Page 44 of Hunted

This is it. This is how it ends.

My fingers claw into his shoulders, instinct stripping pride from my bones as the ground surges upward and windows streak past in flashes of reflected light.

Five floors. Three. Two.

He stops.

Midair.

The halt is so abrupt my body keeps falling in memory even as his arm tightens around my waist and he swings us towards a rusted fire escape, gravity apparently a suggestion he rejects on principle.

My legs buckle but he keeps me upright effortlessly.

For one suspended heartbeat, I’m certain he’s going to let go just to watch what happens.

Instead, he studies me.

For the first time since this unholy escapade started, he looks unsettled.

Subtly. A tightening around the eyes. A shift in focus, something closer to distraction.

His gaze drifts to my mouth. My throat. The collar at my neck and something sharp flickers behind his eyes.

Irritation. At himself?

His jaw hardens, and he releases me completely, stepping back with a suddenness colder than the wind.

‘That was unnecessary,’ I manage, steadier than I feel.

‘Yes,’ he rasps with zero amusement. ‘But somewhat fruitful.’

I can’t stop the shudders still wracking my frame. I want to run, fast and now, but I lock my knees and keep my feet planted. ‘How so?’

He studies my face like a cartographer scouring a map.

Selphine’s screeching somewhere in the back of my skull about every idiotic thing I’ve done tonight.

‘Now I know the true scent of your fear,’ he says eventually.

He turns away, shoulders rigid beneath his jacket as if physically locking something back into place.

Not something.

Dark impulse.

I provoked him into a momentary lapse. My refusal to bow and scrape hit the wrong nerve so hard he forgot himself.

For several long, dangerous minutes, Valentin Moretti forgot why he summoned me. Forgot Lyra. Maybe even forgot he was a Don hunting a missing girl for reasons known only to him.

He became base predator.

And judging by the cold tension vibrating off him now, that lapse unsettles him more than anything I’ve said tonight.

I would laugh if I didn’t know in my bones that the cost will be exacted with the kind of ruthlessness that gets written into forbidden histories.

When he turns back, the heat is gone, sealed beneath something colder and infinitely more dangerous. ‘As I told your superior, you will relocate,’ he says evenly. ‘Immediately.’

My spine straightens. ‘No.’