Marked by an Assassin (25 page)

His past.

But gods, she had felt good in his arms, amazing wrapped around him and moaning hotly in his ear, uttering his name in a passion-drenched voice that was his new addiction. Forget the hunger to spill blood and the craving for the quiet calm that came before the kill.

Aya was more potent than that, more addictive, and he wasn’t sure he could ever get enough of her.

Harbin shoved his hand through his damp hair, preening it back from his face, and looked up at himself in the mirror. His eyes caught on the red streaks on his bare torso, wrapping around from his back to his stomach just above his hips. He stroked the ones on his right with his fingers, his heart beating harder as he recalled how she had scored him with her nails at the height of passion, a lost and wild thing that had driven him into the same dangerous state, making him let go of the fragile tethers of his control and unleashing his more animalistic side.

A growl rumbled through him.

She had marked him with her claws, and fuck, did he love it.

He loved that she had sought to place a claim on him, marking him as hers.

Too dangerous.

He should have stopped her. He should have been stronger.

He pinned his eyes back on his face in the mirror and then slid them towards the door behind him, feeling the full weight of his situation bearing down on him as he stared at it.

Now she was waiting in the other room, and he was locked in a cramped bathroom, and he would bet his left nut that she was just as confused as he was, searching for answers and not finding any.

The door grew hazy, his focus failing as the buzzing in his veins grew louder, rolling into a deafening roar that had him on the verge of turning around, opening the barrier between them and sweeping her up into his arms for round two.

He clamped his hands over the edges of the counter to anchor himself in place and breathed through it, using every technique he had learned over the past twenty years to master his emotions when they slipped the leash and maintain control.

Calm battled against craving, a fight so fierce he wasn’t sure he would win and be able to subdue the urges running rampant through his blood.

Through his soul.

Fuck, he could still sense her, could still feel the need in her. It was there beneath the surface when he went looking for it, easy to detect in her together with confusion, fear and anger. It lingered, as if she couldn’t quite dispel it. Need. Hunger. A craving that had his hands shaking against the marble, his fingers gripping it so tightly that his knuckles burned white.

His primal instincts pushed him to return to her, the powerful urge born of the need he felt burning through her and the one it had triggered in him—a need to satisfy his female.

He tensed when he sensed her move, his head twitching to his left, towards the door. It didn’t have a lock. He wasn’t sure what he would do if she walked in, wasn’t sure he would be able to control himself. He needed more time to rein in his desires and master them again, composing himself so he could face her.

Fuck, there wasn’t much in this world that scared him, but the beautiful female in the next room was doing a damned good job of rattling him.

A knock sounded.

Not on the bathroom door.

Someone was at the main door of his small apartment. Someone powerful. He whipped around to face the bathroom door and his eyes widened as he heard the quiet creak of the knob on the main door turning.

Aya.

He couldn’t hold back the snarl as he yanked the bathroom door open and stormed into the bedroom, driven to place himself between her and the intruder. She stood in the narrow corridor between the bathroom and the bed, barely a metre from the opening door, hastily tying the belt of the blue robe around her waist. He grabbed her arm and shoved her behind him, shielding her with his body just as the door opened.

Fuery pinned cold black eyes on him and then lowered them to his hand where it still gripped Aya’s arm, holding her behind him. The elf’s eyes narrowed, his nostrils flared, and his ears grew pointier. Aggression. Harbin knew the tells. He had been around elves long enough to have figured out the warning signs he needed to heed in order to keep his head on his shoulders.

He had also been around the mad bastard in front of him long enough to know how to defuse that aggression in most situations.

“What do you want, Fuery?” he said, pulling the elf’s attention away from the female behind him and narrowing it down to him.

Fuery raised his gaze back to Harbin and relaxed a notch, but not as much as Harbin had expected. Something about Aya had rattled the elf too. Because she was female? They didn’t have a female in the guild, and the times he had asked Hartt why, the elf had always glossed over it, mixing up his reasons between the female body’s lack of natural strength compared with a male’s, safety reasons, and keeping his male assassins on track at all times.

Harbin was beginning to think it actually had something to do with Fuery.

The dark elf drew in a slow, deep breath, and exhaled. “Hartt.”

Fuery never had been a man of many words. In all the years that Harbin had worked for Hartt, he had probably heard Fuery speak around one hundred words in English.

He had heard the elf rant like a crazed son of a bitch in his own language though.

“I’ll go to see him.” Harbin tugged Aya closer to his back when Fuery glanced down at her hand and she bumped into him, her other hand coming up to rest on his bare skin and sending a thousand volts through him. Heat curled outwards from the place where she touched, slowly sweeping through him and reigniting his desire.

Fuery’s black eyes narrowed.

Dark lines traced over him, flickering and broken, and he cast a pained look at Harbin before storming away.

Hartt had also never mentioned why Fuery couldn’t teleport.

Harbin had never seen him attempt it before, and he felt sorry for the guy now that he had witnessed how much losing that ability had clearly hurt him. If he had to hazard a guess, he would say it was the price he paid for the hold the darkness had on him. What other abilities would Fuery lose as he sank into the black abyss?

He had the impression that Hartt meant the world to Fuery, and so did this job, just as it meant a lot to him. The thought that he might not be able to fulfil his duties as an assassin didn’t sit well with Harbin and he had only been working with Hartt for a couple of decades. Fuery had been with Hartt for centuries.

He couldn’t imagine how Fuery felt as he stood on the precipice, in danger of losing the abilities that were vital to his work as an assassin and that were a deeply rooted part of who he was.

Did he feel he was losing himself?

Did he feel he would lose Hartt too?

Aya shifted position, pulling Harbin’s focus away from the empty doorway to her where she moved out to stand beside him.

He looked down at her, meeting her steady gold-silver gaze, feeling cold and hollow inside as he considered that he did know how Fuery felt after all.

He knew how afraid the elf was as he stood on the brink of losing everything that was dear to him.

Only Harbin wasn’t sure whether he was thinking about losing the guild, his work and Hartt, or whether he was thinking about losing Aya.

Harbin turned away from her and walked to the black chest of drawers against the same wall as the door at the foot of the bed. He pulled the middle drawer open, grabbed one of his clean black t-shirts and tossed it at Aya. She squeaked as she quickly caught it, stopping it from hitting her in the face.

“Put that on,” he grumbled and shoved the drawer closed, and opened the one below it. All of his jeans would be too large for her, but there was no damned way he was going to let her wander the corridors of the guild hall in his robe or that godsforsaken little slip of hers.

He groaned. A slip that he had left in the main reception room.

He viciously yanked a pair of dark grey sweats from the drawer and slammed it shut. He would pick up the infernal slip on his way through to Hartt’s office. It had better still be there or he would be tracking down whoever had stolen it and teaching them a lesson they would never forget.

When he turned to face Aya with the sweatpants, his breath left him in a rush and his chest suddenly felt too tight.

She stood before him in just his t-shirt, the robe discarded in a pool around her bare feet. Her hands shook as she tugged at the hem of the t-shirt, trying to get it to cover more of her shapely thighs. His mouth dried out. Her eyes darted up to him, a pretty blush staining her cheeks, and he averted his gaze, turning his face away from her, and held the pants out to her.

Heat bloomed on his cheeks as she took them from him, tugging them free of his grip. Fuck, she wasn’t the only one with shaking hands now. He kept his eyes pinned on the black stone floor, giving her time to cover herself, and hoped to the gods that she didn’t notice that he was blushing like an idiot.

He had been inside her just minutes ago, pinning her to the wall and taking her hard, and now he was blushing because he had seen her bare legs? What the hell was wrong with him?

He blamed his hormones. They were playing with him, messing him up worse than ever now that being on the cusp of maturity had clashed with finding his female in Aya.

She shuffled away from him and he breathed a sigh of relief as the soft click of the bathroom door closing reached his ears.

Harbin twisted and flopped onto his back on the bed, his arms splayed out at his sides. He needed to get his head on straight and kick his heart back into line, but it seemed impossible when she was near him. He couldn’t focus on his mission or what he was going to say to Hartt. He could only focus on her where she moved around in his bathroom, making herself at home in his tiny quarters.

He blew out his breath and then chuckled.

He had never brought a woman home. He had never let them get close to him. He was breaking all his rules with Aya and he had a terrible feeling he was going to pay dearly for it. She had torn down his defences and shaken his world all over again, rocking it and leaving him reeling.

His heart was on the line again and this time he felt certain he was going to lose it.

Gods, if he was honest with himself, he had wanted to lose it to her forty years ago, and it had hurt him when he had thought she didn’t want it.

Now part of him suspected that she had desired to steal it from him.

She still desired it.

Only now things were different. He wasn’t the innocent boy he had been then, wide-eyed and awed by the world. He had seen too much darkness and blood, had spilled too much of it to be a good man. He had no status, no standing, no pride. He had gone against everything he had been taught and in doing so he had destroyed the boy he had once been and built a dangerous man in his place.

One too dark and twisted to be worthy of a female like Aya.

The bathroom door opened and he looked across at her as she stepped out, rolling the waist of his sweatpants over so they fitted snug against her rounded hips.

Gods, she was beautiful.

Damp strands of her black hair hung forwards, her gold-silver eyes intent on her work, making her oblivious to him. Rose still coloured her cheeks and her lips were still swollen and dark from the ferocity of his kiss. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

Not even when she stilled and slowly lifted hers to meet his.

Her blush deepened and he wanted to stand, cross the room to her and gather her into his arms and kiss her again.

He wanted to hold her close and never let her go.

He closed his eyes instead and inhaled deeply, pushing away the tempting thoughts because they were nothing more than torture to him. He wanted what he couldn’t have, and no good could come of that.

“Ready,” she whispered, her soft voice trembling.

He lifted his feet up and flipped onto them, grabbed his t-shirt from the bed, and pulled it on as he headed for the main door. “Just stay close.”

He pulled the black door open and stepped out into the corridor, and was a few strides down it before he realised that Aya hadn’t moved. He backtracked and peered into his room at her where she still stood between his bed and the bathroom. Her wide eyes shifted from the corridor to him, her fear hitting him in powerful waves that had him crossing the short strip of floor between them and taking hold of her hand. It shook in his and he sighed.

“You have nothing to fear, Aya,” he husked and resisted the temptation to brush his fingers across her cheek when she lifted her chin and looked up at him, her silvery eyebrows furrowing and the fear he spoke of growing stronger in her rather than abating. “I would never let anything happen to you. You know that, don’t you?”

She hesitated, her gaze flicking to the hall before returning to him, and then nodded. “I know. It’s just…”

“I know. You don’t have to say it. I didn’t feel comfortable here when I first arrived either.” He looked away from her when her eyes widened and wished he hadn’t confessed that to her. She did a good enough job of tearing down the barriers around his softer feelings without him helping by opening them up to her. He tugged her towards the door, a little harder than he should have, and she stumbled into him. “Hartt is waiting and he gets pissy if you make him wait.”

She nodded and closed the door behind them, and then did something that threatened to completely blast his barriers into smithereens.

She looped her free hand around his arm and huddled close to him, her breasts pressing against his bare skin, jiggling beneath her t-shirt with each step she took.

He gritted his teeth and forced himself to focus on the corridor and his surroundings as he led her through the guild building. It was a struggle until someone came into view, a young new recruit. His senses immediately sharpened, his instinct to protect Aya driving him to go on the defensive. He tightened his grip on her hand and stared the assassin in the eye, locking gazes with him and holding it until the male had passed. He tracked him with his senses then, monitoring him until he was far away enough that he no longer posed an immediate threat to Aya.