The Hunter (Victorian Rebels Book 2)
The Hunter: Chapter 23

Christopher’s knuckle split as it glanced off the rough wood stump he’d weighted down with stones in his training room. Rain pelted the windows and cast the room in late-morning gray, turning his implements into shadows.

Cursing his lack of concentration, he welcomed the sharp, stinging burn like an old friend. The pain would bring focus, the blood would foster clarity.

I want you.

Then I’m yours.

A harsh sound ripped through the emptiness of the room, a growl he could barely identify as his own as he clenched his wounded fist and drove it into the wood again. And again. And again.

He’d trained like this his whole life. Wu Ping had started with sand, building calluses on his knuckles and the outsides of his palms. Then they’d moved to buckets full of pebbles, and wood after that. Finally he’d been punching the walls of the prison, painting the stones with his weakness until his skin was so rough, it no longer broke.

The blood meant he was growing too soft. That he was getting weak. That he could be broken.

Come for me. Say my name.

Christopher … please.

He was no stranger to entreaties, to pulling people beneath him and silencing their pleas. But hers cut through him like a jagged stone. Had she been begging for release, or had she been pleading with him to release her?

He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t remember. Part of him was glad he didn’t see her last night, that the memory of fear or pain on her face wasn’t branded onto his mind’s eye.

Goddammit, it was supposed to have been a dream. With her, it had always been a dream. Words like that didn’t come to him when he was awake. Needs as primal as those didn’t belong in daylight. Men like him didn’t leave a woman wet and writhing.

They didn’t care to.

He. Didn’t. Care.

This time, it was the wood that splintered beneath his fists.

He’d been at this for what felt like an eternity, trading his obsessive mental mortification with the physical kind. Sweat ran down his naked torso in chilly rivulets, blood pulsed, pushing his veins close to the skin. Muscles swelled and burned.

And still he couldn’t forget the softness between her thighs, the bliss of holding her beneath him, of grinding his hips down against hers.

He’d coerced her. Treated a virgin like a common whore, took her from behind like one. Ripped into her like a barbarian, but at least then she’d consented.

And still he’d cringed from what he’d done.

Don’t … stop.

He rummaged through the haze of lust and frenzy, desperately trying to unravel the meaning behind those words. In his dream, she’d been goading him on, encouraging him to take her.

In his nightmare, he’d taken her against her will.

In reality, he’d spilled his seed inside a woman for the first time in his life. What if she was—What if they’d made a—

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” He punctuated each new blow with a bellow of frustration.

“I wouldn’t let Mama hear you say that.” A small voice permeated the echoes of his vulgarity with a gentle reproach. “She doesn’t like that word.”

Wonderful. He’d said it fucking plenty last night, hadn’t he?

Jakub stepped from the doorway and ventured into the room, pausing to study the weapons in the rack beneath the second-story walk from which a climbing rope dangled. His pale fingers closed over the little wooden handle of his garrote with fascination.

Christopher opened his mouth to tell the boy to leave, but what came out was, “Have you seen her?”

“She’s getting dressed.” Jakub caressed a set of throwing daggers next.

“Is she … all right?” Cursing the tinge of anxiety in his voice, Christopher clenched his wounded fist.

“Why wouldn’t she be?”

There was no safe place to go with that question.

“Don’t touch that,” he barked.

Jakub’s hand jerked away from a shiny pistol and seemed to bury itself in the pocket of his little trousers in shame. “Sorry,” the boy mumbled, then brightened. “Did you break that?” He jogged over to the log, settling his hand on the fresh split with reverence before he craned his neck to look up. “Welton said to come down and look for breakfast after I dressed, but then I heard a crash. You did that with your fists?”

From this angle, those blasted spectacles made the child mostly a set of gigantic eyes with a few skinny limbs dangling from them. Christopher had difficulty looking down at him.

“You must have to be terribly strong to hit something that hard.”

The wistful note in the boy’s voice tugged at him, and Christopher looked down to see Jakub run a finger over the split in the trunk with his brows drawn into a frown.

“I am terribly strong, but you don’t have to be to do damage like that. It takes knowledge, discipline, and agility more than strength.” He walked to a shelf in the corner, reaching for a cloth with which to wrap his knuckles. Eyes snagging on his bandaged forearm, Christopher flinched at the memory of Millie’s gentle care.

“Mama could never do that,” Jakub argued. “Nor could I.”

“Nonsense.” Christopher turned back to the boy, rolling the bandage over his hand. “The martial art I practice was taught by a female monk in the East decades ago. It was said she could shatter stone with a flick of her finger.”

“That’s just a story,” Jakub scoffed.

“A story told to me by the master who taught me to fight. He was a very small man, smaller than your mother, and I saw him shatter bricks in his palm.”

The boy snorted. “Stop teasing me.”

“I’ve never teased anyone in my life.”

“Then you’re lying.”

Christopher frowned, crossing his arms over his chest. “What makes you think that?”

“You won’t look at me.”

Their eyes collided and they glared at each other for a few narrow-eyed seconds before the boy’s mouth twitched, tightened, then broke into a smile.

Grunting, Christopher broke away from that smile, from the answering amusement it produced, and went to the basin in the corner and began to wash the sweat from his skin.

“Your trousers are funny.” Jakub trailed after him. “They look like a dress.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be at breakfast?”

“Do you use those weapons on people?”

Christopher froze with the cloth half dipped into the water. Jakub’s innocence did not belong in this house. Nor did his mother’s. And, bastard that he was, Christopher had taken hers last night. But the boy’s was worth saving. His lack of guile, his big-eyed curiosity, his exuberance.

Hadn’t he been that way once? Before …

“I do.” Shit, he should have lied.

“Couldn’t you teach me?”

“No.”

“But…” The boy’s voice dropped back to the solemn note Christopher had heard before. “There are people after my mother. Bad men. I could protect her if I knew how.”

Dropping the cloth back into the water, Christopher closed his eyes against a wave of something so intense, it locked his limbs. He recognized that note in the boy’s voice. A mixture of worship and fear, of a little boy’s fierce, protective love for his mother, and the anger big enough for a grown man that ignited when that love was threatened.

It didn’t matter that Millie’s body had never carried the boy. She was his mother. Love glowed between them, a love he’d seen before. A love ripped to shreds and lost in a pool of …

“You don’t have to worry about that,” he vowed. “I will protect her; I’m here to protect you both.”

“But will you always be?”

The question tore the breath from his chest and Christopher had to struggle to inflate his lungs. “Get that knife over there,” he ordered. “I’ll show you a few things.”

* * *

“Welton.” Millie ran across the butler marching through the empty dining hall. “Have you seen my son—What on earth is that?”

Welton foisted the prickly-looking oddity forward with both white-gloved hands, his chin rising several notches. “This, madam, is called a ‘pineapple.’ A gift to the master, from the Countess Northwalk.”

Reaching out, she tested the sharpness of the tufted stalks and the rough scales of the oblong fruit. “I’ve heard of these, someone told me the Duke of Milford had a hothouse that grew them—Wait … The Countess Northwalk? She sends Mr. Argent exotic fruits?” A twinge of displeasure stole through her. Lady Farah Blackwell, Countess Northwalk, an heiress in her own right and wife to arguably the most infamous and wealthy man in the realm, sent gifts of a morning to a reclusive assassin. Why? What sort of arrangement did they have? And, more importantly, why did Millie care where Christopher Argent procured his produce?

“Lord and Lady Northwalk are friends of the household,” Welton announced proudly.

“Indeed,” Millie murmured, wondering if it had been terribly unkind of her to assume that Christopher had no such thing as friends. In fact, hadn’t Argent said something the night before about a long-standing loyalty to Dorian Blackwell?

“Well, acquaintances, at any rate,” Welton amended.

Acquaintances, and yet here was a gift from a married woman … Was there something going on between her protector and the countess? If someone were to be brave enough to cross the king of the underworld, it would certainly be the master of this house.

“I was just going to add the fruit to the breakfast menu, but I’m not sure when Master Argent and the young master will be finished in the ballroom.” Welton looked down his spectacular nose at Millie, one brow cocked with insinuation.

“What are they doing in the ballroom?”

“I’m sure I don’t know.” It seemed this morning that Welton’s nasal haughtiness was tinged with something else. Not warmth, exactly, but a purposeful optimism, perhaps, that made Millie feel accepted.

“Thank you, Welton.”

“Very good, madam.” Turning on his heel, he resumed his soldierlike march through the empty dining hall, presumably to the small solarium in which they were to take their breakfast.

Millie wandered in the opposite direction, through the grand, desolate entry and toward the French doors, where the right-hand one stood ajar. The echoes of serious conversation filtered from the opening, and Millie paused to smooth the teal silk gown down her front and check her hair for any escaped tendrils.

Nerves fluttered in her stomach at the thought of seeing him again. Her might-have-been assassin. Her protector.

Her lover.

The manner in which he’d fled from her last night left her confused and uncertain. Two emotions particularly foreign to her, especially when it came to men.

In general, she found men easy to understand, charm, and read, thereby making them uncomplicated company. They were creatures of ego and artifice. They smiled with their wolfish teeth whilst scheming with their eyes. Their weaknesses included flattery, their virility, and challenge or conquest, power, wealth, and sexuality, respective and interchangeable throughout. Anything that made them feel like a predator was enjoyable, as long as they could master it without too much effort.

Some prized intellect. Others physical strength and prowess. And still more chased possessions or influence. Some were cruel, others were kind. Some jolly, others solemn. They loved to compete, and shamelessly display their wealth, power, or consequence over each other. They were fascinating creations of alternating primitive instinct and societal constraints.

Not Christopher, though. He was such a unique and complicated animal. An enigma, really. What was it that drove him? Money, it seemed, was important, as he made a great deal of it, but he didn’t seem to spend it on much of anything. Certainly not on creature comforts. He possessed a grand house, at the behest of someone else, but he slept in more distasteful conditions than the servants would. His clothing was well made, but far from ostentatious.

As for ego and artifice … he didn’t seem to understand either concept. He lied to kill. Or to survive. But not to protect himself from judgment or awkwardness. He accepted his strengths and skills at their value and correct measure, owned them without a speck of modesty, but also without ego. He never exaggerated, nor did he undermine. Seduction was an art he didn’t practice. Flattery was as foreign a language to him as Greek or Arabic. He kept his relationships, such as they were, confined to arrangements. Contracts, whether on paper or understood, ones with very set parameters of which he refused to step out of bounds.

So when he said he wanted her, when he told her she was beautiful, that he dreamed of her. He’d meant it. He meant it more than any of her admirers had ever meant a single one of their poetic words.

And yet he was tethered by nothing. A boy born in a cage, taught little but cruelty and survival. Then he was thrust into this world and had to make his own way, falling upon the only skills he’d ever mastered.

Violence and death.

But there had to be more to it, to him, didn’t there? Despite what he claimed, he was not without emotion. The tortured dreams he suffered. The things he’d said to her. Unapologetic illicit things at first, but then he’d given her needful words, and the most selfless pleasure.

All because he’d thought the only way she’d come to him was in a dream. The reason being, he believed nothing good ever happened to him while he was awake.

What if she changed his mind? What if she brought good into his world? Was there hope for a man with so much blood on his hands? Millie hadn’t thought so before, but after last night …

Lord, but she was thinking nonsense, wasn’t she? A romantic fool, that’s what her brother Merek had always called her. And he was probably right.

“They take my spectacles and then push me down.” Jakub’s voice carried through the door, distracting Millie from her thoughts. “I can’t see to take them back.”

What was this? Millie hadn’t known anyone had done her son violence. That he hadn’t confided in her stung, that he confided in Christopher now intrigued and concerned her.

He’d never had a father, nor had she provided him much in the way of male companionship. Certainly, he knew her fellow actors, and there was Mr. Brimtree, of course, but due to Jakub’s reclusive nature, he’d never connected much with any of them. Was it testament to her failure as a mother that the first man her son seemed to bond with murdered people for money?

Quite likely. She winced. But he had saved Jakub’s life … there was that …

“You don’t have to see them clearly.” Christopher’s voice rumbled off the ballroom walls with all the resonance of thunder. “You focus on the space between you and your opponent, no matter how blurry your vision may be. By not looking directly at them, you notice all of them. You can tell where the next strike is coming from almost the moment the thought is formed in their minds.”

“I want to try,” Jakub demanded.

“Like water,” Christopher reminded. “Take the path of least resistance, but don’t let anyone stop you.”

Shifting her weight, she leaned against the half-open door, remaining quiet and in the shadows.

What she saw stole her breath.

Sweat glistened on his body, trailing into valleys and grooves made by mountains of strength. And still, for all his sheer size, she detected an almost preternatural grace in his movements, though whether innate or practiced, she couldn’t begin to speculate. She couldn’t believe that she’d traced that muscle with her fingers, followed the tight columns down his back as they rippled with rhythmic movement. She’d been pressed against the twin mounded cords of his abdomen, felt their distinct shapes lunging against her flesh.

Her fingers twitched with the memory of him, and the memories only served to awaken new curiosities. He stood in his domain of strange and indecorous tools, a man. Hard and dominant and overwhelmingly potent. Sinful and solid and scarred.

And gently patient with the almost ridiculously small boy lunging at him with artless, wild blows.

She should say something, do something, other than play voyeur to this moment. But, how could she when the ground beneath her was no longer stable? It rocked under her feet like a ship on the waves of an approaching storm.

What must it be like to possess the heart of a man like that? To even think it had to be some sort of blasphemy.

But his blasphemies were delicious, weren’t they? His wickedness brought her pleasures in the dark and—

“Mama?” Two pairs of blue eyes swung to where she stood with unsettling synchronicity.

“Jakub, darling, Welton has set out breakfast, it isn’t polite to keep him waiting.” Millie hated the breathless note in her voice.

“But we were in the middle of a lesson.” Jakub reared back, settling into some kind of fighting stance. “I have a center line, and no one can push me off it. Well, Mr. Argent can, but no one else. I can punch anyone who tries to touch me in the throat, or thrust the heel of my hand into his nose. Also, I can pry off a kneecap with a knife, even a jam knife, Mama. And—”

“Jakub,” she said more firmly, realizing Argent had taught her son the same things he’d shown her only yesterday.

He hid his mulish frown by looking at the floor. “Yes, Mama.” He slunk past her, his shoulders so dramatically slumped that she wondered if she’d also let him spend too much time in the company of actors.

“I’ll be along, kochanie,” she said more gently. “I need to discuss something with Mr. Argent.”

As he plodded down the hall she heard him mutter to himself, “I knew I shouldn’t have mentioned the kneecaps.”

Watching her son, her heart squeezed. Was he being bullied? How did she not know?

Christopher had moved to the basin and was wiping his flushed face, neck, and chest with a damp towel. Millie found herself transfixed again by the muscles rolling in great waves down his back, tapering into narrow hips and disappearing into those strange trousers with the most enticing curve at the backside.

The last time they’d been in this room together …

Blinking, Millie tore her gaze from that particular part of his anatomy, clearing her throat and her thoughts. Her embroidered slippers were soft-heeled and she could hear the swish of her heavy skirts on the floor as she approached him.

He tensed, but didn’t look at her. Aside from the bandage she’d placed on his forearm, his knuckles were wrapped as well, pinpoints of new blood seeping through.

“You’re going to resemble an Egyptian mummy before the week is out.” She tossed a smile into her voice, and mixed it with a pinch of genuine concern. “Are you all right?”

“Don’t do that,” he snarled, turning to pin her with a belligerent glare before his eyes darted away. Gone was the gentle teacher who’d only just shared the space with her son, and in his place stood a glistening god of wrath. “My mother used to do that.”

“Do what?” Millie stepped back, utterly confused. “Worry about you?”

“Pretend you’re all right.” He paced the floor in front of her, three steps to the right, and three back, glaring daggers at the space between them. “She’d fuck the guards for an extra piece of bread, then hide the bruises behind a split-lipped smile when she handed it to me. It sickened me then, and now it’s worse because I … I’m the one that…” Plunging his hands into his lush auburn hair, he gripped it tightly before planting his restless feet and towering over her. “I won’t have it, not from you.”

“I don’t have any bruises,” she told him softly. Of course, she’d felt a few twinges of use on and in her body, but they’d merely served as a reminder of their affair. She hadn’t minded them in the least. “You’ve done me no violence.” Millie reached out her hand, but he flinched away. Pressing her lips together, she knew she needed to tread carefully here. This was not the cold, calculating, ruthless assassin she’d come to know. The man in front of her was a different creature altogether, one with his armor and ice chipped away. Exposed, raw, and just as dangerous.

Perhaps more so.

“I’m no better than them.”

“Than who?”

“I held you down. I made you bleed. I—I forced you to fuck me.”

“Forced is a rather strong—”

“I forced you to fuck me so I wouldn’t murder you.” He swiped at the basin, sending it crashing into the far wall with a terrible cacophony of splintering wood and shattering porcelain.

“Well, if you put it in those words, it does sound a little—”

“I slaughtered them for it. They were my first kills.” He resumed pacing. “And now I’ve become one of them.”

Millie was certain no one had ever seen him like this. Wild and distraught. Working himself into a frenzy. She wanted desperately to understand his meaning, but most of the information remained locked within the vaults of nightmarish memories. He must have fought them in his dreams, those mysterious “them.” How many, she wondered, had mistreated and abused him? It had to have been a collaborative effort, to create such a man as this. A committee of evil deeds and violent men. She knew she should be afraid, could feel the adrenaline coursing through her body, again warning her to run.

But she stood her ground, because an intrinsic knowledge told her they were both standing on the precipice of a wall. A wall of ice. And the audible cracks in that wall were beginning to perhaps make him feel unstable. But at any moment they could break away, and she had to be there for it. For him.

“Who are they?” She stepped forward and he retreated, balling his fists, though she somehow knew he wouldn’t strike her. “What happened to your mother?”

“They held her down … on her back.” His breath sawed in and out of his lungs, the ice in his eyes had melted into an inferno. The flames blue, burning with a rage hotter than any she’d ever before encountered. “They held her beneath them and she didn’t fight. She only begged for my life, told me to look away, but I didn’t. I memorized their faces. I fought back, and because of me, they gutted her.”

Millie’s hand flew to her mouth, her belly clenched in sympathetic response, both for his mother and for her son. Hot tears welled with painful force and spilled down her cheeks.

“I screamed and screamed and no one came.” His voice broke, but it was the only indication he felt anything other than anger. “I spent the night in a lake of her cold blood, and then next day I gutted four men. It took me years to kill the guard who’d facilitated her death, who wanted to teach her a lesson, and not before he killed another boy.” His features told her he was reliving a memory that would sicken her, and he enjoyed it. “Blackwell and I took turns with him. To this day I’m not certain who dealt the killing blow.”

“Oh, Christopher…”

“Don’t be kind to me!” He roared. “I am not a wounded child to be pitied. Your tears are wasted. I am Argent. I am the most famous villain that no one has ever truly met and lived to tell about it. I’ve killed more men in the Underworld War than could fit in your precious theater. I’ve beaten men to death in cesspits for money. And what do you think I felt? Victorious? Avenged? Guilt? Pleasure?”

“I—I don’t know.” Millie’s hand moved from her mouth to cover her throbbing, bleeding heart.

“Nothing,” he said darkly. “I felt nothing. I feel nothing.”

“That isn’t true,” Millie insisted, her voice trembling with tears. “I don’t believe it.”

“No? I’ve fucked whores and the randy widows of powerful men I was hired to kill. You think I cared about them? About their pleasure? I didn’t. I don’t. I only fucked them because they let me. I took them like dogs, like animals, but at least I never held them beneath me. They could always escape … but you … you.” A large wooden beam with pegs like a coatrack splintered beneath his blow, flying into a column and crashing to the floor.

Millie flinched and locked her knees, forcing herself not to take a retreating step from his gathering rage. It had been brewing inside him for years, for more than a decade. He needed to let it out. He needed to break things. “You’re not going to shock me,” she informed him gently.

“I’m not trying to shock you, I’m telling you the truth. I watched you die on that stage and there was a part of me that knew I could never see it again. That I should have walked away and left you to the mercies of someone else. I could sense myself turning into this … this fiend. And still I tried. Then you begged me not to hurt your son. You said the same words she did that fucking awful night.” He scrubbed his face with rough, brutal hands. “God, I am a monster.”

“But you didn’t hurt my son,” she argued.

“Oh, but I have done, don’t you see? I hurt him because I hurt his mother. I took your innocence. I made you pay for your life with your body.”

“He doesn’t know that!” Millie’s cheeks flamed, not because of his terrible confessions, but because of the scandalous one she was about to make. “Also … truth be told … I’ve never enjoyed making a payment so much.”

He froze. “Don’t, Millie. Don’t grant me absolution or forgiveness. I. Held. You. Down.”

“I wanted it,” she insisted. “I knew when I opened that door, when I woke you … a part of me knew what was going to happen. And I wanted it to.”

Some of the flame in his eyes flickered and danced and he made a strangled sound.

The urge to hold him overtook her with such ferocity, her arms ached. Lord, what he’d been through, what he’d survived. Most men would have broken, would have fallen to the earth and lost their minds, or taken their own lives. He’d hidden the shame, the horror, the desperation in a placid lake of darkness. Of blood. And then froze it solid to lock it away.

Unfortunately, it seemed, she was just the storm to dredge the wreckage up from the bottom.

He gaped at her, speechless and stunned, his mouth slightly parted, giving her time to close the gap between them. Reaching out, she spread her fingers over the thick muscle covering his heaving chest. He was still damp, but she didn’t care. He smelled of clean sweat and male, a musk that she’d never thought could be pleasant. Arousing, even. But it was. Whatever this man was made of, the essence of him called to her. Appealed to every sense.

He regarded her as if, for once, she were the hunter, and he the ensnared prey. Beneath her hand, his flesh, hot from exertion and emotion, twitched and flexed. And beneath even that, his heart pounded against her palm.

“I feel that there is something here between us.” Her fingers spread and she stepped closer, pressing her other hand against his chest. “Something more than just a business arrangement. I think you feel it too, growing from the most impossible circumstances.”

He remained silent but for his heaving breaths and pounding heart, and Millie went on, taking his lack of rejection as encouragement.

“I know you’ve done unspeakable things. That you’ve suffered immeasurably. And I ache for you, Christopher.”

“No one calls me ‘Christopher.’ I told you, I am Argent.” But slowly, so slowly, his hands reached up to cover hers. Hard and rough as brick, but tentative as a moth’s wings.

Millie smiled up at him, enjoying the way his eyes snagged on her lips. “After all we’ve done together, I think I’ve earned the right to call you by your name. You asked me to last night, remember? And to me, you are Christopher, a man I—I’m fond of and intimate with. A man who used to be a boy, a boy like my son, whom I love more than I can bear sometimes.”

The prowling beast in his eyes retreated, the fire banking into something more warm than scorching. His chin was directed at the column off to the right, his gaze darting about the familiar room. But it always landed on her, glancing off different parts of her, off the places where they touched.

“That boy, the one you used to be, he’s beneath all this, I know it. And he feels it all.” She pressed at the smooth chest beneath her, and felt some of the cold iron of his muscle melt beneath her hands. “His innocent hands are somewhere inside these scarred ones stained with blood.”

“I have killed so many,” he murmured. “Don’t you know that it’s too late for me? Don’t you realize that if there is anything but oblivion after this life, I am well and truly damned?”

“But wasn’t it Dickens who said ‘I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in this world.’ Look at this, Christopher.” She turned her gaze to encompass the shattered, splintered casualties of his rage strewn about the marble floor like fallen soldiers. “This is proof that, despite what you think, you have the ability to feel, and to do so is not always pleasant, I know, but it is necessary for human life. And we’re alive, you and I. And because of it, there is hope. Hope and truth and the possibility of love. I believe they can pull you out of the mire, if you let them.”

He studied the carnage with the same dark look that Millie imagined the devil, himself, used to survey all the realms he lorded over. “You think—you think I live in a mire? One you can pull me out of?” His voice had calmed, his breathing slowed.

“I think you live in a shell,” she answered. “A grand, large, rather expensive shell of a house. But it’s no home, Christopher, it’s a place to live, but not what a person needs to feel alive.”

His hands tightened over hers and she rushed on with the desperation of a general charging uphill and still gaining the high ground.

“You thought last night was a dream, and I believe there is some truth to that. I don’t think either of us dreamed that pleasure could be so intense, that our bodies would fit together so perfectly. That we would feel so much. I enjoyed being beneath you, and I would do it again.”

“No. You won’t.” His face hardened and Millie could hear the crackle of the ice as it climbed and clawed its way back over his soul, engulfing the man beneath it. She was losing him.

“Christopher … wait,” she begged, as though they were racing, and he’d pulled too far ahead for her to see him anymore.

“You become my woman, what then? Who profits from the bargain?”

“I’m not asking for promises,” she amended. “It’s not a question of profit, it—”

He flung her hands off him and retreated to the door. “What do I have to offer you but corpses and shells?” His voice … his cold, cold voice, it had returned. It leached the warmth from the room, froze the heat of last night’s memories with the hard actuality of his violent life. Of the existence he’d carved for himself out of stone and ice. “I will give you the corpses of your enemies, of the ones who wish you and your son harm. But make no mistake, woman, I am not a man who can give you a life. For like this house, I am nothing but a shell. A walking corpse. And just because I didn’t kill you, doesn’t mean I won’t destroy you.” He turned to leave.

“Christopher.”

He paused, his hand on the door frame, but he didn’t turn to her.

“Please, look at me.” He couldn’t go. They couldn’t leave it like this.

His knuckles tightened on the door frame until they whitened, and still he never so much as glanced back. “Go have breakfast with your son, Millie,” he ordered tonelessly. “I have an appointment to kill his father.”

This time, she made no move to stop him.