Page 18 of Silent Vendetta (Vendetta Duet)

The room’s biting cold continued to assault me—each inhale armed with arctic fingers that traced my spine, causing goose bumps to spread across my skin with yet another tremble.

Hunter’s eyes softened, brows pulling together in a look of concern. He stood and removed the gun and phone from his hoodie pocket—setting them far away from me and Franco. Then he undid the zipper, peeled it off his toned body, and wrapped his warm hoodie around my back—taking an extra moment to carefully tuck it over my shoulders so it wouldn’t fall.

With our faces only a couple of feet apart, our eyes met once more.

This time, it was the same compassionate stare he’d given me when he’d helped clean blood off my neck at the courthouse. When he held my hand while I got stitches and so many other times.

And it looked genuine—far from a psychotic person prepared to end the lives of innocent police. Making me wonder…

“You were never going to kill them,” I started. “Were you?”

Hunter stood up, and his shoulder muscles rounded as he shoved his hands into his pants pockets.

“No.” Hunter’s voice was low and sympathetic, and his posture was different than it had been before. Softer. Remorseful, even.

He could be putting on an act, but he had nothing to gain by doing that now. Everyone was gone, so there was no threat of discovery—not realistically, anyway. The police search had come up empty, so he was probably in the clear.

I studied him closer, at the gentility pulsing through his gaze, and that’s when a sudden realization hit me.

“You were never going to kill me either, were you?” I whispered.

Hunter’s chest muscles rose and fell, and his eyebrows softened. When he spoke, his tone was low and full of pain.

“Of course not, Luna. I love you.”

A tornado of raw emotion whipped through me. Thank God I was theoretically safe, but why the hell did I have to go through all that terror for nothing? And why in the hell was I feeling this odd comfort—that even after all the pain Hunter had inflicted, our love had been real after all?

“Did you mean your threat against my dad?” My voice quivered. “Blocking his chance of getting out of prison?”

Hunter shook his head slowly, and swiped his lower lip with his thumb. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”

So, it had all been a bluff, then.

The rope in my gut loosened with the realization that my father wasn’t in danger, but I clenched my fists.

“Then why did you say it?” I demanded. Of all the bluffs, why that one?

Hunter looked at Franco, then back at me. “I didn’t expect you to come down here and find out my secret like this. I needed time to figure out my next steps and come up with a plan.Beforeexposing all this”—he motioned to the wall of weapons, the blood dripping from Franco—“to law enforcement.”

I gritted my teeth, as furious with his mind tricks as I was with myself because, thinking back on it, he never actually said he was going to kill me. He never denied it when I said it, but he never acknowledged that was his intention, either.

I’d made a lot of assumptions, and those assumptions kept me under his control.

“I thought you were going to kill me,” I snarled.

Hunter tilted his head. “I could never do anything to hurt you, Luna.”

My nostrils flared.

“Aside from holding me hostage, making me believe I was about to die, and tying my wrists together, right?” My voice dripped with venom, each word sharply articulated, cutting through the air like a knife.

He rubbed the back of his neck. “When I saw you here, I reacted on instinct. Self-preservation is a primal force. And like I said, I need you to listen to me.”

I raised my bound wrists. “Then why am I still tied?”

Hunter leaned his back against the stone wall and put his hands back into his pockets.

“We need to talk, and we can’t do that if you keep trying to run from me.”

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