Page 44 of A Treacherous Trade
“Love?” I hated the hope leaking into my voice, an increasingly dim light flickering and dancing dangerously against the storm of sorrows that would see it extinguished.
That shrug again, one Gallic lift of his shoulder beneath the fine black coat. “Perhaps…” He stood against me once more, a pillar of inscrutable composure I could no longer read. “My hatred is commensurate to what my love once was. It is pure. And consuming.”
How could he say such brutal things with such a beauteous voice?
Bending, I retrieved my mask from the floor with joints that suddenly ached with a familiar weight and pain. One that began in my heart and slowly spread through my entire body, like a spill of ink diluting water. “I do not think that love is the pure thing I once did.”
“You were hurt by it,” he said. “By the man who hid his evil behind God.”
Hurt didn’t seem strong enough a word.
“I might have been ruined by it.” My face crumpled, and it took every bit of my pride not to turn away. For all the talk of lies, here was the truth I most feared. It was what had sent me to Croft’s home, searching for some kind of absolution.
“I think… I think I’m broken…” I could say this to Night Horse. Because he was, too. The lone survivor of a massacred clan. A tribe, he called them. He now spent his life creating corpses in a foreign city. Not a man who waited for Hell to come for him, because perhaps he spent the rest of his life trapped in the abyss of his memory.
He regarded me in that detached, bemused way again, his head tipped to the side. “You do not seem broken.”
I snorted, swallowing a flood of tears. “Women are better at hiding it than men.”
Rather than handing me platitudes, he pondered this. “I do not know you well, Fiona, but I know this: broken men hurt others. Broken women usually hurt themselves. Or allow others to hurt them. But not you. You are scarred, but you are strong. You will not break.”
I scoffed bitterly, crossing my arms and rubbing at bare shoulders suddenly cold. “I have you fooled. I amutterlyweak.” As evidenced by threatening tears searing the strength from my voice. “One tiny knock, and I’d shatter into shards.”
Night Horse came to me, capturing my chin and smoothing away a wobble with his rough thumb.
It was at that moment I realized that kindness was its own form of cruelty, one almost more insidious than brutality. Violence and hatred broke upon one’s fortifications, revealing where you might make them stronger. Malice taught you to harden yourself against it.
But kindness… it seeped into the weak places like a mist. Inescapable. Unstoppable.
I hated that I revealed myself to him. That I made myself vulnerable.
He read this in my eyes, I thought, and replied, “You are not so weak as you say. You feel fragile, but you will not shatter. If anything, you will detonate. I see your eyes when you are after the truth, and they are ruthless. Fragile people—broken people—don't want the truth. They usually create a story so they may live in a fiction that will keep them from their demons so they do not have to face them. But you, you chase your demon into the dark places, and that means you have courage.”
Releasing me, he took up his purse of coin and left it on the bed. “Continue searching for the truth, Fiona. The search will keep you together until you are stronger.”
I’d misjudged him again. He’d been neither cruel nor kind.
Just honest.
And it was exactly what I’d needed to hear.
Pausing at the door, he turned back to allow his eyes to linger over me in a way that threatened to melt the blood out of my body.
I thought we’d put our desire away, but an awareness had awakened between us. A knowledge that desire existed. That we enjoyed each other’s flavor. That if I asked for another taste, he’d give it to me.
And more.
“Killing isn’t all I know, Fiona,” he said, his eyes so solemn I realized it was incredibly important to him that I understood this.
I had no idea what to make of it, so I merely nodded.
“My mother, she was a healer to my people,” he continued. “She understood everything about earth and herbs and medicines. Knew everything that could be known…”
I blinked rapidly, wondering how his mother could have crept into our conversation after all that’d just passed between us.
“She taught me many secrets, my mother. Many things I would never share with your people, but I think… I think this will help you.”
I stared at him, trying not to picture him as a curious, innocent, inky-haired little child at the elbow of such a learned and loving mother.
