Marked by an Assassin (16 page)

Eloise rubbed her mussed chestnut hair, her golden-brown eyes hazy with sleep as she carefully took each step. “What was all the noise about?”

She reached the bottom step, yawned and tripped, her bare toes snagging in her loose baby blue pyjama bottoms and sending her tumbling forwards.

Cavanaugh was across the room in a heartbeat, catching her in his arms and drawing her close to his bare chest. She curled into him for a second before lifting her head and welcoming the soft press of Cavanaugh’s lips against hers.

Harbin looked down at his bare feet and turned his cheek to them, trying to shut them out as the war he had feared erupted inside of him, flooding his mind with images of the female snow leopard who had betrayed him. The torrent swept him along, one moment flashing a replay of her as she spoke the words that had cut him to his soul, telling him that she had betrayed him, and the next making him relive the moment when he had kissed her.

She had tasted so sweet.

Had felt so fucking good in his arms.

He needed to know about her, and that was the real reason he had come to see Cavanaugh. He had wrapped it up in another cause in order to make it easier on himself, pretending he had come to Underworld purely to give his friends a safe place to rest and recuperate, because the darker part of himself still wanted to lash out whenever he thought about the female in any way other than as a mark.

A mission.

She had him twisted in knots, and he hated it. He had become accustomed to the darkness inside him, the emotionless state he had embraced in order to survive, in order to keep his past locked away and stop it from destroying him. Now she had awakened the light, had unleashed his emotions from their cage, and he was no longer sure how to proceed. That darker side wanted to destroy her instead now, hungered to take her and the Archangel huntress down.

He wanted to protect himself.

He couldn’t handle what she had done to him. Luring him. Trapping him. Betraying him. He tunnelled his fingers through his silver hair and pulled it back, tugging so hard that it hurt. Gods, why couldn’t he hate her as he hated the Archangel huntress?

Why did he feel as if he was walking towards his doom and he couldn’t change his course, couldn’t avert the disaster looming ahead of him, one that would annihilate him?

If he let her sneak into the heart he defended so vigilantly, she would have the power to destroy him.

Fuck, the part of him that wouldn’t shut the hell up said that she had already done it. She had broken through that barrier. He couldn’t stop thinking about her, couldn’t control the craving he had for her or his need of her. Not even the terrible thing she had done was enough to make him hate her.

He wanted to hate her.

He wanted to shield himself from the pain he could feel coming and it was safer to hate her than to love her and have her take that and break him with it by throwing it back in his face.

Cavanaugh’s steady gaze on him was joined by Eloise’s, and he fought to pull himself out of the mire of his thoughts and regain his focus.

He needed to know about the female he had encountered, but that didn’t mean he was going to let his guard down around her. He couldn’t deny his need to know who she was, or the one that drove him to find her and set things straight with her so she would know the truth about Archangel and would be safe, but he could deny the urges running rampant through him and protect his heart.

Harbin lifted his head and looked at his brother, grimacing as he caught Cavanaugh petting Eloise again with a stupid sappy look on his face.

If anyone would know the members of their pride, Cavanaugh was that male. He had cared enough about his kin to take the time to know everyone, to understand the smallest things about them, all so he could converse with them on a daily basis. Cavanaugh had been born to be a leader of their pride, a male worthy of the role of alpha.

A male worthy of the mate he now held gently in his arms, whispering tender things to her that Harbin wished he couldn’t hear, because they only stirred the primal need that had taken root within him, making him want to hunt the female he had left behind at Archangel.

He needed to find her, but first he had to understand more about her.

He needed to know who she was.

“Cavanaugh…” He waited for his brother to finally release his mate before sucking down a deep breath and pushing the words out. “I have to talk to you about someone.”

“Someone?” Cavanaugh frowned and shifted to face him, and Eloise remained on the step beside him. Her hand slipped into his and Harbin glanced at them, feeling a sharp pang in his chest as he watched his brother’s larger hand curling around hers, holding it tightly.

Gods.

Even something as stupid as that made him ache to see the female again. What the hell was wrong with him?

The voice that had been constantly whispering in his mind since first setting eyes on her murmured that he knew what was wrong with him, he was just afraid to acknowledge it.

He shut it out. The female was a mark, by her own choice, and had orchestrated a plan to capture him and put him into Archangel’s hands. She wanted revenge and that made her dangerous. He had escaped, thwarting whatever plan she’d had for him, but he doubted he had seen the last of her. He needed to know more about her if he was going to convince her that she didn’t want his head on the chopping block. She wanted Archangel’s.

“A mark,” he started.

Apparently that word didn’t sit well with his brother because Cavanaugh’s eyes darkened rapidly.

Maybe his brother hadn’t believed the elves when they had called him and his friends assassins, or maybe he had thought only Hartt and Fuery operated in that line of business. It would be just like his brother to try to see some good in him and refuse to believe he was capable of spending his days killing others for profit.

“She’s a mark… but she placed the contract on herself. Archangel captured her twenty years ago,” he stumbled when Cavanaugh’s expression shifted, pain flooding his handsome face as his silver eyes brightened, and shook off his own hurt in order to continue. “They harmed her and others, and then they fed her lies and she believes them. She thinks I sold her out.”

He waited for either Cavanaugh or Eloise to say that he had in a way, but both of them remained silent as they looked at each other and then back at him.

“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.