning, but most of the information remained locked within the vaults of nightmarish memories. He must have fought them in his dreams, those mysterious “them.” How many, she wondered, had mistreated and abused him? It had to have been a collaborative effort, to create such a man as this. A committee of evil deeds and violent men. She knew she should be afraid, could feel the adrenaline coursing through her body, again warning her to run.

But she stood her ground, because an intrinsic knowledge told her they were both standing on the precipice of a wall. A wall of ice. And the audible cracks in that wall were beginning to perhaps make him feel unstable. But at any moment they could break away, and she had to be there for it. For him.

“Who are
they
?” She stepped forward and he retreated, balling his fists, though she somehow knew he wouldn’t strike her. “What happened to your mother?”

“They held her down … on her back.” His breath sawed in and out of his lungs, the ice in his eyes had melted into an inferno. The flames blue, burning with a rage hotter than any she’d ever before encountered. “They held her beneath them and she didn’t fight. She only begged for
my
life, told me to look away, but I didn’t. I memorized their faces.
I
fought back, and because of me, they gutted her.”

Millie’s hand flew to her mouth, her belly clenched in sympathetic response, both for his mother and for her son. Hot tears welled with painful force and spilled down her cheeks.

“I screamed and screamed and no one came.” His voice broke, but it was the only indication he felt anything other than anger. “I spent the night in a lake of her cold blood, and then next day
I
gutted four men. It took me years to kill the guard who’d facilitated her death, who wanted to teach her a lesson, and not before he killed another boy.” His features told her he was reliving a memory that would sicken her, and he enjoyed it. “Blackwell and I took turns with him. To this day I’m not certain who dealt the killing blow.”

“Oh, Christopher…”

“Don’t be kind to me!” He roared. “I am
not
a wounded child to be pitied. Your tears are wasted. I am
Argent
. I am the most famous villain that no one has ever truly met and lived to tell about it. I’ve killed more men in the Underworld War than could fit in your precious theater. I’ve beaten men to death in cesspits for money. And what do you think I felt? Victorious? Avenged? Guilt? Pleasure?”

“I—I don’t know.” Millie’s hand moved from her mouth to cover her throbbing, bleeding heart.

“Nothing,”
he said darkly. “I felt nothing. I
feel
nothing.”

“That isn’t true,” Millie insisted, her voice trembling with tears. “I don’t believe it.”

“No? I’ve fucked whores and the randy widows of powerful men I was hired to kill. You think I cared about them? About their pleasure? I didn’t. I don’t. I only fucked them because they let me. I took them like dogs, like animals, but at least I never held them beneath me. They could always escape … but you …
you.
” A large wooden beam with pegs like a coatrack splintered beneath his blow, flying into a column and crashing to the floor.

Millie flinched and locked her knees, forcing herself not to take a retreating step from his gathering rage. It had been brewing inside him for years, for more than a decade. He needed to let it out. He needed to break things. “You’re not going to shock me,” she informed him gently.

“I’m not trying to shock you, I’m telling you the truth. I watched you die on that stage and there was a part of me that knew I could never see it again. That I should have walked away and left you to the mercies of someone else. I could sense myself turning into this … this fiend. And still I tried. Then you begged me not to hurt your son. You said the same words she did that fucking awful night.” He scrubbed his face with rough, brutal hands. “God, I
am
a monster.”

“But you
didn’t
hurt my son,” she argued.

“Oh, but I have done, don’t you see? I hurt him because I hurt his mother. I took your innocence. I made you pay for your life with your body.”

“He doesn’t know that!” Millie’s cheeks flamed, not because of his terrible confessions, but because of the scandalous one she was about to make. “Also … truth be told … I’ve never enjoyed making a payment so much.”

He froze. “Don’t, Millie. Don’t grant me absolution or forgiveness. I. Held. You. Down.”

“I wanted it,” she insisted. “I knew when I opened that door, when I woke you … a part of me
knew
what was going to happen. And I wanted it to.”

Some of the flame in his eyes flickered and danced and he made a strangled sound.

The urge to hold him overtook her with such ferocity, her arms ached. Lord, what he’d been through, what he’d survived. Most men would have broken, would have fallen to the earth and lost their minds, or taken their own lives. He’d hidden the shame, the horror, the desperation in a placid lake of darkness. Of blood. And then froze it solid to lock it away.

Unfortunately, it seemed, she was just the storm to dredge the wreckage up from the bottom.

He gaped at her, speechless and stunned, his mouth slightly parted, giving her time to close the gap between them. Reaching out, she spread her fingers over the thick muscle covering his heaving chest. He was still damp, but she didn’t care. He smelled of clean sweat and male, a musk that she’d never thought could be pleasant. Arousing, even. But it was. Whatever this man was made of, the essence of him called to her. Appealed to every sense.

He regarded her as if, for once, she were the hunter, and he the ensnared prey. Beneath her hand, his flesh, hot from exertion and emotion, twitched and flexed. And beneath even that, his heart pounded against her palm.

“I feel that there is something here between us.” Her fingers spread and she stepped closer, pressing her other hand against his chest. “Something more than just a business arrangement. I think you feel it too, growing from the most impossible circumstances.”

He remained silent but for his heaving breaths and pounding heart, and Millie went on, taking his lack of rejection as encouragement.

“I know you’ve done unspeakable things. That you’ve suffered immeasurably. And I ache for you, Christopher.”

“No one calls me ‘Christopher.’ I told you, I am Argent.” But slowly, so slowly, his hands reached up to cover hers. Hard and rough as brick, but tentative as a moth’s wings.

Millie smiled up at him, enjoying the way his eyes snagged on her lips. “After all we’ve done together, I think I’ve earned the right to call you by your name. You asked me to last night, remember? And to me, you are
Christopher,
a man I—I’m fond of and intimate with. A man who used to be a boy, a boy like my son, whom I love more than I can bear sometimes.”

The prowling beast in his eyes retreated, the fire banking into something more warm than scorching. His chin was directed at the column off to the right, his gaze darting about the familiar room. But it always landed on her, glancing off different parts of her, off the places where they touched.

“That boy, the one you used to be, he’s beneath all this, I know it. And he feels it all.” She pressed at the smooth chest beneath her, and felt some of the cold iron of his muscle melt beneath her hands. “His innocent hands are somewhere inside these scarred ones stained with blood.”

“I have killed
so many,
” he murmured. “Don’t you know that it’s too late for me? Don’t you realize that if there is anything but oblivion after this life, I am well and truly damned?”

“But wasn’t it Dickens who said ‘I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in this world.’ Look at this, Christopher.” She turned her gaze to encompass the shattered, splintered casualties of his rage strewn about the marble floor like fallen soldiers. “This is proof that, despite what you think, you have the ability to feel, and to do so is not always pleasant, I know, but it is necessary for human life. And we’re
alive,
you and I. And because of it, there is hope. Hope and truth and the possibility of love. I believe they can pull you out of the mire, if you let them.”

He studied the carnage with the same dark look that Millie imagined the devil, himself, used to survey all the realms he lorded over. “You think—you think I live in a mire? One you can pull me out of?” His voice had calmed, his breathing slowed.

“I think you live in a shell,” she answered. “A grand, large, rather expensive shell of a house. But it’s no home, Christopher, it’s a place to live, but not what a person needs to
feel
alive.”

His hands tightened over hers and she rushed on with the desperation of a general charging uphill and still gaining the high ground.

“You thought last night was a dream, and I believe there is some truth to that. I don’t think either of us dreamed that pleasure could be so intense, that our bodies would fit together so perfectly. That we would
feel
so much. I enjoyed being beneath you, and I would do it again.”

“No. You won’t.” His face hardened and Millie could hear the crackle of the ice as it climbed and clawed its way back over his soul, engulfing the man beneath it. She was losing him.

“Christopher … wait,” she begged, as though they were racing, and he’d pulled too far ahead for her to see him anymore.

“You become my woman, what then? Who profits from the bargain?”

“I’m not asking for promises,” she amended. “It’s not a question of profit, it—”

He flung her hands off him and retreated to the door. “What do I have to offer you but corpses and shells?” His voice … his cold, cold voice, it had returned. It leached the warmth from the room, froze the heat of last night’s memories with the hard actuality of his violent life. Of the existence he’d carved for himself out of stone and ice. “I will give you the corpses of your enemies, of the ones who wish you and your son harm. But make no mistake, woman, I am not a man who can give you a life. For like this house, I am nothing but a shell. A walking corpse. And just because I didn’t kill you, doesn’t mean I won’t destroy you.” He turned to leave.

“Christopher.”

He paused, his hand on the door frame, but he didn’t turn to her.

“
Please,
look at me.” He couldn’t go. They couldn’t leave it like this.

His knuckles tightened on the door frame until they whitened, and still he never so much as glanced back. “Go have breakfast with your son, Millie,” he ordered tonelessly. “I have an appointment to kill his father.”

This time, she made no move to stop him.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-
FOUR

It was certainly surreal to enjoy delicious tea in such an elegant parlor when one’s lover was off killing your child’s father somewhere.

Millie found it impossible to focus on the lovely Lady Northwalk’s conversation, though she did try to smile into the woman’s disarming gray eyes and notice how well they matched the silver of her finely crafted chair.

People died every day, didn’t they? Someone was murdered in the city all the time. Innocent people, young people, the elderly, the helpless, they were all occasional victims. And people like her knew about it, felt sorry for it, and went about their own lives. Not because they were heartless, but because they didn’t know what else to do.

So why was she obsessing about the death of a man who’d ordered her own murder? Who posed a threat to her son? To his
own
son. It made no sense, and yet she couldn’t escape this impending dread. This feeling that something very wrong was about to occur. She knew a crime was even now being committed, that someone who woke this morning and dressed and maybe enjoyed jam with his toast wouldn’t wake tomorrow to do so again.

Was this vengeance, murder, or justice? Were they
certain
it was Lord Thurston who’d lured Agnes to her death? Of course it was, who else could it be? Who else would have profited from Jakub’s mother’s disappearance? His father. The man who stood to lose everything, including his barren wife’s entire fortune, were anyone to find out. He had to be disposed of, didn’t he? It was the only way she could ensure Jakub’s safety. She’d sell her soul to the devil for that boy.

And maybe, by sitting in this lovely room the color of Christopher’s eyes, she was signing the contract in blood.

So be it,
she thought, listening to the peals of laughter filtering from down the hall where Jakub entertained the Blackwells’ delighted toddler with their nanny, a bawdy woman named Gemma.

This whole thing had begun in blood. The moment Chief Inspector Morley had returned her glove, stained with Agnes’s blood, and recited the horror of her dearest friend’s death, Millie must have known the bloodshed was not over. For years she’d been waiting, wondering if the man who’d left Agnes’s womb on the cobbles of London would return for her.

Or for her son.

She’d taken steps to make certain he wouldn’t, done what she’d had to do. Every step culminating in this arrangement with Christopher Argent. That cold, tortured, beautiful, lethal …

 … Blind, irritating,
stupid
man.