4. THE HUNT

♣️XAVIER♣️

I stood at the edge of the forest with my warriors around me, and none of us spoke, because there was nothing left to say before a hunt like this one.

Twelve prisoners tonight. The ones who had crossed into our territory and killed three of our men doing it. I had waited for this moment.

The horn sounded and I heard them run, their boots crashing through the brush, breathing already ragged with fear. My men spread out around me, moving the way I had trained them to move, quiet, patient, pushing the prisoners deeper into the trees instead of chasing them down all at once.

I found the first one crouched behind a fallen log, shaking so hard I could hear the branches rattle above his head.

"You crossed our border." I crouched in front of him. "You killed three of my men doing it."

"Please." His voice broke on the word. "I have a family. I have—"

"So did the men you killed." I didn't feel anything when I said it, not rage, not satisfaction either, just the flat certainty of a debt being collected. "You don't get to plead a life you didn't extend to anyone else."

He tried to run before I finished the sentence. He got three steps. I caught him on the fourth and wrapped my arm around his throat, locking it tight. He clawed at my forearm, his nails breaking against my skin, but I held on, felt his pulse hammering against my elbow, felt his struggles weaken one breath at a time until his body went slack in my grip. I let him drop and his blood ran hot over my hands and down my wrists.

I moved to the next one before his body had even stopped twitching in the dirt.

The second one fought back, swinging a broken branch at my head. I ducked and drove my shoulder into his chest, sending him sprawling. He scrambled for the branch again and I caught his wrist, twisted until I heard the bones crack, and he screamed. I grabbed his head with both hands and snapped his neck in one hard twist. The bone splintered through the skin at the back of his throat and I let him fall, already moving to the next.

The third one didn't fight at all. He just knelt in the dirt and waited, and something about that made it worse, made my jaw clench harder than it needed to. I pulled the knife from my belt and crouched beside him. He closed his eyes. I pressed the blade to his throat and drew it across, slow and deliberate, and watched the blood spill out of him in a dark sheet. He didn't make a sound. Not even when I finished it, and that silence followed me through the trees like a ghost I couldn't shake.

By the fourth kill my hands were slick and my breathing had gone rough, and that was when her eyes showed up behind my own, the exact blue I couldn't place at that dinner table, steady and unblinking the same way they'd been under a silver mask three nights before that.

I lost half a second thinking about it. Just half a second.

The man in front of me used it. He rolled sideways and scrambled up and made it four full strides before I caught myself. I threw the knife. It buried itself in the back of his thigh and he went down screaming. I was on him before he could pull it out, my hands wrapped around his throat, and I squeezed until his face turned purple and his eyes bulged and his tongue pushed past his lips. I didn't make it quick. I made him feel every part of it, my knuckles splitting open through the wrap with the force I put into it. His neck didn't break. He suffocated under my hands, his body thrashing beneath me, and I held on until he went still and then held on a little longer just to be sure.

"You're bleeding," one of my men said, coming up beside me, his own hands red to the wrist.

"I know."

"You stopped moving back there. I've never seen you stop moving."

"Drop it." I said.

He dropped it, because he knew better than to push me twice, and fell back into position.

The fifth one ran for the ravine and made it almost to the edge before I brought him down from behind. I grabbed the back of his head and slammed his face into the ground once, twice, three times until the mud turned dark with his blood and his body stopped fighting me. I rolled him over and he was still breathing, broken and wet, and I pulled my knife from his thigh and dragged it across his throat the way I had done to the third one. He gurgled and went still beneath me.

I forced myself through the rest of the hunt without letting my mind wander again, no matter how hard it tried to drag me back to those blue eyes.

The sixth swung a rock at my head. I broke his arm before it reached me and left him bleeding into the dirt. The seventh and eighth ran together. One died with my knife between his ribs, the other with his throat opened before he'd taken three more steps. The ninth begged for his children. The tenth crawled after I cut the backs of his legs, clawing uselessly through the mud until I buried my blade at the base of his skull.

The eleventh and twelfth were already dead when I found them. Two of my men had gotten there first, their throat cut clean. I stood over the bodies and felt nothing. The hunt was over, but the need for it hadn't left me.

By the time the sky started turning gray through the trees, all twelve were down, six scattered through the underbrush and six more piled near the ravine where we'd finished the chase, and the forest had gone quiet again the way it always did once the debt was paid.

I stood there with blood dried tight across my knuckles and down both forearms, and the calm that usually settled into me after a hunt like this didn't come. It never failed to come. Every single time before tonight, it had come.

Instead the blue eyes were still there. Refusing to leave.

I told myself it was exhaustion. I told myself a man's mind did strange things once his body had spent everything it had, and none of that reasoning did a single thing to loosen the grip those two pairs of eyes had on the inside of my skull, because somewhere in the middle of all that blood I had already decided they belonged to the same woman, and I had no idea what I was going to do with that if I turned out to be right.

"Good work tonight," I told my men, and they moved off toward the estate without arguing, trusting my silence the same way they trusted every order I ever gave them.

I stayed at the ravine a while longer by myself, my hands still wet with blood.

My phone buzzed against my hip.

I answered before the second ring finished, my pulse spiking harder than it had all night, harder than it had for any of the twelve men I'd just put in the ground.

"We have her," Dorian said, his voice low and careful. "Both of them, actually. I wanted to be sure we got the right one."

Something in my chest went tight and hot at once, the first feeling all night that didn't come soaked in blood.

"Bring them to the house," I said. "I'm on my way.”