“This den has all the hallmarks of the one you are hunting so this will be strictly off the books. Covert. Understood?” Hartt didn’t release the folder from his grip when the male tried to take it. He kept hold of it until Fane nodded.
When Hartt surrendered the file, Fane flipped it open and Fuery peered over his shoulder at the white pages.
There were markings etched on them in red ink, symbols that reeked of witchcraft.
He lifted his gaze to the hellcat’s when he felt Fane’s eyes on him and glared right back at him. He refused to back down when Fane continued to stare at him, his blue eyes glowing brighter. In a fight, Fane wouldn’t stand a chance. The bastard knew it, but it still took him long seconds before he finally backed down and stopped challenging Fuery.
Fane snatched the file and stormed from the room.
Hartt stared after him. “Why do you push him so hard? You know he’s a feline shifter and he finds it difficult to back down from any challenge issued to him.”
Fuery shrugged and kicked the door closed. “The male is a feline shifter and should know about prides, and therefore he should know his place in this one and not challenge me.”
Hartt leaned back in his leather chair and sighed, and then his eyes slid back to the door and he quietly said, “I do not think Fane understands anything relating to such things anymore… not since his family sold him into slavery.”
Before Fuery could respond, Hartt spoke again.
“Enter.”
His friend looked weary now, but Fuery didn’t tell him to take a break. Hartt wouldn’t like it. They were similar in that respect. Hartt hated being coddled as much as he did. It was late though, and Hartt had been handing out new orders, receiving reports, and meeting with clients for over twelve hours.
At the very least, Fuery needed to convince him to eat.
A big gruff brunet shifter stomped in, as packed with muscle beneath his fitted black t-shirt and combat trousers as he was in his bear form.
Klay was their newest recruit.
He had done two missions for them so far, barely enough to prove himself. Fuery had been the one to question him when he had applied to join the guild, and when he had asked why Klay wanted to become an assassin, the big bear had almost bitten his head off.
It turned out the male didn’t like explaining himself.
Was that a bear trait?
Fuery had thought so at first, but no longer. Klay was here for a reason, just as everyone else was.
He tuned out the bear’s discussion with Hartt as he was assigned another minor mission and given a report on how Hartt thought he was progressing, and tuned back into Hartt’s feelings. His friend was tired. After he was done with Klay, Fuery was going to force him to head to the mess hall with him to get something to eat.
Klay conducted his business quickly as usual, and was out of the door in less than five minutes. Fuery respected that about him. The male knew how to be expedient, possibly because he was always eager to take down his next mark and work his way up the ladder. For what purpose, Fuery didn’t know, but he would be keeping an eye on the bear.
Just in case.
“We are going to leave your office and eat something,” Fuery growled and kicked away from the wall, crossing the room to Hartt as he slumped into his chair and blew out a long sigh. “Or I will go up to the cafeteria and eat someone.”
Hartt slid him a black look, one that screamed how unimpressed he was, and bored of hearing that threat. Fuery made it every time Hartt refused to take a break. It hadn’t failed to get his friend moving yet, even when Hartt knew it was meant as a joke.
“Fine.” Hartt pressed his hands into his desk, pushed back and stood. “I have nothing left on my schedule anyway.”
That wasn’t as satisfying as making Hartt take a break when he was busy, but Fuery would take the small victory.
He opened the door for his friend and waited for Hartt to pass him before he followed him into the black corridor. The oil lamps at intervals on the wall lent a soft light to the hallway that he found soothing, and the scent of them drowned out the other smells in the guild. Including Aya.
He quickly shoved her out of his head before his mind could latch onto the female and strode beside Hartt, keeping pace with him as he yawned and trudged towards the main reception room.
They were barely two steps across it when he smelled someone unfamiliar.
“I need to meet with someone,” a male with tawny hair laced with gold threads hollered, getting everyone’s attention, including Hartt’s.
Fuery growled at the newcomer, and not only because he was about to stop Hartt from getting some much-needed sustenance and rest.
The male was strong, powerful, and a potential threat to his friend, and him.
“You the boss?” The male jerked his chin towards him.
Hartt stepped past him and moved in front of him, blocking the incubus’s path to him. He folded his arms across his chest, causing his black knee-length tunic to tighten across his back and over his arms.
“I would be the male in charge here,” Hartt said, capturing the male’s attention.
His green eyes, flecked with gold and blue, shifted to Hartt and something that looked like relief flitted across them as he moved towards them.
As he drew closer, Fuery caught his scent more clearly, and an image leaped into his mind, one of white cells splashed with red blood.
“I know you,” Hartt said at the same time as that feeling went through Fuery. “You were there the night we broke Harbin out of the hunter facility.”
The memory crystallised in Fuery’s mind, and he saw a replay of his fight against the mortals, cutting them down with his blade as Hartt worked to free Harbin. They had broken a dragon out too, one Harbin had wanted Hartt to bring with them, and one they had met again in a building.
One where he had crossed paths with someone he hadn’t seen in millennia.
Bleu.
Gods. The male had been a skinny youth barely strong enough to lift a damned sword when Fuery had known him, and had protected him in a fierce battle.
A battle that seemed fragmented now, twisted in his mind, some of the pieces not quite fitting. When he had ended up at Prince Vail’s cottage in the mortal realm, that male had warned him that the darkness had a way of distorting their memories, bending them into new shapes that satisfied it and made it easier for it to steal control of them, and that was the reason pieces of the battle no longer fit and seemed out of place.
“Archangel,” the incubus whispered, a lost look in his green eyes as the gold and blue swirled, a sign of his shifting emotions. “My mate now works for them… and I need to get her away from that wretched place. It’s poisoning her mind and making it impossible for me to make her see the truth.”
“The truth?” Hartt frowned.
“That she isn’t mortal.” The incubus raked fingers through his scruffy hair. “I just need to get her away from them, but her partner has too tight a hold on her… the whole damned organisation has brainwashed her on top of the spell she’s already under.”
Fuery could feel Hartt softening, and while he wanted to tell Hartt they already had too many jobs open, he held his tongue, aware it was pointless trying to argue with him.
Although he led a guild of dangerous assassins, dealt in death and had killed hundreds in his years of service, Hartt had a gentle side, one that often led to him taking on jobs out of pity and a need to help rather than the coin it would gain him and the guild.
“Your name?” Hartt said and moved a step closer to the male.
“Fenix.” The male offered his hand.
Hartt took it and gave it a hard shake. “We will help you, Fenix.”
Fuery couldn’t help but wonder whether it was because Hartt wanted another shot at Archangel, or whether he was hoping that someone would show up again to defend the mortals there as he had last time.
Someone neither of them should want to see.
Thinking of Prince Lo
ren and his intervention when they had been at Archangel to rescue Harbin brought memories of Bleu back with him, and from there he ended up thinking about Prince Vail.
He was alive.
That knowledge still rocked Fuery to his soul.
Still seemed impossible, a dream, even when he had spent time with the male.
Vail.
A male he had served under, the one he would follow into the very pit of Hell and march beside to the fortress of the Devil himself if he asked it of him, was alive.
Not dead.
Gods, he had thought Vail was lost forever.
Now that he knew Vail was alive, Fuery wasn’t sure what had made him think he was dead. It was muddled. A product of the darkness, just as Vail had warned him when he had mentioned pieces of the battle they had been in didn’t fit?
Even now, when he knew that Vail was alive, part of him still believed that he was dead.
It was strange, unsettling, a weird sensation that often left him lost and adrift, staring into space as he tried to figure out what was real and what was an illusion created by the darkness.
It was so fucked up.
It had left him doubting his mind, and had left him feeling he had lost it and had gone insane.
If Vail was alive, was it possible his other memories were wrong too?
It hurt too much to think that, so he shut down that line of thought, ending it before it could seize him and only drive him deeper into despair. It wasn’t possible, and thinking in such a way would only torment him, giving the darkness a tighter hold on him.
The memories he wanted to be a lie were real.
He was a killer.
With his own hands, he had killed his beautiful mate.
CHAPTER 7
Sweat rolled down his pale skin, tracing lines over taut muscles that shifted with each hard breath he took and stirred wicked heat in her veins. His mouth moved silently, the words he said to his sparring companions in the sun-drenched camp beyond her reach, those firm lips fascinating her and setting her heart racing.
Shaia swallowed hard when he rose onto his feet and turned towards her in a single fluid move that caused his body to come alive in a symphony of power, muscles bunching and stretching, drawing her eyes back down to his bare chest.
She had to move.
Her hands shook against the wicker basket of wet clothes, and her feet refused to obey when she issued them a command, a demand that she break away from the stream and the alluring male on the other side.
She didn’t want to leave.
It seemed he didn’t want it either, because he said something else to the males and then jogged towards the bank. He didn’t hesitate as he reached it. He plunged into the stream, splashing water everywhere as he waded through the knee-deep river barefoot, not slowing as he headed straight for her.
Shaia looked around her at the green valley, part of her afraid another member of the village would see him coming to speak with her and would report it back to her parents, or worse.
They would create a scandal out of it.
The rest of her rebelled against everything that had been bred into her, screamed that she had come here wanting to see him and now she could, and she had to take this opportunity.
She needed to speak with him, needed to see him again and bask in his masculine beauty, needed to understand what it was about him that had entranced her so deeply, affected her so swiftly, making him all she could think about.
He stopped when he was barely two metres from her, ankle-deep in the water. “Were you hurt?”
He breathed hard, distracting her, drawing her mischievous gaze back down to his bare chest. Water glistened on it, catching the light. A single bead broke away and tracked over his abdomen, luring her eyes with it as it cascaded over chiselled perfection. She swallowed hard again, desperate to wet her parched throat as her eyes caught on his black trousers that rode low on his hips.
They were wet, moulding the material to his thighs and other places.
Shaia stifled the blush that threatened to scald her cheeks and pulled her eyes back up to his face, ashamed at herself. She had never stared so openly at a male before. She had seen males in the fields with their chests bare, ones larger and more muscled than he was, but none of them had affected her in the way he did, setting her heart pounding and blood burning.
He looked down at himself, grumbled a rather wicked and shocking curse, and bent towards the water. She could only stare as he scooped it up in his hands and washed his chest, sweeping away all the sweat and the dust.
Making him even more tempting.
“You must think me a ruffian or a peasant,” he muttered and pushed his hands down his chest and then his arms, clearing the water from his skin.
“Not at all.” It left her lips before she could stop it, before she could consider the consequences of responding so quickly to him and how he might interpret her words.
He froze halfway through pushing his long black hair from his face and stared at her, his fingers tangled in the wet ribbons and body deliciously tensed.
Gods, she had never spoken so out of turn in front of a male before, so careless and free with her words that she had been in danger of revealing everything to him.
She liked him.
Her thought back in the village just moments before she had met him haunted her.
Perhaps it was possible for a female of barely two hundred years to find a male she wanted to spend the rest of her life with after all.
But her heart had chosen a male far different from the one her family wanted for her.
One who was still staring at her in silence, his clear violet eyes a little wider than usual, relaying his surprise.
“Thank you for your concern.” She struggled to keep the tremble of nerves from her voice and to stick with a more appropriate set of responses, ones her family would approve of and deem correct for the given situation. Ones she didn’t like at all, not when her heart spoke different ones, things she wanted to tell him and couldn’t stop herself from tacking on. She managed to do it in what she hoped society would think an appropriate way. “Though there is no need for you to be concerned, as I was not hurt.”
His tempting lips curved into a smile. The brightness of it stole her breath. It made him even more handsome. She hadn’t thought that possible.
“I am glad… although I think I hurt the reputation of the squad. Your mother seemed rather disgusted by us.”
“Mother is disgusted by most things.”
Her eyes widened and her hand would have flown to cover her mouth if she hadn’t been holding the basket. Had she just said that out loud? Her heart stuttered, and then thumped harder against her chest. She stared at the male, unable to believe she had spoken of her own family that way around a stranger and afraid of what he would think of her.
His smile was slow this time, and a little wicked and teasing, as if he liked the way she had spoken so openly, so not the way she should have been speaking around him.
“I am sorry,” she whispered, although she wasn’t sure who she was apologising to—him or her family.
“Don’t.” His smile held, bewitching her and relaxing her at the same time. “You did nothing wrong.”
She felt as if she had though. What world did he come from where speaking so harshly of a family member was acceptable?
A world a million leagues away from her one, that was for sure.
A soldier on the other side of the bank shouted a name and he twisted at the waist, causing his muscles to ripple with strength, and the ridge that arced over his hip tensed.
“I’ll be back soon,” he hollered and the soldier moved on.
Shaia stared at him.
Fuery.
Was he as violent and tempestuous as that name suggested?
As rough and forceful?
Before she could stop herself, she fell into imagining it, entertaining wicked things that heated her cheeks and would give her mother a heart attack if s
he knew.
Fuery said something else to the male, his deep voice curling around her and drawing her back to him, making her imagine him whispering into her ear, his breath warm on her throat.
He turned back to her and his left eyebrow rose. “Are you unwell?”
Shaia quickly shook her head, dislodging the fantasy but not the flames scalding her face. If anything they grew worse, roused by the fact he had obviously caught her daydreaming about him.
He looked her over and a little colour touched his cheeks too, reached his eyes and made them darker as he met hers and stared into them. Her breath lodged in her throat, heart racing there, and her hands shook against the basket again.
She had to say something, but her voice felt weak. Lost to her.
A male had never looked at her the way he was, with hunger in his eyes, blatant desire that stoked hers and made it burn hot and fierce, sending an achy shiver over her skin and rousing feelings that she had never experienced before.
She had to say something.
Her mouth moved automatically, her words distant to her own ears. “Where are you going?”
He blinked, a flicker of confusion chasing some of the heat from his eyes.
“You said you would return soon.” Implying he was going somewhere.
Was he leaving the village?
A sharp pain pierced her chest in response to that thought and she wanted to take hold of him and make him stay, something shockingly powerful inside her demanding she not let him go.
Demanding she make him his.
What wicked need was this?
He smiled again, stepped towards her and took her basket from her hands. She shook as his fingers brushed hers, his skin hot and sending electric tingles arcing up her arms.
“I am taking you home. People will start talking if I stand here staring at you much longer.”
Oh.
Not a good idea at all.
As much as she wanted to remain near him, as much as the thought of him walking her home delighted her, she couldn’t allow it.
Shaia reached for the basket. “People will start talking if they see me walking with you.”
Hurt danced in his eyes but he vanquished it a second later. It didn’t stop her from feeling that pain echoing in her chest, wrapped in shame and guilt. She blamed her upbringing. Walking alone with a male at her age was considered a very bad thing to do, something that would bring dishonour to her entire family.
Unchained by a Forbidden Love Page 7