She said nothing. She had no idea.
“How many were human?”
Again she said nothing.
“And you’re certain they deserved to die. Certain you’re thinking coolly enough to pass that judgment.”
She could stand in silence a long time.
“I’ll say it one more time. Jada. Let me teach you.”
“The only thing I’ll let you do is tattoo me.”
“You’re brittle.”
“I’m steel.”
“Brittle snaps.”
“Steel bends.”
“Christ, you’re so close.” He shook his head in disgust.
“To what?” she said derisively. “To the way you think I should be? Isn’t that what you’ve always been doing? Like Rowena? Experimenting on me? Determined to make me what you want?”
He went still, assessing her intently. “You know what Rowena did.”
“I live inside my own head. I’m brilliant.”
He didn’t speak for a moment, as if debating what to say and what not to say, and she wondered what he thought he knew that she didn’t. Measuring her. Deeming her, if she could read the look in his eyes, on the verge of an explosion. She wasn’t. She had herself completely under control. To prove it, she once again adjusted her breathing. Deepening it. She wasn’t entirely certain how it had gotten so shallow again.
He stepped back then, as if giving a cornered, wild animal room so it wouldn’t spook. “Rowena wanted you to be what she wanted you to be,” he said finally. “I want you to be what you want you to be. And it’s not this.”
“You don’t know what I want. Your inferences are incorrect. Tattoo me or I leave.”
Another measured look. “Wash and I’ll tattoo you.”
“Fine. Where’s the nearest lav?” She wanted that tattoo.
Without bothering to reply, he turned for the door.
She followed, chafed that he had something she wanted badly enough that she would follow. Chafed that she was so wired her hand trembled as she swept her sword back to pass through the door.
Chafed that he was right.
She had killed with fury tonight.
She’d played Death like a lover, seeking release. If she’d really wanted to help Dublin the most logical and efficient way possible, she’d have gone to Inspector Jayne, forged a new alliance, and cleaned out his overflowing cages so the Guardians could capture more. Let a hundred Guardians net for her so she could slay even greater numbers. But efficient killing hadn’t appealed to her, standing there, methodically slicing off the heads of dull-eyed, defeated enemies. There was something about the heat of the hunt she’d craved.
She had no desire to analyze motives that had been so clear at the last full moon, now splintered, impaling her every way she turned.
She followed him in silence. She would put up with anything, do virtually anything, to get her tattoo finished.
—
“Unbutton your jeans.”
Resting her head on her arms on the back of a chair, Jada didn’t move. “Make it smaller. I doubt any part of it needs to be on my ass.”
“I won’t bastardize the spell. Do you want it to work or do you want to walk around with a tat that may not perform at the critical moment?”
She popped the top two buttons on her jeans and shoved the waistband down. Then his hands were on the lower part of her back where it met her hips, and she had to bite her tongue to keep from shivering. Her skin felt too hot, the air too cool.
Once, she’d watched him touch a woman like this, close his hands on her body where he was touching her now. He’d been pushing into her from behind and thrown his head back and laughed; beautiful, cool, strong man. She’d wanted to catch that moment in her fourteen-year-old hands, explore it, understand it, strain it through her fingers. Be the cause of it happening.
Joy. This cold, hard man was capable of joy. The conundrum had fascinated her. And stirred something inside her that she now understood with a mature woman’s brain, that moment when her young body had intuited on a visceral level that she, too, would experience those things, that her body was made for it, and soon a whole new realm of experience beyond imagining would open to her.
The fourteen-year-old had crouched, hidden in a ventilation shaft above Level 4, and closed her eyes, pretending to be the woman he was with. Trying to imagine how it would feel. Being the woman who made that man feel that way. Shivering with a blend of sensation so intense it almost hurt: hungry, anxious, wild, too hot, too cold, too alive. She’d found a large vent in a bathroom, sneaked out for a closer look, and nearly gotten caught.
Lust. It was a blinding thing. One might as well gouge out one’s own eyes. Yet for some, indulged as a surface dance between strangers, it was a way of feeling without having to.
She inhaled and straightened her back. Young. Strong. Untouchable. She focused on radiating all those things, particularly the last.
He’d been working on her for over two hours, after a wasted hour in which he’d insisted she clean up and wait until her clothing was laundered by one of his many employees. She would have sat nude in front of him to get the damned ink.
Then again, perhaps not.
She’d examined the beginning of the tat yesterday with a mirror, looking over her shoulder into another mirror. It was a complex pattern with a brand in the center, layered in gray and black and something else, something glittering that wasn’t any type of ink she’d ever seen. It shimmered in the hollow of her back, seeming to move in tandem with her subtlest shift, like silvery fishes beneath the surface of a lake. Somehow he was embedding a spell into her skin. And she hoped—only one. The devil was multifaceted, and so, too, might be his ink.
It offended every ounce of her being to let Ryodan do such a thing. Yet if he could genuinely track her with it no matter where she went, mortal or Silverside, she wanted it more than any other weapon she might have been given. As she’d recently told an Unseelie princess, there was the devil who couldn’t get the job done and wouldn’t eat you, and the one that could but might. She knew which one Ryodan was. And was willing to take her chances. “This would work, even in the Hall of All Days?” she asked again, finding it nearly impossible to believe. But she would be depending on it.
“Hell itself couldn’t keep me from joining you with this on your skin.”