Marked by an Assassin

by Heaton, Felicity

  “I need to know who she is… and I thought maybe you could help.” Although, he wasn’t sure that coming to Underworld had been such a great idea, because being around his brother was playing merry hell with him. Being near the female had been bad enough, reawakening the softer emotions that had no part in an assassin’s life, but being around Cavanaugh was infinitely worse.

  It took him back beyond twenty years, to a time when they had lived together in peace, enjoying life to the full. A brighter and better time, one he hadn’t realised he missed until he had seen Cavanaugh and Eloise together again.

  How many times had they all trekked from the village together, heading high into the mountains to shift and play chase, to burn some energy? How many times had they all crashed in front of a blazing fire afterwards, spent and tired from the exertion, and aching and sore from laughing so hard as they talked?

  Gods, those days felt like a distant memory that belonged to someone else.

  Something beautiful he had witnessed from the outside rather than experienced.

  “Did you get a good look at her?” Cavanaugh’s deep voice rumbled through the room and Harbin pulled himself back to it.

  He nodded, keeping his features schooled and emotions locked away, because his brother was watching him closely and any slip would give away that he had done a lot more than just get a good look at the female in question.

  “Jaw length silver hair, but she dyes it black. I’m guessing she wants to blend in and lay low. Silver-gold eyes. About this tall.” He held his hand at around shoulder-height to him.

  “She give you those?” Cavanaugh pointed at Harbin’s right cheek.

  He was touching the marks before he could stop himself, his focus slipping as he recalled her taste on his tongue and how warm and soft her body had felt against his.

  “You’re on the cusp.”

  Harbin snapped back to the room, ice blasting through his veins and cooling his hungers as his brother’s words sank in and he met his silvery gaze. It challenged Harbin to deny it, and he wanted to, but the words refused to leave his lips.

  Cavanaugh sighed. “I wish I could help, but several females at the village had eyes like that and silver hair. I’m guessing you got more than a good look at her, so did she have any scars, any marks of any kind that would give me more to go on?”

  Harbin frowned at the floor and pictured her. It didn’t take much effort. The moment he thought about her, she popped into his head, wearing just her white underwear. Damn. He had loved the feel of her curves beneath his hands.

  He hadn’t realised he had growled until Cavanaugh was right in front of him, his left hand clamped down on his right shoulder. His brother hadn’t done it to soothe him. He had done it to anchor him in place in order to protect Eloise. The slender female was tucked behind Cavanaugh, a wary look in her golden eyes.

  She was safe. He wasn’t interested in her. Fuck, he wasn’t interested in any of the females he could smell in the club. There was only one that he wanted.

  Her.

  “She had a scar… here.” He ran his index finger across his right collarbone. “It was old.”

  Cavanaugh turned pensive, silent for so long that hope began to build in Harbin’s chest.

  It faded when his brother shook his head. “I don’t remember anyone with a scar like that. Maybe she picked it up after leaving the pride or kept it hidden.”

  Harbin exhaled hard. It was a lost cause then. He had been banking on his brother being able to tell him more about the female in the hope that he would be able to place her and remember her. His memories of his time at the pride were fragmented now, churned up so much that unless he had a specific one he wanted to recall, he couldn’t get them to fall into order. Maybe he hadn’t known the female before, but if he hadn’t, why had she felt so familiar?

  “She kept it hidden.” Those words leaving Eloise’s lips had him staring at her in stunned silence. She came out from behind Cavanaugh, moving to stand beside her mate. “I know her.”

  Gods, had his heart just done a ridiculous jump in his chest? “You do?”

  Heat flooded him, hope carried with it, and he couldn’t stop himself from inching closer to Eloise, eager to hear what she knew of the female.

  “We played together and she got that scar falling out of the rafters of the barn when we were small.” Eloise’s soft pink lips tugged into a wistful smile. “Her name was… um…”

  Harbin barely stopped himself from grabbing her shoulders and shaking the answer out of her.

  “Aya.”

  He stumbled back a step as that name hit him, dragging him back beyond twenty years, to another twenty before.

  It transported him to a small classroom and a boring lecture about snow leopards that he had been itching to escape. Cavanaugh had promised to take him into the mountains to hunt after his lessons and he had spent the day caught up in fantasising about it, eager for the day to be over.

  He had been the snow leopard equivalent of an adolescent, appearing in his late teens to mortal eyes, but sixty years of age in reality.

  He hadn’t taken in much of what the teacher had been saying, talking about the phases of a snow leopard’s life, from birth to sexual maturity and beyond. None of the class had been close to that stage in their lives, all of them at least four decades away from maturity.

  He remembered her.

  He remembered the fresh-faced and freckled daughter of their teacher and how her eyes had always sparkled like the pale sun suspended above their mountain home.

  He remembered because she had been the first girl he had kissed.

  Well, she had kissed him.

  The bell had rung to signal the end of the day and they had been walking together. He could still feel the sun on his face and smell the crisp fresh snow on the ground. It had been one of the rare times she had walked with him back towards the village square, and she had talked to him this time rather than shuffling along in awkward silence.

  She had asked whether he thought that not being sexually mature meant they couldn’t have sex or wouldn’t enjoy it.

  She had blushed, he remembered that, because it had made him blush too. She had worded it in a way that had made it sound as if she had been talking about them having sex.

  He hadn’t given any thought to that sort of thing before that moment, but fuck, had he started thinking about it then.

  They had walked a little deeper into the village, along the narrow alleyways between the older buildings at one end of it, with their pale stone ground floor and their upper floor with its crisp white panels surrounded by elegant carved dark wood. The mountain peaks that surrounded three sides of the village had shown between the low-angled wooden roofs of the buildings, reaching towards the clear blue sky and stealing the focus of his eyes, allowing his mind to wander a different path to his feet. When they had come close to the square, he hadn’t been able to hold his tongue.

  He had asked whether she thought they would enjoy anything intimate before they had matured.

  She had countered his question by asking what sort of things.

  And gods, he had said kissing, because kissing had been on his mind. There had been numerous couples in the village, and he had seen many of them kissing and his natural curiosity had always focused on it, making him wonder what it would feel like and why they did it.

  He hadn’t quite known what to do when she had looked around them at the empty alleys and then grabbed his hand, dragging him behind the stone base of the nearest building and pressing him against it. Her hands had scalded his chest through his jacket when she had leaned into him and tiptoed, and he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her lips as they had neared his.

  His heart had been racing, blood thundering, and then she had set him on fire with a clumsy kiss that still had him burning forty years later.

  It hadn’t taken him long to find his feet and have her pinned against the wall, his body caging hers as he kissed her harder, desperate for more of
her.

  That time he had kissed her, she had welcomed it, wrapping her arms around him and tugging him closer.

  He had bumped against her and snow had rained down his back, the icy chill nothing when he was burning from the fumbled kiss, losing himself in her.

  Only the crunch of boots on compacted snow had broken them apart and she had hurried ahead of him down the alleyway. He had followed her home, seeing her there safe, before returning to his own one, still lost in a daze from the feel of her kiss and the urges she had awoken in him.

  Fuck, he had dreamed of that kiss for weeks. He had wanted to do it a thousand times over again and had gone to school every morning filled with the hope he would see her again and she would let him kiss her.

  She had avoided him though, always fleeing whenever he found her alone, and in the end he had been nothing more than a typical teenage boy. She hadn’t wanted to kiss him, she had made that clear with her behaviour towards him, and so he had found a female who did.

  He had embraced the passion she had unleashed in him, working his way from kissing and fumbled touches to bedding the females who approached him, all of them eager to attempt to secure a place of power within his family by securing him as their mate. He hadn’t been interested in a mate, or anything resembling a relationship. He had been consumed by lust and a desire to learn more, to sate his needs, and he had. Being immature, he hadn’t been able to impregnate the females, so he had slept with them freely, not thinking about whether they were interested in more than sex with him because he wasn’t interested in anything beyond fucking them.

  When he had grown bored of the females in the village, he had started heading down into the town, sleeping with the mortal females there, knowing he couldn’t impregnate them either so he could do as he pleased with zero consequences.

  Or so he had thought until the fateful night the Archangel huntress had set her sights on him.

  Harbin scrubbed a hand down his face and groaned as he realised that Aya had spent twenty years seeing him chasing other females after she had been the one to give him his first kiss.

  He hadn’t really given any thought to how it might hurt her but he suspected now that it had, and that hurt had made her an easy target for Archangel’s lies.

  Gods, she had to hate him.

  Despise him.

  It was a lost cause, but he couldn’t deny his need to find her and explain, to make her see that he hadn’t sold her out. He couldn’t deny his need of her.

  It was primal and deep, the call of the wild, and it demanded things of him that he had no right to feel or desire.

  Not when there was zero hope.

  He had made sure of that by whoring himself in the village with the pride females and down in the town with the mortal ones.

  He had made his bed and now he would have to lie in it, alone, forever.

  A female like Aya would never want a male like him. She could never forgive his sins. She could never love him.

  Because he didn’t deserved to be forgiven or loved.

  Harbin watched as Cavanaugh tucked a rogue strand of hair behind Eloise’s ear and lingered with his fingers on her neck, his silver gaze soft with love and flooded with warmth. Eloise lifted her hand and placed it over his, holding it against her as she turned her head, closed her eyes and pressed a kiss to the heel of his palm.

  Harbin shut his eyes and tried to stifle the pain as the past and the present clawed at him, ripping away the softer parts and leaving his chest hollow and cold again.

  He didn’t deserve what Cavanaugh had.

  He didn’t deserve a fated female, the one female in the universe meant solely for him, and the only one he could truly bond with to forge a connection that most snow leopards could only dream of because finding your mate was more than merely rare. It was almost impossible.

  Male snow leopards searched the globe for their fated one, and most never found her.

  His had been in front of him all along and he had been too blinded by lust, too overwhelmed by desire, to see her, and now she was lost to him.

  His animal side cried out and he couldn’t contain the pained roar that left his lips, a call filled with the yearning that had been growing inside him, one he felt sure was going to consume and destroy him.

  A call for his mate.

  A call for Aya.

  CHAPTER 12

  Aya paused mid-step and looked back along the alleyway between the brick buildings, sure she had sensed someone behind her. No one was there. She waited a few seconds more, studying the shadows of the quiet London side street, and then started walking again, heading towards the main road that would take her to her small apartment. She pulled her thick grey wool jacket closed over her mulberry jumper, folding her arms across her chest, and kept her head down as she walked, her leather boots loud in the silence of the night.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d had the unsettling sensation since making her excuses and leaving the Archangel facility.

  The first time had been that same night, a few hours after Harbin, the dragon, and many other prisoners had escaped, Rocky included. She might have had a hand in helping some of them, but Archangel didn’t need to know that. They had been a little too happy for her to leave after questioning her, and she suspected they were going to be watching her for a while, so she had been keeping her distance from Switch and any of the escaped fae and immortals.

  At first, she had put the odd sensation down to them tailing her, but she had sensed no one near her. When she had studied the feeling, setting aside her fear that Archangel were coming for her and those she cared about, she had discovered something unsettling.

  It wasn’t a sense that she was in danger. It didn’t stem from the feeling that someone was stalking her.

  It tugged at her animal side, making it restless, and that was why she had automatically associated it with her being in danger.

  When it was quite the opposite.

  Her snow leopard side was drawn to the source of the sensation, so much so she had awoken last night to find herself standing at the window of her bedroom, on the verge of lifting the sash.

  She had wanted to shift and drop to the pavement below, had ached with a need to seek the origin of the call that drummed in her blood and lured her to it.

  Harbin.

  Gods damn him.

  She hadn’t anticipated this. It was a complication she didn’t need, not when her head was already tied in knots, her thoughts still tangled. It felt impossible to find the end of the right thread, the one she could pull to make the whole ball unravel so she could finally know what to believe.

  She hadn’t found the courage to question Archangel about what they had told her all those years ago or the huntress who had been the one to meet with her, but she was beginning to believe Harbin. Little by little, day by day, that belief grew and the faith she’d had in Archangel weakened.

  Little by little, the need for answers grew too, and more than once she had found herself standing outside Underworld, staring at the sign and considering going in. She hadn’t lied to Rocky when she had said she avoided the club because a snow leopard shifter worked in it and she had wanted to stay away from him, but she hadn’t exactly told him the entire story.

  Harbin’s brother was the snow leopard shifter, and until recently he had been the alpha of her pride.

  She wasn’t sure that he would recognise her, but she feared that he would or that Harbin had been in contact with him and that he would try to detain her.

  Harbin was still in London.

  She knew it because if he had left the city, she would no longer feel drawn to him. The compulsion to find him would have faded as the distance between them had grown, until it had finally died completely.

  He wasn’t staying at Underworld though, or at least he hadn’t been there the times she had ended up outside it, because she hadn’t felt him nearby. The closer she came to him, the stronger the pull towards him grew. It was part of the reason she couldn�
�t face him in order to get the answers she needed. It was too dangerous. The pull she felt towards him was already strong while the distance between them was no doubt great. If she was in his presence, it would be unbearable.

  She wasn’t sure she would be able to control her primal urges and she was damned if she was going to surrender to them and to Harbin.

  His kiss had rocked her, shaken her world all over again, but she wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice and believe it had meant anything.

  The last time she had stood outside Underworld, she had caught his scent though.

  Aya paused again, the memory of his smell flowing through her, the masculine mix of spice and snow warming her despite her best efforts to not allow it to affect her.

  Gods help her. She wished Harbin would leave the city and release her from his wicked spell, because she wasn’t sure how much more she could take. She hadn’t been prepared for how deeply seeing him again would affect her, turning her world and her feelings on their axis and leaving her thinking about him almost constantly.

  Dreaming about him.

  The nightmares of her past no longer haunted her sleep. He did. A vision of sensuality and danger, an alluring and tempting male that she never quite found the will to resist. If she couldn’t resist him in her dreams, how could she expect to do so in reality if their paths crossed?

  His kiss had shocked her, had made her realise just what he was to her, and she had wanted to flee in that moment, to run and not look back. She still wanted to run away, even as the rest of her wanted to run towards him. She wasn’t strong enough to deal with this turn of events. He had crushed her heart once and it had never completely recovered from that blow. She wouldn’t risk it again, because she feared this time the damage would be devastating and permanent.

  But she still needed answers, or she was going to go mad. She had to know whether he had been telling her the truth and Archangel had used and betrayed him.

  Maybe she could call Underworld and ask to speak with Cavanaugh. That way she would get her answers, and she would remain safe.