Page 43 of Kept to Kill
He shouldn’t fuck her. Even if he made her want it, they were on a mission. He had to keep a clear head. His fingers trailed down the curve of her throat and he swallowed hard, biting back a curse as he turned away.
‘Put her back in her room,’ he said to Bastian, who was looking vaguely disgusted. Quin stepped away, trying to get some distance from Lily in more ways than one. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘We shouldn’t have done this,’ Bastian muttered. ‘We should have told her at least – explained it. This was wrong.’
‘Right or wrong,’ Quin snapped, ‘what’s done is done. For now at any rate.’
‘What do you mean?’ Bastian’s eyes narrowed.
Quin walked back to the table in what he hoped was a casual manner and filled a new cup with wine, thinking that he hadn’t seen Bastian drink himself into a stupor since the ship, though he’d had ample opportunities since then. His eyes cut to Mal, who was still standing in the same spot, still as a statue. He frowned. There hadn’t been any disappearances to explain away, either. With Mal there always was, but not since the ship … Both men seemed to have found some new way of fighting their demons. He glanced between them, gathering by the way that Bastian and Mal were eyeing each other when they thought he wasn’t looking that there was something more going on here that he wasn’t privy to.
‘I mean that I’m the Commander,’ he finally said. ‘I can break a bond if I need to. When I need to,’ he corrected.
Bastian snarled. ‘You’d bind her and then cast her aside?’
Quin shrugged. ‘It won’t be long before we reach Kitore and she does what we brought her to do. It’s a dangerous task that she probably won’t survive anyway, so I won’t have to do anything,’ he said callously. ‘This discussion is pointless.’
Bastian turned away without another word and left the room with Lily in his arms.
When Quin turned back to Mal, his Brother was looking at him strangely.
He ignored him and went back to his wine. By the time Bastian came back, slamming the door in his wake and throwing himself on one of the beds like a petulant child, Mal had disappeared again. Quin went to Lily’s room. He slipped inside, finding her in the bed, still sleeping off the effects of the drug.
He settled down in her room to wait. When she woke, he was going to talk to her. He skimmed a hand over the bulge in his breeches, allowing himself a moment to indulge, looking her over as she slept, wondering whether she’d be pliant or if she was a fighter. He’d put good money on the latter. He could always tell when she didn’t agree with something. Her jaw would set mulishly and her eyes would flash for just a moment.
Her first instinct was to fight, and he knew that drive well enough. But so much of her life had been controlled by Vineri – and now by the Brothers – that she swallowed that spirit down and pretended obedience. He wondered what she’d do if she were free, who she would become if given the chance to step out of the shadows of everyone else’s selfish needs and live her life as she willed.
She gave a groan and he shook himself free of his thoughts. Her future didn’t matter; she didn’t matter past the part she would play in Kitore. He had to remember that or they would not succeed. Failure wasn’t an option. He’d worked too hard for too long to become the Commander to only be remembered as the Brother who’d held the title the shortest amount of time.
He stood, pouring some water into a cup. He knew she preferred it, so that was what he’d started ordering them to bring at every inn they stayed in. A tiny part of him wondered if she’d noticed. An even smaller part wanted her to.
He growled audibly at his errant thoughts and she sat up in the bed with a gasp, looking at him like he was her enemy. He was, he reminded himself, and it was a good thing that she had remembered.
Lately she had not seemed particularly afraid of any of them, and that blasé arrogance would get her killed, if not by the other Brothers, then by the overzealous witch hunters who seemed to be so much more abundant in the north thanks to the rewards offered by the king. She was safer with them. Most of those sort wouldn’t tangle with a unit of Brothers, but alone? She’d probably be dead already.
She was looking around the room, her eyes falling on him at close intervals as if she thought he would attack her.
He held the cup out to her, but she made no move to take it, looking at it as if it were a snake set to strike.
‘It’s just water,’ he said to her. ‘I won’t drug you again.’Probably.
She didn’t look convinced, but she took the cup from him gingerly, not letting her fingers touch his. Losing patience with her, he grabbed her wrist with his hand tightly and held on as she tried to pull away.
‘Let me go!’ she wailed in a tone he hadn’t heard from her before, but which just about broke him.
‘No,’ he told her, stepping closer, trying to intimidate by looming over her as he fought to push his sudden reactions away. Her eyes flashed, boring into him with that defiance he liked to see from her.
‘Get. The. Fuck. Off. Me,’ she ordered, the command losing much of its power as he noticed how her body shook with fear. But it wasn’t him she was afraid of, he realized; it was herself.
‘When was the last time you could touch anyone without killing them?’ he asked her, gentling his grasp on her wrist and sitting on the bed beside her.
She drew back and he let her, but her searching eyes never left his. ‘Before Bastian, you mean?’
Quin rolled his eyes at his Brother’s name on her lips, a feeling he didn’t like forming in the pit of his stomach. Gods, was hejealousof that prick?
‘Yes, before Bastian,’ he said tersely.
‘Never.’
