He stood at the end of the carpeted hallway looking down the corridor. All the doors were open except one, at the far end, which was locked.
And vibrating. She was hitting—or kicking—it from the inside. If it hadn’t been reinforced she would have easily kicked the door right out of its frame, but as it was, she was doing a fine job of trying. He wondered what the inside of the door looked like.
Not pretty, he’d bet.
“Eliana,” he called. The blows on the door abruptly ceased. He took several steps forward, listening, hearing nothing but the pounding of his own pulse in his ears. “Ana, it’s me.” He cleared his throat, feeling suddenly like the biggest fool on the planet. Of course she knows it’s you. Nicely played, idiot!
Ignoring that snarky little voice inside his head that never failed to demoralize him, D reached out, put his big hand on the doorknob, turned it, and pushed the door open.
It swung back on silent hinges, revealing the room in all its chaos.
She’d torn the sheets and quilted duvet from the bed and upended the mattress against the bed frame so it stood on end, a queen-size padded wall concealing the far corner of the room. All the drawers in the bureau stood open, their contents rifled through, clothing pulled out and left in piles on the floor or hanging haphazardly from the backs of chairs or over the desk, which also had all its drawers ajar, a few upside down on the floor beneath it. The two bedside lamps had been smashed, though one had survived the attack and lay on its side against a wall, uplighting the room in a wash of intermittently flickering yellow.
The crystal vase with the flowers he’d brought lay shattered at his feet, the flowers scattered over the dark rug in bright confusion, drenched and half demolished.
That actually hurt.
“I’m coming in,” he warned, his voice harder than he intended because he was feeling sorry for himself about the flowers.
Silence. He took it as an affirmation and eased into the room.
His first mistake was assuming she’d hidden behind the mattress; he realized that as he saw movement from his right and heard something whizz by his head, parting the air with a sinister hiss just as he jerked out of its way. He whirled around and leapt back simultaneously, barely avoiding another slashing blow aimed at his jugular, and had exactly two seconds to appreciate the vision of Eliana—dark eyes ablaze, lovely mouth pinched in concentration—before she thrust again with the blade.
He wrenched away and got himself clear of striking distance before she could take aim again and left her standing, arm raised, dagger clenched in her fist, next to the open bedroom door.
“Hello, Demetrius,” she said coldly, gazing at him with what appeared to be perfect composure. “I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”
Insanely, he wanted to laugh. He was so happy he could have danced. She clearly hated him and wanted to kill him, but she was here and she was alive and she was all he’d wanted for so long he couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t, and the relief and euphoria he felt lit him up inside like a Roman candle.
His face split with a big, goofy grin, the first time he’d truly smiled in years. “Me, too,” he said. “But obviously for different reasons.”
Very slowly, never letting her intense gaze leave his face, she shifted from one foot to the other, repositioning her weight. He marveled at how she seemed perfectly poised and confident, totally in control, and then he noticed the throbbing pulse in the hollow of her throat that betrayed her.
Not so cool after all. Perversely, it satisfied him.
“I’m unarmed,” he said as she advanced toward him with the dagger held out. He took a slow step back and held his hands up, wondering where she’d found it while at the same time cursing himself again for not clearing the room before he’d settled her in it to sleep off the anesthesia. Rookie mistake, one even a less experienced soldier in the lower class of Legiones would have avoided. She short-circuited his brain, as always.
“An unfortunate oversight on your part,” Eliana replied, not sounding sorry for him at all, “as it’s pretty idiotic to come to a knife fight without a knife.”
Dressed in a black pair of men’s boxer shorts rolled over at the waist so they didn’t sag down her legs and a white men’s undershirt she must have found in one of the dresser drawers, with her choppy blue hair sticking up in every direction and her wild, glittering eyes, she looked like an insane, cross-dressing pixie.
An insane, cross-dressing pixie with glowing skin and perfect breasts that were, unfortunately, clearly visible in all their creamy glory beneath the thin cotton undershirt. He avoided glancing at them but knew they were there, and his body responded.
Feeling that flush of heat to his groin, he smiled even wider.
Eliana turned beet red. “I’m not the innocent little princess you used to know, Bellator,” she hissed. “She died when you killed my father!”
Then she lunged forward, dagger aimed at his heart.
He spun out of the way and she followed, thrusting, leaping forward when he danced back, slashing out with the blade, her face grim and determined. He didn’t think himself in much danger—he was far stronger and had trained in all kinds of fighting since he’d been selected as a child for the king’s elite guard because of the strength and purity of his Bloodlines—but he was careful not to let her see his confidence, and he kept a safe distance while letting her advance and lunge while he feinted and leapt clear.
“Stop playing with me and fight!” she spat as he deflected a vicious thrust with a quick turn of his wrist. He had to admire her technique, he grudgingly admitted to himself. She’d obviously trained with someone who knew what they were doing.
“We are fighting. You’re lunging at me with a knife, and I’m trying not to get stuck, so it’s definitely a fight. And for the record, I didn’t kill your father.”
In response to that, Eliana froze. He froze as well and stared at her warily as she looked back at him, her chest rising and falling erratically, that pulse still fluttering wildly in her neck.
“Right to my face,” she muttered and shook her head.
This time when she lunged forward with a savage snarl—teeth bared, eyes alight with demonic fury—D was a little less certain he’d be getting out of the room alive.
Damn! Eliana barely missed D’s face with a well-timed swing.
The fact that he kept looking at her like that wasn’t helping her concentration. How he had the audacity to stare at her with such rampant glee after what he’d done—it made her even more determined to kill him. She lunged at him again.
“I’d almost forgotten how beautiful you are when you’re mad,” said D, feinting from her lunge so fast he was a blur. He wasn’t even breathing hard, damn him, but she was sweating, her hands were clammy, and the adrenaline blasting through her veins was making her shaky. She adjusted her grip on the dagger and breathed in, trying with no success to slow her pounding heart.
This was nothing like fighting with Alexi.
“I don’t want to hear anything you have to say,” she spat. “I just want you to die!”
“Ouch.” He looked pained and leapt clear as she lunged again.
She spun around and faced him. Big and brawny and utterly masculine as she remembered, he was still a masterpiece of agility, nimble and graceful with every move. He wore boots, black leathers slung low on his hips, and a half-zipped hoodie that revealed a distracting expanse of chest. Of tattooed, corrugated chest. His presence filled the small room, and she felt almost suffocated by the nearness of him, his size and scent. Just being close to him was overwhelming. She needed to get this over with, and quickly.
“Coward,” she growled as he deftly avoided another of her swings.
“I’m not the one who ran away from home in the middle of the night,” he countered. Though his tone was serious, she knew he was enjoying this, enjoying seeing her sweat and pant, trying to chase him.
Enjoying playing with her.
Fury blasted through her veins. He’d killed her father. He’d ruined her life. He’d taken away everything she’d ever known and used her in the worst way possible, and now he was toying with her.
She fell still and lowered the dagger to her side. D watched this with a wary expression from several feet away. “Come on then,” she challenged, holding his gaze. “Come and get me if you’re not a coward. That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s why you broke into that police station. So you could take me to some godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere,” she said, gesturing to the room, “and get it out of me?”
His expression darkened. His brow crumpled to a frown. “Get what out of you, exactly?”
“You really think I’m that stupid?” She began to shake badly now. Emotions she’d managed to bottle up for years welled dangerously close to the surface, a tidal wave of rage and betrayal, anger and loneliness, gathering into a howling, molten core so pressurized it threatened to go supernova. “You think I don’t know I’m only alive right now so you can find out where the rest of us are hiding? So you can finish what you started three years ago and kill us all?”
His nostrils flared at that. His eyes, dancing with barely repressed glee only moments before, turned murderous. “I saved your life today,” he said, his voice very low in his throat. “If I wanted to see you dead, I would have left you at that prison and let The Hunt have you. And who do you think fixed those damn bullet holes in you? The tooth fairy?”
Her hand flew to the bandage on her hip, hidden beneath the boxers. The Hunt? A flicker of emotion pinched her stomach—confusion? doubt?—but it was quickly eaten by anger.
“Clever. Pretend to save me from your own gang to gain my trust, keep me alive just long enough to find out where the others are, and then kill me. You’re even craftier than Silas said. I can’t believe I ever trusted you!”
And with that, the missing puzzle piece clicked into place.
“He told you it was me,” D said, incredulous. “That son of a bitch told you I killed your father, didn’t he?”
Eliana’s dark eyes flared hot, and two spots of pink appeared high on her cheeks. She sucked in a breath and then shouted, “No one had to tell me anything because I saw it with my own eyes, you bastard! You, the gun, my father lying dead on the floor with a hole in his head!”
She backed a step away, her breath ragged, her legs bent as if she would leap at him at any moment.
D stood ready for her move, every nerve and muscle throbbing with the effort it took to restrain himself from lunging at her, crushing her to his chest, crushing his lips to hers. “You saw nothing,” he said between clenched teeth. “I was holding a gun, that was all. And then you ran away before you let me explain—”
She made the tiniest move, her muscles coiled to spring, and, tired of the cat and mouse and dagger game, he was instantly there to catch her. He reached out and grasped her wrist. With a gasp, she tried to yank free, but his grip was too strong and she dropped the blade. Struggling wildly, she ended up losing her footing and executing an ungainly back flop onto the box spring mattress, where she bounced once, then recovered her equilibrium and kicked out sharply with a leg.
But again he was too fast for her. D caught her ankle in his other hand and wrestled her, bucking and screaming, down to the mattress.
“Murderer!” Eliana shrieked in his face, all pretense of control vanished, wriggling and hissing beneath him like a snake. “Liar! Traitor!”
“Listen to me!” he shouted as she thrashed, spewing obscenities and hitting him with her free hand. She landed a hard punch to the side of his skull, and he grunted as fireworks exploded behind his eye. Damn—she was a hell of a lot stronger than she looked. And vicious as a wildcat, too; she raked her nails down his cheek, and he felt blood, hot and wet, drip from his jaw.
“I’ll kill you!” she screamed. “I swear on my dead father I’ll kill you!”
He dropped his full weight on her chest, pinning her, and then grabbed her other wrist and pushed both her arms to the mattress above her head.
“Dammit, listen!” D shouted, shoving his face right up against hers.
She shrank back into the mattress with a shocked little gasp and froze. Their noses were touching. Their bodies were pressed full together. They stared at each other, eye to eye, breathing hard, muscles rigid.
And then, oh and then…
Second by second, inch by inch, on a deep, cellular level, D became aware of Eliana.
Her breathing, ragged. Her heartbeat, pounding wildly against his chest. The blood rushing through her veins. The heat of her skin. Her body beneath him, soft and warm, overwhelming his senses.
All the little details of her—so vivid in his memory but now here, here—came flooding back to cripple him with a tidal wave of emotion so overpowering he momentarily lost the capacity for speech.
“It wasn’t me,” he finally whispered hoarsely, staring deep into her eyes. “I swear on my life, on the life of my brothers, on everything I hold sacred, it wasn’t me.”
“Who…who was it then?” She was whispering now, too, as though she’d felt the change in him, which she probably had. Her eyes blistered him, and he thought there might have been a tiny, tiny glimmer of hope there.
Constantine. It was on the tip of his tongue, it was right there. He sucked in a breath…
And couldn’t say it. He simply could never turn on his brother whom he’d sworn to protect with his own life, not even to try and convince the woman he loved he wasn’t the murdering bastard she thought him. Caught between love and duty, the agony of divided loyalty was crushing, and it kept him silent.
The little glimmer of hope in her eyes winked out. It was replaced by fury and withering hatred. “You better kill me now, because the minute you let me go I’m going to cut off your balls and make myself a nice new pair of earrings.” She smirked at him. “A very small pair.”
“Dick jokes? Really?” he snapped, feeling as neutered as she threatened him to be. She’d never actually seen his balls, but he didn’t enjoy having his manhood called into question. Perversely, it made him want to strip just to prove her wrong.
“Get off me!”
“I’m not going anywhere until you take that back!”
“Kill me, or get off me!”
“Take it back!”
They glared at each other, neither one blinking. Fuming, she pressed her lips together and a tremor ran through her body. It took several seconds, but she seemed to garner some shred of her abandoned control. Then she said, “If your plan is to smash me to death, it’s working. I can’t breathe.”
“You seem to be doing a fine job of breathing, Ana.” D glanced down to her chest where the top of her breasts swelled invitingly over the scoop neck of her T-shirt. When he glanced back up at her, her face had gone cherry red. She turned her face aside, closed her eyes, and bit her lip.
The heat of her body against his, those beautiful breasts, her teeth sunk into that full lower lip…D couldn’t help himself. An erection sprang to rock-hard life in his pants. Because their bodies were pressed together, chest to crotch, she didn’t miss it.
“Unbelievable,” she said, outraged. “Just…unbelievable.” She squirmed beneath him, trying to get away, but the friction only served to excite him further, and she gasped, feeling him grow even harder.
“You bring the animal out in me, beautiful,” he said gruffly, smiling though he knew he shouldn’t be, elated to be near her. “Always did.”
“I’m going to throw up on you now. Get off me.”
Her look was absolutely murderous—and, he decided, utterly adorable. “Not before you apologize for scratching my face and saying I have a small dick.”
She growled in exasperation and said through gritted teeth, “Small. Balls. Now. Get. Off!”
“Something you need to know first, baby girl,” he said, but she stiffened beneath him as if she’d been slapped.
“NO!” She stared up at him, and her dark eyes b
lazed cold fire. “You don’t get to call me that! You don’t get to call me nicknames and pretend you care and lie right to my face, not after you used me and took away everything I ever had! You took away my entire life! And I hate you for it! I! HATE! YOU!”
D felt his face harden. “I didn’t take away anything, you gave it away. You ran away without a word, without so much as even a look backward, and I’ve spent the last three years of my life in fucking agony because of it. And your leaving like you did stirred up such an epic shit storm I don’t know how it can be fixed. Maybe it can’t. But I’m the one thing standing between you and certain death right now, and I’m risking my own ass to keep you safe, so you’re going to be nice to me and take it back!”
They glared at each other, stalemate, until finally her lower lip quivered. Unbelievably, impossibly, her eyes filled with tears. “I wish you were dead,” she whispered miserably.
D could endure physical pain of any kind. He could take blows or cuts or falls, he could even take torture. What he couldn’t take was a woman’s tears. Especially his woman’s tears.
Like snow in the sun, his heart melted.
“No, baby girl, you don’t,” he whispered back, looking deep into her eyes. He was certain now beyond a doubt that beneath all that rage and blistering fury and wall of ice she’d erected was a tiny ember of tenderness that still burned just for him. “And I’ll prove it to you.”
He lowered his mouth to hers.
She gasped against his mouth, and he took the opportunity to slide his tongue between her lips. She made a little sound in her throat—horror or outrage, he couldn’t tell—and stiffened to the rigidity of a wooden plank and stopped breathing.
What she didn’t do was pull away.
D took that for a positive sign and deepened the kiss, still tender but seeking, tasting her, wanting her to respond instead of lie frozen, allowing him to explore her mouth with no resistance but no return, no answer to the question his lips were asking.
He pulled back and looked down at her; her eyes were squeezed shut tight. He lowered his head and gently kissed each of her eyelids, the place between her eyebrows, the tip of her nose. She made the little sound again, and this time it sounded closer to a plea. For what, he couldn’t tell.
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