The Killing Season (7 page)

No one else spoke as we rushed through the rest of the meal, skipping dessert in favor of our rooms, which would likely be warmer than the dining room, where it seemed all the warm air and smiles had been chased away by the hunters’ arrival.

Later that night, alone in my room, I listened to my music and considered how much lighter I felt now that I’d told Sunny the truth—the full, real truth—when a key twisted in the knob of my door.

By the time I’d shoved myself up in bed and nearly tumbled to the floor in an effort to untangle my legs, Luke had slipped into my room and quietly closed the door behind him. He took in my disheveled state with a cocked brow. I huffed out a breath and sat back on the bed. “Better watch out,” I said dryly. “I’m so screwed up I might rub off on you.”

Even in the dim lamplight, I saw Luke rub his hand across the stubble along his jaw as he sighed. The initial sting of the argument we’d had after our first time together had worn off slightly, but we’d never talked about it, much less worked it out. Luke and I weren’t really the type to share our feelings much. “If you recall, I said we were
both
too screwed up to be together.”

“Oh, right. That makes it better. How did you get a key to my room?”

“I have a key to everyone’s room.”

My interest spiked, which was hard to do given the fact that Luke was in my room, at night, for the first time since our fight at the university. “Like to your father’s office?” I asked as casually as I could.

He frowned. Apparently, I hadn’t been as casual as I thought. “Why do you need a key there, Ollie?”

The question was sharp and pointed, like he knew exactly why. “Just idle curiosity.”

“I doubt that, but no, I don’t. He’s the only one with that key.”
He leaned back against my door and crossed his arms, settling in. I narrowed my eyes and noted how he moved stiffly, as if he were really sore. Slowly, I registered the numerous gashes across the tops of his hands, the nasty cut snaking up from the collar of his thermal, and the bruises on his face. He looked like he’d been shoved down a garbage disposal. He tried to hide it, but I saw the weariness in the red rimming his eyes, the way his freshly washed hair deposited huge drops of water onto his shirt as if he hadn’t even had the strength to run a towel over his hair to dry it.

For some reason, that really bothered me. In my bones, I wished I’d been there, in his room, on his bed, waiting to help him when he’d returned, bruised and wasted, from a day-long hunt. “Christ, Luke. What happened to you?”

“Hunting happened.” Luke stretched out his shoulder, groaning. “Takes a while to get back into the swing of it.”

“Is it always this bad?”

I didn’t wait for his answer or his permission. I crossed the room and began inspecting his injuries, starting with his hands. I ran my fingers over the claw marks, making certain they were slathered with enough ointment. His fingers clung to mine for a moment before I released his hands and reached up for the collar of his shirt. As I pulled the material down to inspect the rest of his cuts, his breathing turning slow and careful, his chest evenly expanding beneath my palm. He watched me carefully, closely tracking my every move. His jaw clenched and nostrils flared around my scent.

When I’d seen for myself that he was whole, I said, “Answer me. Is it always this bad?”

Luke carefully pushed me back a few feet before raking a hand along his jaw, grimacing at the bruises he found there. “Not always. Killian is testing me, sending me out to the tougher, more infested parts to remind me who’s boss. To see if I’ve still got it.”

I gritted my teeth. Killian never ceased to surprise me. “Why would he do that?”

“You,” he said quietly, his eyes slipping away from mine. “He thinks I’ve gone soft.”

His ever-present anger simmered just beneath the surface of his dark expression, but I sensed something more. Something like guilt. And quite possibly fear. “What’s in those woods, Luke?” I asked, my quiet question hanging in the slight space between us.

His eyes tightened, deepening the fine lines there, and I knew he was about to lie. “Nothing. Just a lot of ’swangs.”

I blew out a deep breath. It was impossible for me to be angry with him for keeping so many secrets when I kept just as many, but, damn, if it didn’t hurt my heart. Like so many things between us, I let his lie slide. “Is God’s Forgotten really that bad?”

“The Brooks Range is an entry point for ’swangs coming north, so they tend to pile up there. Every year we have to fly down there more and more to clear it. But . . .” He turned away and paced around my room with a slight limp to his step, but I didn’t miss the shudder that crept down his back. He kept his voice low enough that we wouldn’t be heard in the hall, and his feet moved around the room silently. “It seems worse this year. Like it’s not just the aswangs that hate us, but the woods too.” He let out a shaky laugh. “But I could just be paranoid. I told you this place will make you go mad.”

“You’re not crazy.”

Luke sighed and turned back to face me, the bed between us. My stomach dipped at the thought. “That’s why I came here tonight. You need to get a leash on your temper before my father figures out something went on between us.”

“A leash—” For a second there, I nearly lost it. A leash on my temper? I focused on breathing through my nose until the urge to throttle him lessened. He’d had a rough day, I reminded myself. The asshole. “I don’t care what your father thinks.”

“You should. We have to be careful here, Ollie. For your safety, he can’t know anything. That’s why I need to keep my distance from you. Why we need to act indifferent with each other. So you can’t go around kissing Thad.”

I held up a finger. “First off, you’ve made it perfectly clear that you want nothing to do with me. Secondly, if you don’t want your
daddy
knowing what happened, then maybe kissing Thad is exactly what I should be doing.”

A choking sound tore from his throat. “No kissing anyone, Ollie. I mean it.”

“Go fu—”

“Please,” he said, eyes pleading with me. My words fumbled to a stop. Hell,
I
fumbled to a stop. I didn’t know Luke even knew what “please” meant. He took advantage of my shocked silence. “I’m exhausted and banged up; I can’t do this right now with you. Fighting all day is going to wear thin and fast. I’m going to be clawed up and bitten for the next sixty days. And if we are going to coexist under the same roof, then you have to keep your distance and
not
touch anyone else.”

“Why does it have to be like this?” I asked, my voice quiet from the pain—not the physical kind but the kind that originated in your heart and flared with each beat.

“Because my father will
kill
you, Ollie. If he knows we’ve been together, he will stop at nothing to stomp out your existence in this world. This family, our lineage, is all that he cares about. He would never allow a civilian to be with me. While I give zero fucks about his opinions, he is very dangerous, and he does
not
play by Dean’s rules, do you hear me?” He expected me to nod, so I did. But I knew the rules Dean had given Killian already, and my only hope of surviving up here depended on Killian following them. For once, Dean was actually keeping me alive. “I can’t keep you safe when I’m gone hunting all day. So you have to look out for yourself when I can’t. When you kiss Thad and force me to react, he sees all of it. We’re vulnerable up here with him.”

I let out a long breath. “I didn’t ask to come here.”

“I know,” Luke said, his face softening. “But we have to deal with it, and us staying apart is the best way.”

“Is that what you want?”

“Ollie . . .”

“Just answer me, Luke. I know after we were together that things got a little messy—”

Luke sat down on the edge of the bed, but I was too anxious to sit. This was the first time we’d come close to discussing us. “That wasn’t you. You were . . .” He raked a cut hand over his face and through his hair, letting out a long breath. “Christ, Ollie, you were amazing. But sometimes I scare myself. The things I want with you . . . With your condition, though, it just isn’t right. It can’t work. I’ll only hurt you.”

I crossed my arms. “I guess it doesn’t matter how I feel about it. You’ve already made the decision for both of us.”

“Look at us,” he said, motioning to the distance between us. “Aside from the sex, we argue all the time. I mean, come on. When have you
not
lied to me?”

“You lied to me too,” I said, my voice barely a whisper.

Luke frowned. “When?”

“Olesya Volkova.”

He went still, and his eyes fell away from mine. “Oh. You found the note then.”

“After Fields.”

He sighed. “I should have known that was why you pulled away before we came here, but I had to let it happen, Ollie. You have to understand that we need that distance up here. For so many reasons. But that name wasn’t a lie. It was just a lead. I saw it in your file in Dean’s office after I took you hunting with Hatter and me. I started looking into it, but it’s a dead end.” He finally looked at me, his eyes pleading again. “Irena Volkova was the last female hunter of her line, and she disappeared in 1985. No one ever saw her again. She never had any kids. I don’t know why that name was in your file, but it has nothing to do with you, okay?”

I let out a long breath and sank onto the bed across from Luke. The tension in his shoulders eased. “Okay.”

He reached across the bed between us and ran his fingers over the top of my hand. The simple touch nearly made me tremble. I’d missed him more than I’d ever missed anything in all my life. My chest ached for him. “I know you haven’t told me everything—”

“I can’t, Luke,” I said, feeling desperate. “I just can’t. One wrong step could get me killed.”

“I won’t let that happen.” His fingers tightened over mine.

He didn’t know what he was saying. If he did, he might be the first in line to put a bullet through my head. He was right. There was so much between us. So many lies and secrets. I considered telling him about his father assigning me to hunt down the university’s leak, but there was no point. When he was out hunting, I didn’t want him distracted by the fact that I was snooping around. “Okay,” I said instead.

“No more kissing Thaddeus.”

“Fine.”

“No touching.”

“Whatever.”

“Don’t even look at him.”

“What the hell, Luke?” I was ready to rip him a new one when I saw he was grinning faintly, his green eyes warm. For a second, it was like it used to be, back at the university when we were training before everything went to shit. He knew his effect on me, and I couldn’t help but smile back. Just like that, the tension between us crackled and disappeared. Luke stood up from the bed and headed toward my door.

“Besides, he’s not even nice to look at with that bandage and everything. You need a man who is proud of his scars.”

I let out an exasperated huff, though I did wonder why the hell Thad still wore that thick bandage around his throat. Maybe he really was just self-conscious about the hunks of his neck missing. “I need a man who isn’t—”

“Careful, Ollie,” Luke warned, like he knew exactly what I was going to say. “I’m going to leave before we start fighting again.”

When he was back at my door, turning the knob in his hand, I said, “You can’t touch Eve, either.”

“What?” Luke glanced back at me, surprised.

“I see the way she looks at you. You can’t touch her, kiss her, screw her. Nothing. Not even if you’re bitten. Got it?” I crossed my arms over my chest.

“She’s with Sin.”

I almost cringed, but I stuffed my reaction back down inside me. Luke really, really didn’t want to know who Sin was actually with, and it sure as hell wasn’t Eve. To hide my blunder, I hurried on. “She eye-fucks you every time you walk in the room.”

He chuckled softly. “Fine. No Eve.”

“Or I swear,” I said with relish, “I will rip your balls off if you do.”

Luke’s expression turned serious, his hand tightening around the doorknob. “Ollie, if I get bit, you can’t come anywhere near me, okay? Not in the same room. Not in the hall. I don’t even want you on the same level of the house.”

I didn’t back down from his intense stare. “I want to be around you when you’re bitten, Luke. I want to take care of you and help you through it.” I met his eyes and held them, daring him to say we weren’t good together again.

He stayed silent for a long time with our eyes locked. Finally he asked, in a voice that almost cracked with desperation, “Why? Why do you want that? Want
me
?”

There was that wrenching heart pain again. Unconsciously, I ran my fingers along the new scars adorning my cheek and jaw. Eve didn’t have scars on her face. “You’re,” I nearly choked on the word but I kept going, “you’re like my family, Luke. You and Sunny and Hatter. Peg.” My voice broke on her name.

Luke’s eyes deepened with sadness; he knew then, too, which was a relief, because I didn’t know if I could bring myself to explain what had happened to her family. “But you were ready to leave us two weeks ago.”