“Why are you doing it?” He always had motives. She couldn’t divine this one. What did it matter to him if she got lost again? She didn’t buy his line that he didn’t lose things that were his. She wasn’t, and they both knew it. He wanted something from her. But what?
“Figure it out. You’re brilliant.”
“You need me to save the world?”
“I don’t need anything.”
That left want. “Why are you always interfering in my life? Don’t you have better things to do?” It had made her feel special all those years ago, that the powerful and mighty Ryodan had paid attention to her. Solicited her input, desired her around. Though she never would have admitted it and had bitched endlessly about it. He’d thought she had a great deal to offer and would one day be “one hell of a woman.” It had given her a kind of aiming-at point. Silverside, she’d kept aiming at it.
Her faith in his power, his attention to those details he’d chosen to track, had been absolute.
She’d waited.
He hadn’t come.
His hands were no longer moving at the base of her spine. She felt nothing for several long moments, then the light dance of his fingers across her scars. He traced one after the next. She should stop him. She didn’t. It was almost as if his fingers were saying: I see every injury you suffered. You survived. Bang-up fucking job, woman.
“I could remove them,” he said.
“Because a woman shouldn’t have battle scars. The same thing that brands a man a hero marks a woman as disfigured.”
“There’s nothing disfigured about you. Except your aim. Work on that.”
She was silent then. She was wary around this new Ryodan; the one that didn’t push and poke and prod but treated her like…well, she wasn’t sure what he was treating her like, and that was the crux of it. She couldn’t get a handle on how to respond to him when she didn’t understand his overtures. It was like trying to return a tennis ball on a court when someone had changed the rules and you didn’t know which spot you were supposed to smash the ball back into. Once, they’d lobbed that ball back and forth like pros, intuiting each other’s every move. Now when he swung, she spent too much time staring at the ball in the air.
In his office, she’d kissed him. He hadn’t kissed her back. Now he was touching her intimately, with her shirt off, but made no move or comment to indicate it was anything but business. Not that she would have entertained anything but business. Why had he said “Kiss me or kill me” that day in his office? Had it been merely another of his position-clarifying tactics, like the night she’d discovered that, although the Crimson Hag had killed him, he’d somehow come back as good as new and insisted she choose between being disappointed that he was still alive or being loyal to him?
He’d brought her to what she was fairly certain were his private quarters, a spartan set of rooms deep beneath Chester’s. She was also fairly certain it wasn’t his only place and, like her and Dancer, he had many well-stocked lairs in which to retreat from the world.
Ultramodern, ultrasleek, the room was shades of chrome and slate and steel. Black, white, and, like the man himself, every shade of gray. In the room adjoining the one in which they sat was a bed with crisp white sheets and a soft, dark velvet spread. The bedroom had smelled of no one but him, which didn’t surprise her. He would never take a woman to one of his places. It was never that personal. The decor was tactile, complex but simple. The kitchen was white quartzite and more steel. The bathroom sculpted of thick, silver-veined marble and glass. Everywhere she looked, the lines were straight, clean, sharp, hard, like the lines of his face, and his philosophy.
“So if I call IISS what happens again?” she fished.
He didn’t reply and she hadn’t expected him to, but nothing ventured nothing gained. Sometimes you could trick an answer out of someone. He’d already given her as much of an answer as he would and it had been a complete nonanswer: hope you never find out.
His finger moved slowly over a long thin scar close to her spine. “Knife?”
“Whip with steel points.”
He touched a spray of white bumps. “Shrapnel?”
“Blow-dart gun.” Filled with tiny crystalized rocks. Blown by a beast on a planet of eternal night.
“This?” He touched a messy, shallow one near her hip.
“Fell down a cliff. Did that one myself.”
“Stay or go?”
“The scars? Stay. I earned them.”
He laughed. After a moment she felt something very like the tip of a knife at the base of her spine. “I’m one inch away from ripping out your throat,” she said softly.
“Blood binds. I need some of yours to set this layer of the spell.”
“How much?”
“Minor.”
“You’re mixing yours with it.”
“Yes.”
Blood spells had nasty, pervasive side effects. This man’s blood in hers was not something she wanted. His tattoo, however, was. “Proceed,” she said without inflection.
He did, and she found herself slipping back into that strange, almost dreamy place she’d been in since he’d begun inking her. As he’d worked, his big strong hands moving with precision against her skin, the angry thrumming in her body had faded, her muscles had stilled, her tension calmed. She was having a hard time remembering what had driven her out into the streets today on such a murderous rampage. Languor infused her limbs and her stomach no longer hurt. Her psyche was beginning to feel drowsy and relaxed, as if she could just stretch out and sleep for a long, long time and not have to worry while she did because this man would stand guard and she could rest knowing that whatever predators were on this world, the world’s greatest predator was right next to her and she was sa—
She sat up straighter, flexed her muscles and snapped back into high alert.
There was no such thing as safe. Safe was a trap, an ideal that could never be achieved. And hero worship was pointless. There were no heroes. Only her.
Behind her, he said, “You don’t have to be on guard all the time. Nothing can hurt you here.”
He was wrong. Anytime there was another person in the room with you, the possibility for hurt existed.
“You’re doing something to me,” she accused.
“I can have a certain…agitating effect on a woman.”