Page 8 of Mortal Heart

The room they were in was dimly lit and smelled of sulfur and rot. The stone floor and walls radiated heat. He gripped the bars of his cage and tried to pull them apart, but they wouldn’t budge. He felt weak and lightheaded, and he had no magic and no weapons. No way to defend himself or anyone else.

Someone laughed mockingly—someone he couldn’t see, standing in the shadows to his left. “Strange that after all you’ve been through and seen, you end up dying here,” an unfamiliar voice said. “Any last words, my sweetness?”

He thought the voice had addressed him, but Arkady responded instead. She rose, spat out some blood, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Just the ones I figured would be my last,” she said. “Which are, fuck you.”

She’d barely finished the sentence when a knife wielded by that unseen tormentor plunged into her heart. Without a sound, she fell.

“No!” He tried to get through the bars of the cage. To his surprise, they gave way easily, as if the cage door had swung open. He flung it aside and charged ahead.

He heard a thud and a grunt at the same moment his brain recognized the smell of cool night air and the sound of his boots crunching on gravel-covered asphalt. No odor of rotten eggs or filth.

Take the curse, he’d shouted at Michael again and again.Take the damn curse and give it to someone who wants it.

But of course Michael hadn’t taken his curse of foresight, because that would have been a reprieve. Making Ronan keep his unwanted “gift” was yet more punishment, like his bound wings and unusable celestial sword. Just one more burden on a man already struggling to stand under the weight of his sorrows.

To make matters worse, his mortal mind wasn’t quite as adept now at distinguishing visions from reality, or adjusting when one ended and another began. In his disorientation, he’d thrown Arkady aside, mistaking her for the door of a cage he wasn’t yet imprisoned inside.

She leaned against the side of an old truck, cradling her left elbow as she glared at him. “I’ll give you a passthis timebecause obviously you just had a flashback or hallucination of some kind and didn’t know what you were doing. But so help me, the next time you put a hand on me in any way I don’t like, you’re going to wear your left arm as a bowtie. We green?”

“Very green.” He felt humbled, both by her fierceness and his own actions. “And I apologize.”

She rubbed her elbow and hunched over. He must have hit her in the midsection. For a moment he saw that other version of Arkady superimposed over this one: bloody, wounded, crouching, and clutching her knife. Then that image faded, leaving behind the faint echoes of his own anger and desperation.

He’d been desperate to save her from that unseen, mocking threat. As far as he could recall, he’d never been desperate to save anyone. Wanted to very much, yes, but desperate…never. Desperation was a human emotion, and not one he wanted to experience.

“You were about to tell me about your leads.” With a grimace, Arkady straightened and flexed her left elbow. “And now youoweme the chance to kick someone else’s ass, or it’ll be yours.”

He didn’t want to watch her die. He opened his mouth to tell her they had to go their separate ways, then closed it again. No matter what they did now, his vision said they would end up in that room. The future couldn’t be changed.

Except when it came to Alice.

He’d seen a vision of Alice’s death while they were in the Broken World. Yet somehow she’d survived being shot by a sniper, thanks to her lover, bound ghost, and mysterious guardian wolf. That fact was as inescapable as his prior belief that once he’d seen events unfold in a vision, they were set in stone. Alice had lived. And if Alice could live, there was a chance Arkady’s life wouldn’t end with a knife in her heart as he watched helplessly from inside a cage.

Not to mention she’d dared him to accept her challenge. He might be mortal now, but backing away from a challenge wasn’t something he’d ever done, willingly or otherwise.

Besides, the idea of kicking a whole lot of asses had never appealed to him quite so much as it did in that moment. He wanted to punch someone so badly, his knuckles itched.

“Well, Idohave a lead,” he told her.

She smiled. Her hunter’s smile was back, and it made him feel right at home and ready to track their prey. “What kind of lead?” she asked.

“A name.” He gave her his own hunter’s smile. “Ace.”

4

ARKADY

Ace.

Well, it ain’t much to go on, but hell, I wanted a challenge, she thought.And not just the challenge of not decking Ronan every time he opened his idiot mouth. At least searching for Ace would distract her from the pain in her back and wrist and the fact now her damn elbow ached from hitting the side of that truck.

In the throes of whatever flashback he’d just experienced, Ronan had thrown her aside as easily as she tossed an apple core out her car window. Earlier he’d moved impossibly fast to catch up with her, and then there was that weird silver glint in his eyes when he got angry. She knew what hewasn’t—not fae, vamp, shifter, or ghoul—but she was no closer to figuring him out than before. How could she trust him at her back if she didn’t know what the hell he was?

And yet despite her natural wariness and all her years of training and experience, her gut told her shecouldtrust him the same way she trusted Alice, Malcolm, and Sean. That made no sense, but there it was. That annoyed her, though she wasn’t sure why.

“The bartender’s father paid me to keep her safe and watch out for her abusive ex-boyfriend,” Ronan said in an undertone as they made their way back to the dead men’s car. “I’m sure you noticed the bruise on her face. I do not want this ex anywhere near her.”

She put her questions about Ronan aside and focused on the task at hand. “I saw it, and he needs to disappear,” she said. “But first, we need to get this girl out of the trunk, see what she knows about the traffickers, and get her somewhere safe.”

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