Marked by an Assassin

by Felicity Heaton

  He growled under his breath and clawed at his chest, struggling for air as he tried to regain control of his mind and shove her from it.

  “She is mortal.”

  Those three words sent him back over the edge and he stumbled away from the wall, mind reeling as he stared blankly at the other side of the cell.

  Mortal.

  A cold shiver ran through him followed by a hot blast of anger.

  They had done it again. They had sent a female to seduce a fae male, no doubt in order to capture him for one of their studies.

  He snarled through his fangs, ploughed his fingers into his silver hair and yanked on it as the anger inside him coiled tighter, burned hotter. The flames ate away at his control, shattering his mind and turning his heart to ash in his chest as everything came flooding back.

  The bar. The beauty. The betrayal.

  He collapsed to his knees and curled forwards, unable to breathe as those terrible memories washed over him, racking his tired body and tearing him to pieces. He tried to hold himself together, scrambling to gather each broken piece of his soul before the memories leaped forwards, but he wasn’t swift enough.

  White snow. Red blood.

  His beloved mother and sister, their sightless eyes staring at the heavens, to the place where they roamed free with their ancestors.

  Stolen from him too soon.

  Hot tears rolled down his face as he grimaced, clenching his teeth against the pain ripping him apart. Still raw. Still killing him slowly twenty years on.

  The blood of his kin. The cries of those who had survived the brutal attack on the pride. The look in his older brother’s eyes as he lifted them from their dead mother and sister and set them on him across the frigid square.

  Gods, Cavanaugh had known it had been his fault.

  Harbin had seen it then. He had seen the disappointment and disgust. The anger. The pain.

  He had done the only thing he could. He had gone after Archangel, mad with a need to make them pay. He remembered little of what had happened in the aftermath of the attack. Only the taste of blood, the feel of bones breaking and skin rupturing beneath his claws, and the overwhelming urge to keep fighting.

  Until all were dead.

  That urge still lived within him.

  It still took him whenever he crossed paths with an Archangel hunter, and he still lost his mind when he killed them, remembering only fragments of what happened, engulfed by his rage and his pain.

  Harbin growled and fought the dark need as it rose inside him, threatening to drive him insane. He could smell the Archangel hunters, could sense their presence around him, but he couldn’t reach them. If he succumbed to his urges, he would only lose his mind, unable to satisfy his deep craving to spill their blood. He had to retain control.

  Voices blurred around him, a female and the dragon’s. The huntress had come to him, but Harbin was too deep in the grip of his memories to make out what they were saying to each other. He breathed deep and clawed back control, focusing on his need to hear what was being said, because it might end the attack ravaging his mind and body.

  If he could only hear she hadn’t betrayed him.

  He needed to hear.

  A different male voice joined the blur and he caught the words ‘study’ and ‘shift’. He twisted his hair in his fingers and focused on those two words. They wanted to study the dragon. They wanted to see him shift.

  It wasn’t possible.

  No dragon could shift in this realm. The curse placed on them millennia ago made it impossible. It also made the male’s time limited. If he didn’t escape, he would die here. Not because of Archangel’s experiments, but because this realm would kill him.

  “I’m sorry.” A soft female voice rang through the glass and Harbin heard the hurt in it, pain that spoke to him and softened the harder parts of him for a heartbeat before he closed himself off again.

  A female could easily sway a male with a few sweet and well-chosen words. It meant nothing.

  Harbin only hoped the dragon could see through them too.

  “I am sorry too.” Those four words, spoken by the shifter, carried a weight of bitterness, hurt and hatred, and Harbin breathed easily at last.

  The male was wiser than Harbin had hoped.

  He wasn’t sorry the bitch had betrayed him. He was sorry he had ever met her.

  The huntress who had used and betrayed Harbin wouldn’t receive such a simple ending. His closure needed blood and death, and he wouldn’t be sorry about it.

  Harbin closed his eyes. “Escape… the mission… and then revenge. He’s coming. He’s coming. He’s coming. Escape… the mission… and then revenge.”

  He lost himself as he chanted those words, so focused on them that they filled his mind and left no room for any other thoughts. They consumed him, drove him, and no matter how much he tried, he couldn’t stop saying them. A passing guard looked in on him and Harbin lifted his head, bared his fangs and kept chanting. The hunter gave him a look that said he had gone mad.

  Mad. Yes. Definitely mad.

  But not insane.

  Driven. Obsessed. A madness that kept him walking forwards, forever onwards in search of the one elusive female, the one death that would free him of the compelling urge to butcher Archangel hunters and make them pay for their sins that was beginning to consume him again.

  He had lost sight of his true mission, but now a need to fulfil it ruled him, had him in its grip again. This time, he wouldn’t set it aside for anything. This time, he would complete it and the huntress would die.

  It ended now.

  He shoved onto his feet and began pacing, taking swift agitated strides across his cell as the thought of finding the bitch who had betrayed him and killed his kin spawned a thousand more thoughts, an account of all the knowledge he had gained during his search for her across all of the continents of the mortal realm. Somewhere in that knowledge was the seed that would bear fruit and give him her location. He just had to find it.

  His fingers flexed, twitching with the need to sink his claws into her.

  Escape. Fuck the mission. Get revenge. That was all that mattered now. Escape and revenge.

  It was time she paid for her sins.

  He sharply turned towards the wall separating him and the dragon and banged on it. Time to sow some seeds of his own, ones that might just get him out of this white-washed Hell.

  “That the woman you were looking for?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  Harbin snorted. “They sent a woman to trick you, too?”

  Silence greeted that question and he could almost hear the dragon’s thoughts, could almost taste his freedom. He was close. He just had to push the male a little more. He had to play on his feelings, both the good and the bad.

  “Did she sleep with you and then betray you?” He pressed his palms to the wall and waited.

  The dragon growled. “Yes.”

  Harbin spat out a foul curse. “They did the same thing to me… and then they attacked my pride. They killed my sister and mother.”

  Silence again, and this time Harbin knew the reason. The dragon was thinking about his clan and the danger it was in now. Dragons valued their clan above everything. Well, everything except their treasure.

  A low snarl rumbled through the wall, the sense of power Harbin got from him increased tenfold, and then the dull sound of fists slamming against glass sounded. The dragon was pissed. Just how Harbin needed him.

  The banging ceased and he felt the dragon move closer.

  “What is your name?” Those words were laboured, spoken between hard breaths if he had to guess.

  “Harbin.”

  “My name is Loke. You heard my conversation with the huntress. I cannot be here. I must escape these fiends… and therefore I need your help. I need your knowledge of this facility.”

  Bingo. He had just secured his ticket out of here. Now he just had to give the male what he knew, and escape and revenge would be his.

>   Escape. Revenge.

  He hadn’t realised he had relapsed into chanting about those two things until the damned dragon was roaring down the house and pummelling the glass again. Fuck.

  “Bad move,” Harbin called, but he knew it was already too late. “They don’t like it when we’re rowdy.”

  Loke stopped the banging but the deathly silence in the other cell told Harbin that they were already releasing the gas. He didn’t have much time if he was going to convince the dragon to break him out.

  He growled as he gave the dragon the information he needed, his voice deeper and more vicious than he had ever heard it as thoughts of finally achieving his revenge rolled through him.

  Atonement.

  It would finally be his.

  “Two scientists. Bonds are weak. Shatter them. Scalpels are weapons. Four guards. Two observers. Eight throats to cut. Kill the fuckers and come get me.”

  Harbin grinned and sealed the deal by placing a cherry on the top.

  “I know a portal back to Hell.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Harbin couldn’t wait to see what the scientists had in store for him this time. He had expected the two male hunters at his back to escort him into the same cramped medical room as before, but they had continued along the stark white corridor, leading him deeper into the facility. The shackles they had placed on him were cold against his bare lower back, irritating him. He flexed his fingers, fighting the itch to stroke the surgical scar on his thigh where his implant sat deep beneath the skin. Escape. That instinct rode him now, strengthened by the conversation he’d had with the dragon shifter.

  It was within his reach.

  He had been set on escape and revenge until he had passed the cell of the female snow leopard and had seen it was empty. A pressing need to see her again had welled up inside him, startling him with its intensity. Curiosity drove questions through his mind, a hunger to know where she was and what Archangel was doing with her.

  That hunger filled him with a dangerous need, one that had little to do with his mission and everything to do with his need to atone.

  He couldn’t leave without her.

  He needed to see her and see she was safe, and know that she would be in her cell when the time came to escape this Hell. Whether that escape came at the hands of Hartt and Fuery, or the dragon.

  He wasn’t leaving without her.

  His fingers itched with another need as he cursed himself, a desire to plough them through his wild silver hair. What the fuck was wrong with him? What had happened to the cool and collected killer?

  He growled a curse out loud this time.

  He had been unravelling from the moment he had set eyes on her.

  He had bottled up everything, every softer feeling or painful memory, and now it wanted to come out.

  It couldn’t have worse fucking timing.

  He needed to be on his A game right now, at peak strength, with his wits about him. He didn’t need to be mooning over a damned female just because his hormones were out of whack and the need to mate was strong. The urges he had been suppressing for the past few years rose to overwhelm him whenever he thought about her, riding him harder than ever.

  Ninety-nine years old.

  It taunted him.

  Crossing paths with the female couldn’t have come at a worse time.

  He hadn’t believed his teachers or his family when they had told him that as a male he would hit sexual maturity at a century old. He had thought it bullshit, a rough estimation of the time he would awaken as a fully matured snow leopard adult, able to breed. He had never thought it possible that they were right and it would hit him at dead on a hundred.

  It certainly felt as if it was going to, and if the rollercoaster ride he had been on the past few years was anything to go by, it wasn’t going to be much fun.

  He had been keeping his urges under control, never straying close to women when they were at their strongest, trying to rule him, but now they were owning him, pushing back whenever he attempted to wrestle them under his command. His instincts were too powerful, and gods only knew it was because of the presence of the female.

  How the ever-living fuck was he going to escape with her when his condition was worsening, degrading to a point where whenever he thought about her lush curves and feeling her flesh cushioning his fingers he got a raging hard on?

  He looked down at the front of his black trunks and grunted. It wasn’t as if he could hide the damned thing with his current clothing shortage either.

  Maybe it was better he let Hartt and Fuery handle her, but that meant handing over control to them. It would place her in danger. Hartt and Fuery would want to carry out their mission.

  He snarled at the thought and bared his lengthening fangs. No fucking way. He wanted nothing to do with females, especially not a snow leopard, but he couldn’t let them take her from him. He couldn’t sign her death warrant.

  He had to handle her himself.

  The hunters shoved him into a room, pushing him right out of his thoughts and back to the present. The moment he realised his wrists were unbound, he turned back to lash out at the mortals, but a solid steel door slammed in his face. Great. Another cell.

  He turned around and dread slithered over his skin as his eyes took in the new room. What the hell were they up to now?

  Everything in the large rectangular room with him looked rather unthreatening. Blue plastic barrels, ropes, and boxes were strewn across the white tiled floor. Did they think he would be tempted to play with the stuff?

  “Make yourself at home.” The male voice barked over an intercom on the left wall, above which was a small camera.

  They were watching him.

  He spotted more cameras on the other walls, and in the corners of the room too.

  They honest to gods wanted to see what he would do when faced with all the shit in the room with him.

  Fuck all. That’s what he was going to do with it.

  Instead of surrendering to his natural curiosity, he started pacing the room, cataloguing everything about it. There was a deep gully across the middle of it, cutting it into two squares. He glanced up at the ceiling, at a dark band there. He would bet his left nut that there was a barrier up there, ready to slam shut and divide the room into two.

  Harbin casually strode away from his end of the room, towards the place where the barrier was hidden in the ceiling, curious to see what would happen.

  He was within a few paces of the gully when the scent of male snow leopard hit him. His nose tingled, his primal instincts firing and seizing command. He peeled his top lip off his teeth and dragged the air over them, tasting the male’s scent.

  A snarl rose up his throat and he stalked towards the first item that smelled of the male, a barrel just over the gully on the other side of the room. He halted a few feet from it, stealing back control of his body and refusing to give in to the need to rub the damned thing to erase the male’s scent from it.

  Archangel were fucking with him.

  Maybe they wanted to see how long it would take him to cave and let the need to scent mark everything seize control of him.

  He huffed and forced himself to turn around and walk away, back towards the end of the room that didn’t smell of the male.

  It was a dangerous game they were playing. This close to sexual maturity, the scent of another male affected him deeply, triggering a primal need to fight and fuck, and gods help anyone who was on the receiving end of either of those needs because he felt like a feral bastard, liable to rip apart an enemy or a bedfellow.

  He stormed to the steel door and banged his fists against it. He needed to get out. He needed to escape. Fuck waiting for Hartt. Fuck the female mark. He had to get to the dragon and get the hell out of this place. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t handle any more.

  The matching steel door at the other end of the room opened, jerking his gaze in that direction, and his stomach dropped as the female snow leopard was shoved into it with him.


  Clad only in a strapless white bra and panties.

  No.

  The twin urges to fight and fuck combined into one seething hunger and he roared as he launched himself in her direction, unable to claw back enough control to stop himself. The terrible urge to escape overrode them all, filling him with a black need to fulfil his mission. He could only watch himself running at her, determined to wrap his hands around her throat and choke the life from her, convinced that he would be free then.

  He would be free.

  The glass panel dropped and he slammed into it, cracking his nose on it. The taste of blood coated his tongue, worsening his hunger to fight. He shook his head and gathered his senses, and growled as he attacked the barrier that kept him from his mark.

  The female shrank back, her gold-silver eyes filling with fear as she brought her hands up to her chest and swallowed hard. Those wide doe eyes pinned on him, burning into him and wrenching him in two directions, tearing him between the hunger to kill and the terrible need to kiss her.

  Fear.

  He frowned and looked down at the barrier, and snarled as he spotted the holes in it. He could smell her. Sweet mountain air.

  His knees weakened, threatening to buckle and send him crashing to the ground as that scent curled around him, seeped into his skin and made him heat from the inside outwards. He shuddered, his body swiftly hardening in response to her tempting smell, his primal instincts hijacking control and leaving him at their mercy.

  The darker part of himself that had been established in the blackest pits of Hell, born of bloodshed and violence, and a constant fight for survival, rose against it, pushing back and flooding him with a terrible need to escape.

  Kill the mark.

  Secure his freedom.

  That was all that mattered.

  He attacked the glass again, alternating between slamming his fists against it and clawing it. Nothing he did left a mark on the five-inch-thick barrier. He growled and kept up his assault, but it strengthened the hold his primal instincts had on him. The more he fought the barrier, the harder he breathed, and the deeper he took her scent into him, until it filled him completely and the thought of killing her was replaced with pleasing images of killing whatever male had marked the items in the room with him.