Hired Hunter (The Rover series Book 2)

by Amelia Shaw

  “I was mistaken when I made my oath to you,” he said.

  Outrage must have already shown on my face because he shook his head.

  “I don’t think you’re a mage, not in the way many know them. I think you’re mage-born, but also fae-born too.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  He chuckled; it was a sad sound. “Because only other fae can see into each other’s dreams with a bond like ours.”

  Chapter Ten

  Fin’s words echoed in my brain and then he said my name, once, twice.

  It took a moment to clear my head enough to meet his eyes again. “Yes?”

  “Are you okay? Did you know that you have fae blood also?”

  I shoved him away from me, needing distance, space, the truth.

  I stumbled out of his office, sure my face showed everything I tried to keep locked inside. With nothing to do but move, I jogged down the hall, going nowhere, and found myself in the sparring room. It seemed my psyche knew what I needed, even if I didn’t.

  One of the punching bags wobbled on its hook and I stared it down. Had I done that?

  I crossed the room and bracketed the bag with my hands to still it.

  I’d spent my entire life thinking I was human. After one terrible experience, I’d learned I was some part mage, and now...some part fae. Did it never occur to my parents I might need to know these things?

  Probably not, since they didn’t expect to be slaughtered in our own home. They had thought they had time. Just like everyone else.

  I wrapped my arms around the bag, almost hugging it.

  “You should buy it dinner if you’re going to feel it up.” Fin’s voice came from the stairwell leading into the large open space.

  I didn’t apologize for pushing him, and yet he seemed to know I was sorry.

  “Want to spar? Will that help?” he asked.

  I shoved away from the bag and faced him. “Right now, I might accidentally take your head off.”

  He unbuttoned his dress shirt and stripped his tie off his neck. “You could try. I doubt you would succeed.”

  “That sounds like a challenge, old man.”

  Since I was dressed in my usual jeans and a t-shirt, I didn’t need to change. I kicked my shoes toward the edge of the room and waited for him on one of the thick blue mats.

  He toed off his shoes at the edge, then met my eyes while he pulled his belt from its loops. “Don’t get any ideas. I just don’t want the buckle to hurt you when I take you down.”

  Not wanting to fan his ego further, I let his statement go as he met me in the center of the mat. The soft plastic material folded around our feet as we both took a fighting stance: one arm ready to block, the other ready to strike.

  I let him make the first charge. He swung out and instead of blocking the strike, I danced to the left out of his reach.

  “Running already?” he joked.

  “Just helping you get a little cardio in.”

  He circled around and tried to get behind me. As he braced on one leg, I crouched, swept, and took him to the mat.

  He landed flat and turned over onto his knees. I joined him, and we engaged another round of spinning and slipping back and forth.

  Instead of grabbing my arms and dragging me down, he tackled me flat on my back to the mat. We hit the mat hard, and I locked my thighs around his waist to try and gain some control, or else, with his size, he could roll right over me.

  I squeezed my thighs tight, and he groaned out an exhale.

  “I really only came down here to see if you were all right,” he said. “Hearing news like that is a lot.”

  “What news?” I said, jerking my hips to tip him off balance too much to make his next move.

  No such luck, not that I truly expected it given his experience. Nor did I expect him to drop the subject of my apparently muddled up heritage.

  He shoved off the mats, lifting me up and slamming me back down. It was enough to knock the wind out of me and my legs slipped enough he could escape.

  Instead of waiting for him to take the lead, I struck out. I expected him to block the move, but he didn’t, and my fist collided with his jaw.

  Pain rammed into my knuckles, and I shouted, “Shit!”

  “Fuck,” he muttered, rubbing his face.

  I shifted over onto my knees to look at his cheek. “I thought you were going to block that.”

  “Well, I thought we were having a conversation.” He stretched his jaw. “I don’t know if I should be terrified or aroused right now.”

  My hand stung, and he pushed off the mats to walk over to the mini fridge in the corner of the room. He returned with two ice packs so we could both nurse our wounds.

  “You ran away,” he said. If there had been judgement in his tone, I might have slugged him again, but it was more of a question.

  “If you haven’t noticed, I have trouble with acting before I think things through.”

  “Really? I had no idea,” he said, hugging the ice pack to his cheek. A stain of pink spilled out from its edges. From the cold or from my punch?

  Not looking at him, I continued. “I had a happy childhood. Part of me knew, even from a young age, I was luckier than a lot of kids I grew up with. My parents loved me, and they loved each other. When I became a teenager, obviously, I didn’t appreciate that as much as I should have. And like I do as an adult, I shoved them away, as far as I could.”

  I peeked up at him under my lashes. “What I’m trying to say is I thought I knew my parents when I was a little girl. As a teen, when they died, I realized I didn’t know much about them, or myself, which is one reason their deaths hit me so hard. We all think we have more time.”

  I kept my gaze on the ice pack over my knuckles, focusing on the cold burning into my skin as it soothed the ache.

  “Parents hide things from their children all the time,” he said. “It’s nothing new. If you knew nothing about some aspects of yourself, it’s because they wanted to protect you.”

  I snorted. “A lot of help that did me. And how are their secrets helping me now? I can’t hate them, and I feel so guilty every time I think about the less shiny parts of our lives. They’re dead. They can’t defend their actions. But I’m the one who has to live with them, and I can’t either.”

  His fingers trailed under my ponytail and he cupped the back of my neck. They were cold from his ice pack and I relaxed into his touch.

  “Do you want to go another round?” he asked.

  “Do you?” I countered. “I won’t promise not to hit you again.”

  He clutched his chest in shock, mockingly. “I would never dream of asking you to hold back on my account.”

  We kept the cold compresses close at hand. When had things gotten so easy with him? So comfortable? After he slept on my couch? After the bond he made between us? I felt like I understood him a little better than I had when we first started working together. Then, he’d been this magical creature, now he was just...Fin.

  He snapped his fighters. “Are you paying attention? I said ‘go’ but you didn’t move.”

  I shook myself back to the ring, the mats, the fight. “Yes, sorry. I zoned out for a moment. Where were we? Have I won this fight yet?”

  “Not a chance,” he said, on the tail end of a chuckle, then lunged for me.

  I feigned to the left and then dove to the right. He landed flat on his belly on the mat. Faster than I anticipated, he rolled over just as I launched myself at him, his long legs wrapped around my back.

  Unlike him, I didn’t have the strength to lift him off the ground and slam him hard enough to get him to release. I shoved my forearm into the meaty part of his thigh. His hold loosened enough to allow me to shove my bent knee over his thigh. Using momentum, I reached out, grabbed the collar of his T-shirt, and flipped myself over his leg.

  Even out of his guard, he recovered, coming back up on his knees before I could get him a choke.

  “Damn. I wanted to finish that,” I
said.

  “Not a chance.” He swatted out his arm, testing my balance. Little did he know, I’d trained with Hawk more times than I cared to remember, a man with zero balance, and all bulk.

  I countered his parry with a shove straight to his abdomen.

  He toppled back onto his ass with a grunt. “What the hell was that?”

  “You test my balance, I test yours. The captain would be appalled.”

  His face shifted from open and smiling, to inscrutable. He came at me again, this time catching hold of my wrist, dragging me into him.

  I tried to pry off his fingers, but he jerked me hard to the right. I went down on my back.

  Before he could make his next move, I wrapped my legs around his hips and then locked my ankles. He could take me up and slam me down, but it would be harder for him to escape.

  But he didn’t. He stayed on the mat and stared down at me, his crystal eyes churning while he looked at me.

  “Do you ever wish you had a different life?” he asked, completely out of the blue.

  If this was a new tactic to throw me off and make me release him, he underestimated my need to win.

  I squeezed my legs around him tighter. “No, because if I wished for a different life it would cheapen the one I have, make the sacrifices and trials I’ve endured meaningless.”

  He settled his hips against me almost casually. “You don’t wish you could take back the things you’ve lost, go a different route?”

  He seemed to have zero idea how uncomfortable I was feeling with him pressed so intimately into me.

  “Do I wish I could see my family again, the people that I’ve lost? Of course, but I also have to believe I’ve made the right choices in my life, that where I end up will make everything worth it.”

  He smiled, the corners of his lips ratcheting up slowly, like clouds parting across the sun. “Wow, who would have thought it? You’re a closet optimist.”

  “Not an optimist,” I grumbled. “A pragmatist. It’s much less work and I get to wear sweatpants and hate the world sometimes.”

  He scanned my features, looking for the truth, hunting for it between the lies I told and the jokes I lived behind.

  “Sir.” The captain’s voice came from the stairwell leading into the training room. “We have—”

  “I’ll deal with it in a moment,” Fin said, his tone sharp, but his eyes never leaving my face.

  The captain’s footsteps on the stairs told me he’d gone, so I didn’t feel the need to squirm, to hide, to run away from someone who might see me as less. Fin didn’t look at me like that. He didn’t look at me like he couldn’t wait for me to screw up so he could rub it in my face. I hadn’t realized how much I needed that confidence from someone, that show of faith.

  “Do you need to go deal with that?” I whispered.

  The tension between us shifted, morphing into something I couldn’t even touch yet.

  He hung his head, finally dragging his eyes from mine. “Probably. He’ll only come back in a moment to interrupt again.”

  I nodded and used his moment of stillness to launch up off the floor, flip him onto his back, and slam his arm into an arm bar. He wiggled under my legs as I tightened them across his torso, dragging his other side into my ass with my ankles and feet.

  After a second, he tapped my hip, and I released him.

  “Not fair,” he said.

  “The chief says nothing in life is fair. Get used to it.” I lay down on the mats and spread my limbs wide, sprawling out and enjoying the feeling of everything around me.

  Did I have a lot of questions about myself, and my past, of course? Could I do that all in one day? Nope.

  He gripped my hand and hauled me to my feet before I was ready. I stumbled into him and he grabbed my hips to steady me. Our gazes clashed in that moment, his surprised, mine weighted, and the entire world seemed to grind to a halt, filling the room with a bubble of silence. Shit. This wasn’t something I could face either. Whatever was between Fin and I would need to wait, at least for my drama to catch up with my hormones.

  My phone that I’d thrown onto the floor, rang out loudly, interrupting the moment, and he stepped away. He grabbed his clothing and belt from the floor. Instead of dressing there, he took his stuff and walked out of the training room without another word.

  Part of that alone felt like a victory. Fin wasn’t someone I’d considered flappable, but his face as he left was confused—or bemused perhaps.

  I answered the phone and jolted as Tegan’s voice cut through the speaker. “I’ve got something for you.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I put Tegan on hold, then raced up the steps toward Fin's office. By the time I made it, and pressed the phone back to my ear, Tegan was in mid-tirade about her boss, and how he wouldn’t let her take the detective exam. I made a few noncommittal noises at her to keep her talking. When I walked into Fin’s office, I found him and the captain whispering by his desk.

  The captain stopped talking the second his eyes slid over me entering the room.

  Without another word, he walked out, but not before delivering a glare I could feel in my toes. Oh yeah, we weren’t going to be braiding each other’s hair later.

  Fin turned toward me, his eyes expectant, but guarded. Good, he wasn’t ready to review what we’d faced in the sparring room either. It would make things easier for now.

  I cocked my phone toward him and then pressed it back to my ear. Tegan continued her assault on her boss’s character, some of which was probably unfounded. No one who could eat a dozen donuts in under five minutes could be all bad.

  “Tegan is on the phone,” I told Fin. “She says she might have something for us.”

  He walked toward me and pressed in close. I backed away.

  “Teags, okay, so what do you have?” I asked.

  She stopped short in the middle of her sentence and then switched gears. I loved a woman who knew where her priorities were.

  “The lab said they found some DNA on the ribbon and they—”

  Fin cut in closer. “What is she saying?”

  I put my hand into his face and gently pushed him backward. “Sorry, Teags, I missed what you said. Someone is being impatient.”

  “Oh, is your babysitter there? He was cute. Is he single?”

  I snorted as he slapped my hand away from him. “Yes, but he probably bites.”

  “Even better,” she said.

  “Tegan, back to the lab report.”

  “Oh, right, sorry. Yes, they found DNA and trace bits of metal on the ribbon. All over it, like someone had been—”

  “Put it on speaker,” Fin demanded, right in my other ear.

  I shoved him away. “No, I’m not putting it on speaker because you’re acting like a toddler. One minute, and I’ll tell you what she said.”

  Tegan was still going. “They couldn’t figure out the composition of the metal, but they said they found traces of magic as well.”

  “They can test for that now?”

  Tegan hemmed and hawed a little bit. “Well, not for magic specifically, but there is a chemical composition that magic can leave on some fabrics. Looks like silk is one of them.”

  Interesting.

  “Thanks, Teags,” I said. “Can you email me the report?”

  Fin jostled me again, trying to get to my phone as I hung up. He dropped his hands when I slipped it into my pocket.

  “Are you going to be a good boy and relax while I tell you what she said? Because you need to calm down.”

  His forehead drew in tight and I resisted the urge to push his hair behind his ear to get it out of his face. “She’s my sister. You have to understand. The only family I have left. If there is some proof she still exists out there, then I want to hear it. And quickly.”

  I threw myself into an armchair and curled my legs up underneath me. “She said there was DNA, female on the ribbon. Also trace amounts of metal and chemical composition which suggest magic was used near the ribbon at som
e point.”

  He sat across from me. “Was that it?”

  I dug the phone out and tossed it to him. “You can call her back if you want to hear about it, but be prepared to offer up your phone number. She’ll bribe it out of you for the information.”

  Before I could take the phone back, he climbed out of the chair and headed toward the door. “Where are you going?”

  He’d already started buttoning the cuffs of his shirt. “I’m going back to the station to get more information. Surely, if she sees how important it is, she’ll help me without the running tableau.”

  I surged to my feet and crossed the room. “First of all, I take offense to that. I may be a smart ass, but that wasn’t news to you when you brought me into this job. Second, she won’t. She’s my friend and worse than I am. And if you mind control her, I will walk out that door and never come back.”

  He held his hands wide. “What do you want me to do, Zoey? If my sister is alive, I need to know and I need to find her.”

  “What we need to know is if Esteban has stolen her skin and used her likeness to get to us, or if it’s really her in the dreams. A sending is what she has been doing to me. How is that different from me seeing your dreams when you sleep?”

  He turned away toward the bookshelves and ran his hand through his hair, mussing it with his fingers. “It’s different because you can’t invade my mind through the dream. You’ll never be able to get in, only watch from the outside. It was used between fae to show psychic dreams to each other when necessary. And with humans breathing down our necks and killing us off one by one, it was very necessary.”

  He sounded frustrated, tired, and more than a little bit over everything.

  I nudged the chair in his direction. “Sit down, and we can talk it out.”

  “This, coming from the queen of throwing things first, asking questions maybe later?” His frustrated tone held a hint of amusement.

  But he came back over and sat in the chair. I took the one across from him again.

  Was this bond messing with me mentally?