Page 110 of Death Wish

He held up his hands in surrender. “No judgement there.”

“And besides,” I began. “I don’t like what you’re hinting at.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not one of your magical weapons that you store in your backpack. I won’t be used as one.”

One eyebrow lifted, like he was impressed. Had I read his mind? Had he been thinking about using me in that way for his mercenary work?

At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised.

How had I felt anything for this man before? Now I was seeing the real Cole Masters. The clever, ruthless, work-driven assassin, and I wasn’t liking who I was seeing at all. He was something else.

I gritted my teeth. “So, you obviously weren’t doing your job efficiently enough. Azrael sounded mad when he visited you in the motel.”

“Oh, he was,” Cole said. “I had every intention of doing the assignment. It was probably one of the easiest jobs I’ve ever had. And his threat was read loud and clear. A specialty trained supernatural bounty hunter babysit a woman for a few days? It was almost insulting.”

“Wow, thanks.”

Asshole.

He held up a hand. “Then I met you and saw the power you had, saw the way you blasted Xaver out of the store, and I kind of got it. You weren’t just a reaper like he said you were.”

“Was Azrael the reason you could see me in my reaper spirit form?” I asked. “Did he do some kind of angel voodoo on you to make that possible?”

“No, actually he didn’t do anything. I still don’t know why I could see you.”

Still another mystery I had to figure out.

“When I brought you here and we discovered the demon cure—the very thing I’d been searching for most of my life—I got a bit sidetracked. Azrael’s mission suddenly didn’t matter anymore. You were the key I had been waiting for to get this demon part of me off my back.”

“As flattering as that is, Cole, it doesn’t excuse the fact that you lied to me all this time,” I said. “I trusted you.”

“I never asked you to trust me.”

Ouch. Good point. But ouch. That had been all me. Me and my naivety.

It still was a douchey thing to do.

“I have to admit, I expected you to be madder if you somehow found out the truth,” he said. “You knew all this time, and you still saved me from Xaver?”

I had expected to be angrier, too. It had come so quickly before, but now, all that fury and feeling of betrayal had fizzled out. Maybe it was because I found understanding in his explanation. He hadn’t asked me to trust him. I had done that on my own, and it had been a mistake. I couldn’t fault him for that. He was just doing his job, one he had been threatened to perform. If I had been put in that situation, could I say I wouldn’t do the same? Especially when my assignment was a complete stranger?

The answer was a common sense one. Of course I would take the job.

Cole let out a long, dramatic sigh. “Even so, I should say thank you. For saving my life, that is. And for what you did for Wyatt.”

“I liked him,” I said, which was the wholehearted truth. I would have said the same thing about Cole, but now, I wasn’t too sure how I felt about him. I didn’t know him. That was for sure. “He helped me a lot. I owed it to him, too.”

Cole ran his fingers through his hair nervously and stared out into the darkness. “I definitely owed him more than a quick, shallow grave burial and a cross made of some dead branches. I’ll miss that son of a bitch.”

“Yeah…”

We stood like that for a while, saying nothing.

In the stillness, I pulled out the velvet bag I had gotten from Marla.

“What’s that for?” he asked.

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