Hunger (6 page)

Damn, she could fool herself into thinking that when he didn’t have his eyes closed. She could make herself think it when he was dispatching vampires.

He had been incredible.

Fluid. Graceful. Powerful. A predator.

Eve shook herself when he opened his eyes and they settled on her, a small frown making his eyebrows twitch. He had felt her staring and had probably detected her feelings. She shut them down and swore she would keep better control of them in the future. It hadn’t taken her long to realise how easily vampires could sense emotions in each other, especially when the other was broadcasting them loud and clear.

She looked away and scowled as her gaze hit the mirror behind her and she saw only the room reflected in it. Her vow to keep her emotions hidden shattered instantly, the reminder of what she had become cutting her to her heart. She quickly closed her eyes and clutched the edges of the counter.

Tor’s gaze lingered on her.

He was going to ask what was wrong and she was going to look foolish and weak again.

He stared at her for what felt like eternity and then went back to showering. Eve relaxed, her grip loosening, and risked a glance at him. He had turned his back again and she leisurely perused it, taking in every scar that marked a path across his broad shoulders, a trail she happily followed.

He did have a magnificent body, like nothing she had ever seen before, and the scars didn’t detract from its masculine beauty. They only added to it and the image she had of him, that of a lethal, fearsome predator, a cold killer to his bones. He was his bloodline’s name made flesh. Violent. Yet, it was a controlled and efficient violence. Methodical and calculated, expedient.

She had never met a vampire like him. If she had, she would have died and turned a long time before Adam’s betrayal.

That name sent a hot lance through her heart and she ground her molars against the pain that welled up, spreading through her veins like acid, eating away at her.

The glass door of the shower sliding open startled her and she tensed, her gaze leaping to Tor. His blue eyes were dark, ringed with crimson, and malice emanated from him again, a wave that swept over her and made her feel she should say something, that she needed to explain things to him so he could understand the emotions running rampant through her, emotions that awakened a feral, intoxicating response in him.

Tor wouldn’t settle for the surface details she had told Oneiric though. He would want to know everything and part of her wanted to tell him. She wanted to bare herself to him and show him the ugly, terrible things that haunted her.

Her deepest, darkest secrets.

E
ve managed to keep her eyes off Tor as he slung a white towel around his waist, giving him a moment of privacy and battling her feelings. She clutched the edge of the white vanity unit beneath her, her mind swirling, her gaze locked on the bright pale tiled wall opposite her in the bathroom. She wasn’t ready to tell him everything yet. She hadn’t told her father the full extent of what had happened to her. She hadn’t told anyone.

What was it about Tor that made her want to collapse and give up, to say the things she had held close to her chest for all these years and pour out her pain?

Tor moved closer, his eyes boring into her. He said nothing and she was grateful for it. She knew he wanted answers and she needed to tell him about what had happened to her. For once, she didn’t fear putting voice to what she had gone through, at least the edited version anyway.

He scrubbed a towel over his blond hair, tousling the pale lengths, his ice-blue eyes locked on her face and his air that of a man willing to wait however long it took for her to speak. She supposed patience was a virtue when you were an assassin. She had always been patient. She had never rushed into anything. It had probably saved her life countless times.

It was blind faith that had killed her.

Tor walked into the cream-coloured bedroom of their hotel room and she studied him, using her perusal to quieten her turbulent thoughts. Did he take everything in his stride, always calm and unflinching?

He had dealt with the vampires with ease, as if he had calculated all the moves he had to make ahead of time and had simply allowed them to play out exactly as planned. When the jet had exploded, he had calmly swept her into the shelter of his arms and carried her to safety. She had stood there like a fool, unable to react to the deadly wave of fire and debris surging towards her.

Tor moved around the room, gathering his wet clothes and hers, dumping them on a wooden chair in the corner off to her left, near the window there. He drew the pale curtains, shutting out the night, and smoothed them to ensure no crack remained where light could enter, a compulsive action that drew a small smile from her. His body shifted enticingly with each move he made, threatening to wreck her concentration. He was a wall of strength, but not just in a physical way. Not to her. It went deeper than that. He was solid and steady, always calm and quiet.

It was a strange comfort to her. Her life had been a whirlwind before she had met him, everything bombarding her, threatening to pull her under even when she fought for calm and struggled for control. She hadn’t realised it until this moment, when she sat watching him in silence, studying the way he moved and behaved, and his constant feelings.

They never shifted. Not up nor down. No spikes like she felt. No uncontrollable moments when her emotions raged and she couldn’t shut them down.

Tor was unwavering, constant, dependable.

She had been like that once, before waking as a vampire. She had been calm and in control, strong and clear-headed, able to take a moment to study her surroundings or her foes, to calculate every outcome of every possible move.

Memories surged, breaking to the surface of her mind, dark and twisted things she had fought to confine to her nightmares. She wasn’t a hunter anymore. She was a vampire now, and as a vampire she had witnessed the true depth of their evil, the most terrible extent of their darkness. They were vile, despicable, far worse than she had ever thought them as a hunter.

But not Tor.

He was nothing like the vampires who had tortured and tormented her, who wanted to kill her before she could satisfy her dark craving for vengeance and kill Adam, the hunter who had become one of them.

Tor’s solidity and steadiness brought her the calm she had been seeking without ever knowing it. Around him, she felt different, in control of her destiny again and able to see that not all vampires were like those who killed her, who had made her suffer when she had been lost and confused, thrown into a devastating tailspin by waking from death as a vampire.

“Eve?” Tor’s deep voice splintered her thoughts and she found him standing before her, his blue gaze steady on hers. “Did you hear me?”

Eve shook her head.

The corners of his firm lips twitched. What would he look like if he smiled? The lack of lines beside his mouth said it didn’t happen often and she found herself trying to picture it, to imagine how this dangerous, dark angel would look.

He frowned, shattering the picture before she had completed it. “Are you feeling ill again?”

“No.” She wasn’t even sure why he would think that. Because she had been lost to her memories or because she had been staring hard at him? Maybe he wasn’t used to women staring at him.

Eve almost laughed at that. With his face and his sensuality, deadliness and grace of a great jungle cat, he was anything but a monk. She didn’t doubt that he partnered a passion for hunting and killing with a passion for pleasure. Every hunter like him at Section Seven had been like that. Fresh from a kill, high on the adrenaline, they had hit the late nightclubs and slaked themselves on women, usually more than one.

She had even known a few female hunters who had acted the same way.

Not her though. She had used that high, that burst of adrenaline, to fuel her next hunt and kill.

“I asked what happened to you,” he stated, his tone flat and devoid of emotion. If he was annoyed with her because she hadn’t heard him the first time, she would never know it.

Suddenly, she didn’t feel ready to speak to him about everything after all. She drew her knees up, arranging her white towel robe so it covered her, and leaned her back against the mirror, wrapping her arms around her legs at the same time.

His expression softened, losing the hard edge for a moment, a brief span of time that could have fooled her into thinking he cared about her if she hadn’t already convinced herself that she was nothing but a mission.

A package.

She still wasn’t completely certain that he intended to help her track down Adam and kill him. He had said she would have her revenge, and she had believed him at the time, but looking back, she couldn’t help wondering whether he had just said whatever it had taken to get her out of her catatonic state and on the move with him. Or worse, he had used it as a chance to pry into her heart and her head, to uncover things about her that he could pass on to Lilith and Lincoln, and others in her family, and they could use against her.

That felt almost like a betrayal, coming too close to what another man had done to her, turning her life into a nightmare.

Eve reminded herself that Oneiric had probably already passed on the details she had given him to her sister and Lincoln, and possibly even Tor knew some of them.

Maybe they were all out to betray her.

She shut out that dark voice and the insidious things it whispered to her, refusing to believe it. Lilith would never betray her, and neither would Oneiric. She hadn’t known him long, but she knew he had her best interests at heart, even if that went against what she wanted for herself.

“I told you. Someone betrayed me. The jet was his work.”

Tor’s pale eyebrows met above his steely gaze. “Earlier you said you thought it might be this man who betrayed you. Now you seem sure it was.”

She nodded and brushed her tangled brown hair behind her ears. “Let’s just say I’m thinking more clearly now. It was him. He did have a fondness for blowing things up.”

The thought that he had wanted to blow her up sent a pang through her heart though. He didn’t even have the decency to do this thing face to face, looking her in the eye while he killed her, and giving her a chance to be the one to kill him. Bastard.

“I need more details than that if you want my help, Eve.” There was a note of warning in her name, a harshness that she didn’t like.

He was ordering her compliance.

Strange considering he had responded to her order earlier, and seemed reluctant to pull rank on her. Because she was going to be his family’s Chosen Daughter? He could force himself to show her respect and not succumb to that desire to set her straight and demand things of her that she could see in his eyes whenever she was irritating him, but that didn’t mean she was going to go along with it. She wanted nothing to do with her family, and she wasn’t going to do anything under orders.

“I’m sure Oneiric already told you what happened to me. Or Lincoln. So why bug me about it?” She pushed off the vanity and shoved past him, heading into the bedroom. She went to the window and peeked through the curtains, her focus on Tor the whole time. He followed her and the moment he reached her, she moved away, leaving the material open a crack.

He methodically smoothed it down again, sealing the opening.

Eve held her smile inside and fought the temptation to go back to the curtain and do it all over again.

“Oneiric told me nothing. Lincoln even less. I was given what I needed in order to complete my mission.” Tor pressed his hands against his hips, distracting her. She should have commanded him to put some clothes on. She wasn’t going to last five seconds against him when he was wearing only the world’s smallest and most revealing white towel around his hips. “So… with respect… I need you to tell me what happened to you.”

She couldn’t believe they had kept him in the dark about the things that had happened to her. She went back over the whole time they had been together. He had seemed genuinely shocked when she had talked about being betrayed and wanting revenge. His whole demeanour had changed.

Eve walked back into the bathroom and washed her face, rubbing the grit from the explosion from her eyes, and dried it, leaving black marks on the towel. She stared at the sooty streaks, part of her glad that she couldn’t see her reflection so she couldn’t see what an unholy mess she was right now. She touched the dark tangled threads of her hair and sighed.

“Eve,” Tor said, a demand again, a warning that he was haemorrhaging patience fast.

“Fine.” She turned and tensed when she found him close behind her, barely a few inches away. Even with her heightened hearing, she hadn’t heard him move. “You want my story?”

He nodded.

Eve brushed past him and settled on the end of the bed. Tor leaned against the bathroom doorframe and folded his arms across his bare chest. She did her best to keep her eyes off him, shifting her gaze to her knees and locking it there. She could still feel him staring at her though, stirring that intense heat that flowed through her, burning up her blood.

She knew how to douse that.

“My partner at Section Seven was a man named Adam. We worked together for years. One day, we were sent to Paris on a mission. Adam told me it was top secret. I had no reason not to trust him. We had completed upwards of one hundred missions together and around twenty percent of those had been top secret.” She clutched the edges of the mattress through the white bedclothes and frowned at her bare feet. They swam out of focus as her emotions collided, merging and becoming a storm within her that battered her heart. “I went to Paris with him and carried out the orders in our brief. I was to enter an old abandoned building through the rear and he was to come in the front. Inside, there was supposed to be a nest of vampires.”

Her voice squeaked, her throat tight as she struggled against the memories of that night. It had been chilly and she had been thinking she should have brought a jacket. It still irked her that one of her final thoughts as a human had been worrying about the cold and catching a chill. It had felt like such a normal thought to have. It had been life as usual for her. She felt sure she had even considered what she would have for dinner when the mission was done. Adam had promised to take her out to somewhere nice with a view.