Page 56 of The Hunter
“I sent word.”
“Of course you did,” she huffed. The highhanded lout. Lord, she would have some explaining to do when she returned home. “Did you warn them? Are they safe?”
“If you’re not there, it does mitigate the possibility that anyone else would attempt to collect on the contract, so yes, they’re safer.”
Millie peered at the man seated across from her in the carriage. There wasn’t a lantern illuminating the inside, so only the glow from the streets seeped through a few cracks in the velvet drapes and slashed pale shards of light across his still form. One of those shards drew a jagged line over his eyes, one ear, and the blue silk upon which he rested his head.
She’d been right in her earlier musings, that dark blue behind his head painted his disconcerting eyes an even lighter shade. Something like a glacier floating above water. They looked almost inhuman, in a way she’d not noticed before. It was as though darkness sought him out, as though shadows settled upon him, recognizing one of their own, and he siphoned strength from them. This was where he belonged. Cold, eerie nights full of danger and blood.
“Did you murder Mr. Dashforth?”
“Did you fuck them all, or just him?”
They spoke at once, but his question rang through the carriage, snuffing hers into oblivion.
Millie released a shocked gasp that resembled a cough and didn’t speak until the next time she heard her son snore. “I—heartilybeg your pardon,” she spat.
“Thurston, did you only fuck him, or did you have Gordon St. Vincent as well? They’re a randy lot, and Gordon St. Vincent and his father, the earl, often have those masqueraded, orgiastic gatherings you described. Is that why they give so much to the theater? Do you pay them in trade… like you’re paying me?”
Millie could count on one hand the times she’d been struck truly speechless. In fact, most people made the context a somewhat ironic paradox because they spoke in order to point out their speechlessness. But outrage and disgust paralyzed her tongue to the roof of her mouth and she could only stare in dumb amazement.
“I don’t ask to condemn you.” He correctly read the unmitigated outrage on her face. “Only to clarify the situation. We’ve both obviously had intercourse—”
“I’ll thank you to keep your voicedown.” She put her gloves over Jakub’s ear, and though he twitched, the rhythm of his breathing didn’t falter.
Argent’s lids shuttered his expression. “I’ll admit… I wanted to kill them, though they’d done me no disservice and issued no insult. Iwantedto spill their blood. To break every part of them that had touched you, starting with their fingers.”
“Don’t.” Millie held up her hand against him.
“It’s why I had to make this bargain, I expect. Why I must have you. Because you make me want to—” He paused, eyes moving in their sockets as though searching for a word. “You make me… want.”
“Stop,” she hissed in a dramatic whisper. This habit he had of chilling and concise honesty. It unsettled her. Disturbed her. She, who lived among people whose livelihood depended on being someone else a great deal of the time. Performers, the lot of them, much of their memorized rhetoric spilled over into their lives, and they borrowed from the minds of great thinkers and emotional writers to express their own needs, to seduce, and to survive. They were students and conveyors of the human condition, and a great part of that condition was deceit.
But not this strange and stoic man. He revealed what others wouldn’t dare. His uncommon fearlessness wasn’t contained to the physical, but also to the emotional. For someone so impervious to emotion, he certainly wasn’t oblivious to it. And Millie was starting to believe that he shared with her the entirety of his limited emotional experience, at least the ones that pertained to her.
A man who didn’t lie. Who didn’t flatter, or seduce, or elaborate.
Did such a man really exist?
“I’ve upset you,” he observed. “Perhaps because I’ve insinuated that you’re a prostitute?”
Millie glared at him, mostly upset because, in all honestly, she couldn’t say she wasn’t one. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I will tell you with absolute certainty that before tonight, I’d never in my life been introduced to those wretched people.”
“You seemed to enjoy their company.” His brow lowered, casting a shadow over his gaze. It was apparent that he didn’t believe her.
“It’s called acting. I was merely being polite. You can’t honestly believe I enjoyed amomentof that interaction?”
“I know nothing about what you enjoy.”
“Obviously.” The sharpness in Millie’s tone surprised even her. Was it wise to speak to a professional killer in such a manner? Likely not. But wisdom was never really something she’d been credited with an abundance of.
Unfortunately.
She had the habit of speaking before her thoughts told her the better of it, and maybe now was a good time to start working on that.
They were silent for a long moment, listening to the clip of the horse’s shoes against the cobbles, or the sound of Jakub sleeping the undisturbed sleep of the innocent.
“My mother was a prostitute.” The words were spoken so softly, Millie wondered if she’d imagined them.
