She bowed her head and opened the case.
Eva’s eyes went wide.
A glass syringe sat nestled in black velvet within the box.
Her gaze shot to Benares. His smile widened the smallest amount but it didn’t reach his eyes. They were cold now, impassive and diamond hard.
“Do not fail again, my angel.”
A hypodermic needle? Was he serious? She hadn’t exactly fought her mark and survived, and the bastard knew that. He knew that the mark had shut her down before she had even had a chance to start fighting.
He knew everything.
Which meant he had people watching her every move.
Why?
Jin snapped the case shut, startling her out of her thoughts, and Eva’s gaze leaped to her.
“It is rare. Do not squander it this time.” Jin shoved the case into her hands.
Eva wanted to ask what was rare—the drug she was meant to administer to her mark or a second chance from Benares?
She kept her mouth shut and clutched the case instead, heart pounding as she considered what they were asking her to do.
They wanted her to drug her mark, and this time they wanted her to do it up close and personal. No dart gun. Just a syringe.
Eva eyed the case.
“What is it anyway?” she said with as much confidence as she could muster, holding on to her mask so Benares didn’t see through it to the fact that she was scared, afraid of him and thinking twice about going through with his request.
Running the hell away from Rome was starting to look good. She could disappear, lay low and keep her head down somewhere remote. Maybe South America.
The coldness in his emerald eyes warned not to try it, that he could already see through her carefully constructed façade and knew what she was thinking, and that it wouldn’t end well for her. How powerful was he? Every honed instinct she possessed said that he was too powerful, that he could easily track her down and kill her if she dared to disobey or tried to flee.
“A means to an end,” Benares said.
An end.
Poison.
It wasn’t her style, but she was hardly in a position to say that. What the client wanted, the client got.
Although she did find it strange that she had been hired to tail her mark and learn about him, and now her client was asking her to kill him. Benares had only ever asked her to gather information, had made it sound important that she did so. Why would he want to learn about someone he meant to kill?
He had made it sound as if he had been looking for a weakness he could exploit.
Now he was asking her to poison him.
Had something changed?
Eva shut down that line of thought before it got her into trouble. She had the feeling that the less she knew, the better off she would be on this particular job. Clients were allowed to have a change of heart.
She tried to shrug it off as she bowed her head and retraced her steps through the villa, but the heavy feeling in the pit of her stomach refused to go away.
She had never been one for guilt before, so why did the thought of what she was going to do with the contents of the case she clutched tightly in her fingers unsettle her?
She caught a flash of her mark holding her, powerful arms caging her, his knife pressed against her throat together with his knuckles.
The press of those knuckles had felt more dangerous than the blade, sending an electric thrill through her, and the way his incredible eyes had held hers, merciless and cold, but at the same time filled with a wealth of emotions just beneath their golden surface, had ignited a spark that had set her on fire.
Eva put it down to the fact he had bested her, pushing aside all the other reasons she could think of for the way she had felt in his arms, desperate to remain professional and maintain her distance.
It had been a long time since someone had beaten her, and that was all this feeling was.
He had brought a spark of excitement back into her dull little life and had reignited something inside her.
A fire she thought had died long ago.
CHAPTER 3
Valen had somehow managed to stay away from his little assassin for three nights, when every shred of his being had wanted to head into Rome and track her down to finish what they had started. He wanted her to come at him guns blazing, with that fire flashing in her stunning eyes. He wanted to tangle with her.
Gods, he wanted that.
He shoved his fingers through his blond hair, raking it back from his face, and gripped it hard, taking pleasure from the pain as it tugged at his scalp. His hand shook, muscles tensed and quivering, trembling with need that was becoming impossible to contain. He was hungry for another shot at her, ached with a need to hear her voice and smell her again, to feel her body plastered against his.
His beautiful little assassin.
He still wasn’t sure whether he wanted to kiss her or kill her.
The darker part of himself, the side ruled by his power and thirst for violence, wanted the latter. The lighter part? He wasn’t sure that existed anymore, but something inside him wanted the little female in a way he had never wanted another.
Centuries on this godsforsaken plane and not once had he desired a female the way he desired her.
He vaguely recalled bedding some mortals at the start of his sentence, but his interest had waned as his power had grown, becoming more seductive and alluring, and pleasurable, than they could ever be.
His lightning had become everything he needed, both his pleasure and his pain, his joy and his despair.
He wanted for nothing else.
Except her.
Now he couldn’t get his mind off her and it was starting to become a pain.
His brothers had noticed it during their last meeting the night after he had let her go. The night after she had returned to him. He had managed to blow them off, spouting bullshit about the Rome gate keeping him busy and all the pain-in-his-arse Hellspawn that kept calling him out to it to open it for them so they could travel between this realm and the Underworld.
He had even tossed in a few daemon hunting reports for good measure, ensuring his brothers had no reason to suspect anything. His brothers were pain-in-his-arse gods, always sticking their noses in where they didn’t belong, and they pissed him off more than the Hellspawn who dragged him to the gate at all hours of the night as if he was their personal bitch.
Valen stared at the shimmering gate to the Underworld that formed a pattern of concentric rings filled with glyphs and rested flat like a disc above the ground in the middle of one of Rome’s ancient sites in the Palatine Hill.
Keras, his oldest brother, was the worst. Self-righteous prick. The fucker had been looking down at him for the past five and a half centuries, always watching him as if waiting for him to fuck up again.
He spat on the sand beside him.
Bastard.
He idly stroked the obsidian blade sheathed against his right hip beneath his long black jacket, thoughts turning dark as he imagined helping Keras out the night he had decided to cut his own throat in order to see if Ares’s new plaything, Megan, really had the ability to heal.
Valen would have gladly cut it for him. A little deeper than Keras had chosen. Of course, the other five pains-in-his-arse would have come down on him and even dear old Dad probably would have got in on the action too. Fuck, maybe even Nemesis herself, although the punishment she normally dished out to him was more pleasurable than having to spend time with his brothers.
Eight and a half centuries he had been putting up with his brothers’ bullshit.
The last couple of centuries had been the worst. At least when they had been in the Underworld he had been able to keep to himself, to go away whenever they bothered him too much and roam the various realms, finding some quiet.
Now, he couldn’t escape them. They stepped into his apartment all the fucking time, acting as if he needed a bloody babysitter.
He snorted at that,
but there wasn’t even a hint of amusement in it this time. Not a drop.
Bastards.
The ground beneath his feet warmed and he looked down, frowning at the delicate green stem that pushed from the sand between his black leather boots, growing before his eyes. It formed a bud that opened to reveal a small golden flower.
The light faded as the colourful rings of the gate shrank into a yellow dot and winked out of existence.
Valen stared at the flower. A message.
He huffed and scuffed his boot over it, crushing the delicate bloom into the dirt, and turned his back on the gate.
The ground shook in response.
His father’s doing.
He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, cursed himself for letting his temper get the better of him when his mother had only been trying to soothe him with the flower, a symbol of her love. He issued a silent apology to her and walked away, heading into the darkness and not bothering to send one to his father.
He was ninety-five percent certain that Hades despised him as much as his brothers did.
It was entirely possible that only his mother loved him.
Only his mother could love him.
It was safer that way anyway.
He didn’t believe what she had said to him three months ago when she had broken the rules to leave the Underworld and visit him when Ares had gone moon-eyed over the mortal female, Megan.
Persephone was a romantic. A fool.
No one could love him.
The curse made sure of that.
A curse he deserved.
His whole fucking life was cursed and had been since that night five and a half centuries ago, but even if he could change the events of that night, he wouldn’t do it. He would rather live with a curse on his head than live without taking action against those responsible for what had happened.
He reached the perimeter fence of the site and stepped, teleporting to the other side, and kept walking, heading along the road towards the centre of Rome and leaving a trail of black smoke in his wake. He jammed his hands in his pockets as he walked, his gaze on the pavement, his head whirling with thoughts he did his best to ignore and shut out.
Memories he wanted to forget.
The familiar swirling sensation started in the pit of his stomach, a warning that daemons were nearby. The coppery stench of them hit him a moment later and he stretched his senses out far and wide, tuning into his surroundings and scouring the ruins for the filthy wretches.
His internal radar pinpointed them directly ahead, near to the island that sat in a bend of the Tiber river.
It seemed his night was looking up.
Most days he cursed his father for sending him to the mortal world with his brothers, but never when he was fighting daemons. He lived for times like this, when he could drench his hands in their black blood and send them screaming into the afterlife. The rules of his mission clearly stated he was allowed to use any force necessary to ensure daemons didn’t breach the gate between the Underworld and Earth.
Lightning crackled between his fingertips as he withdrew his hands from his jeans pockets.
Valen used all the force of the Underworld at his disposal to eradicate them, never holding back even a fraction of his strength. He showed them no mercy, because they had shown the same to his family. They had attacked his parents once, and then again when Keras had been born, shaking the Underworld with their impudence and forcing his father to banish them from his realm. Now, because of a future the Moirai had seen, an attack on the eight gates that would merge the Underworld and Earth to create a new realm, Hades had banished him and his brothers here to fight the daemons and protect their world.
Daemons had fucked with his family, in too many ways to count.
What they had given, they would receive.
Eternally.
He would hunt and destroy them until either they were extinct or he drew his last breath.
He kicked off with his left foot and stepped, disappearing from the street near the Palatine Hill and reappearing in a small square on the island in the centre of the river.
The three daemons immediately froze.
They looked as human as he did, but their stench gave them away, their corrupted souls bleeding through the skin they wore.
Valen slowly drew his coat back and rested his hands on the hilts of the twin black blades strapped to his hips.
The female of the group tensed. The two males, both slightly older than her and appearing in their late twenties to mortal eyes, which placed them at around seventy to one hundred years old, moved to shield her.
How noble.
He eased the blades from their sheaths and lowered them to his side as he focused on his body.
On his power.
The brunet male’s eyes leaped down to the long black curved knives as that power flowed out of Valen on command and arced along the metal, causing flashes of light in the dimly lit square. His paler-haired companion eased back a step, his left hand fumbling behind him and finding the female. He caught her arm and pushed her back with him.
Distancing themselves?
Did they think he was going to let them go?
Valen clucked his tongue, causing the titanium stud in the centre of its tip to crack against his teeth.
“Run,” the blond hissed and shoved her hard, and she twisted as she stumbled.
She found her footing and broke into a dead sprint.
Valen sighed. He did hate it when they tried to run. It took the fun out of it.
He idly tossed his right blade into the air above him, slipped his hand into his coat and pulled free two small throwing knives from their holster against his ribs. Lightning danced across their surface as he poured his power into them in the split second it took for him to draw and set them loose with a casual flick of his wrist.
They hit the female in her right shoulder and lower back and she shrieked as she went down hard, her body jerking as his electricity rushed into it.
The brunet looked over his shoulder at her and then back at Valen, and hissed through his teeth as Valen caught his second black blade before it hit the floor.
Actually fucking hissed.
Shapeshifters.
Had to be.
It had been a while since he had fought one. Several of the shapeshifter species had elevated themselves to the rank of Hellspawn rather than daemon by providing thorough charts of their bloodlines and aligning themselves with other Hellspawn breeds united under the banner of his father and pledged to protect the Underworld from daemons.
What species of shifter were these three? Their stench said they were still daemon, still corrupted and twisted by darkness.
He flicked a glance at the writhing female and frowned as she alternated between mortal and demonic in appearance, sprouting horns and wings, and even a lizard-like tail as his lightning continued to ravage her body. Scaly lips peeled off rows of serrated sharp teeth and her yellow eyes watered as she grunted and whimpered.
Not a species that his father had any love for, which meant he had the green light to tear them apart.
He raised his left blade and took aim, targeting the female while she was down and vulnerable.
A familiar sensation went through him and he froze.
Heat warmed the space behind his breastbone, chasing out the cold calm he was used to and not only during a fight when most warriors found themselves detached from everything, a creature of logic not emotion.
His little assassin.
She would choose now to return to him.
He snarled and hurled the knife at the female, but took no pleasure from her scream as his blade sank deep into her side.
Damn meddling mortal.
Fighting was only fun when he could use his power and while he normally didn’t give a shit what sort of chewing out his eldest brother would issue if he broke the rules, or the potential punishment handed down from on high, he found himself playing by the book.
Acting mortal.
Because of her.
He eyed his remaining two opponents. If he snuck a little lightning into his blades while fighting them, would they go bat shit crazy like the female had?
Valen wasn’t sure whether daemons revealing their existence to a mortal because of something he did was grounds for punishment.
Ares had fought Trickster in front of Megan, revealing the existence of gods and daemons to her in the process, and hadn’t been punished.
But then Megan was a Carrier, a mortal with Hellspawn blood in her family tree and a power of her own.
Damn it.
“Fucking little assassin,” he grumbled and the two daemons frowned at him.
He shot them a glare, letting them know his words hadn’t been aimed at them and they shouldn’t have been listening. Fuck, he wasn’t even sure if they had been aimed at her, or his own pathetic desire not to stir the pot this time and cause trouble.
A desire to fit in.
What was the point in that?
It wouldn’t change a damned thing and he knew it. Every fucker on the planet would still despise him because they had already made up their mind about him and there was no way to alter it for the better. Nothing he did could redeem him now.
The ground warmed beneath his feet.
Valen scuffed it with his boot.
Not now, Mother.
One of the idiot daemons rushed him. They never did learn. Every daemon in this world thought they could be the one to claim the glory of bringing him to his knees. Morons.
He was a god.
He grinned and power raced through him, lightning that warmed his bones and lit his blood. He kicked off, propelling himself right at the hapless dimwit. There was a flash of panic in his eyes, a momentary twitch as he tensed, as if regretting his actions already, and then he broke right.
Valen kept running, aiming for the brunet now that his companion had cleared the way. The daemon looked ready to piss in his pants, but he pulled his shit together just as Valen reached him and blocked his right blade with his forearm.
Instead of the expected scream and stench of black daemon blood, his blade bounced right off the bastard.
Valen (Guardians of Hades Romance Series Book 2) Page 4
