“Everything happens for a reason.” His voice softened. “You have to believe that.”
“I don’t believe, Reed. I’m agnostic.”
“You’re a pain in the ass.” He caught her face in his hands and tilted it up. With his thumbs brushing over her cheekbones, he examined her. “Shit. You’re burning up. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I did say something,” she groused, “to both Gadara and Alec. One says it’s all in my head, the other says it’s just my body adjusting to the mark.”
He snarled something in a foreign language. Eve meant to ask what it was but was distracted by the feel of his touch, which cooled her. The scent of his skin filled her nostrils, altering the tension that gripped her from anger to something far more dangerous.
She caught his wrists and tried to pull his hands away. “Uh . . . Maybe you shouldn’t touch me right now.”
“No wonder you’re so combative,” he said roughly. “The Novium is on you.”
“You sure that’s what it is?” Her voice was a whisper, her throat clogged by the images that filled her mind of him on her.
“Oh, yeah. No doubt.” He released her abruptly. His gaze was sharp . . . and frighteningly fervent. “You’re crawling out of your skin. Marks don’t reach this stage until much later, but you’re primed like a veteran.”
Her hand lifted to her face, coming to rest over the spot where he had touched her. The skin tingled and was cooler. “Why?”
“You were made for this work, babe. It’s just that simple.”
“No, I wasn’t. You said it yourself; I wouldn’t be here if Alec had kept his dick in his pants.”
“I said that to f**k with you and get you pissed off at Cain.”
“This isn’t me,” Eve argued. She couldn’t face days on end of this job. She would lose her sanity. “Remember? I’m the one who screams at the idiots in horror movies who grab a weapon and pursue the maniacal killer instead of running for help.”
The negating shake of his head infuriated her as much as if he had covered his ears with his hands.
“I didn’t commit a sin worthy of being marked,” she insisted. “This is all just a monumental fuck-up to punish your brother.”
“You know how many mortal women have f**ked Cain?” Reed’s smile was tinged with malice. “And of those, how many of them have ended up where you are now?”
Her chin lifted. “He loves me. I can be used to hurt him. That’s the difference.”
“You want to toss around theories and conjecture?” He advanced. “Let’s take it further. What if Cain is in this mess because of you, instead of the reverse? I’ve been watching you, babe. You’re a natural. What if you two met because you have the inherent skill to rival him and no one else could mentor you as well as he can?”
“That’s r-ridiculous.”
“No, that’s a possibility.” His quiet conviction sent a chill down her spine. “You’ve survived demons no untrained Mark should have.”
Eve took a step forward. Reed’s suggestion pounded through her skull like a migraine. Her skin and muscles ached as if she had the flu. Even the roots of her hair tingled with a prickling that maddened her. Don’t kill the messenger, or so the saying went. But she wanted to. Unease slid sinuously around her insides, hissing like a serpent. “I love how you all conveniently forget that I was dead just a few days ago!”
A visible shudder moved through him.
That telltale sign devastated her. With everything around her unfamiliar and hostile, what she longed for most was something familiar. Someone who cared for her.
Her arm lifted toward him. “Reed—”
He turned away, his shoulders set against her. “I can feel the heat of the Novium moving through you. It’s making me . . . edgy and agitated.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I need to stay away from you while you’re like this, Eve.”
She realized then that her bloodlust was translating into a different kind of lust, which created an entirely new problem on top of all the others. She could fight her fascination for Reed, but not his returning fascination for her. “Does that mean you’re leaving?”
“I can’t,” he said gruffly. “Not yet.”
Eve would have asked why, but she had a more pressing question. “What is the Novium, exactly?”
Reed looked over his shoulder at her. “A change, similar to the change you went through when you were marked. Over time, a mentor and Mark pair become connected. Emotionally and mentally. They learn to think and move as one unit. When the time comes for the Mark to work alone, that bond has to be severed. Cauterized. Some Marks call it ‘the Heat’ instead, due the fever that accompanies the process.”
“Bond,” she repeated, “like you and I share? But I can’t feel Alec’s thoughts and feelings like I do yours.”
“There hasn’t been time. Neither of you has been trained. You haven’t hunted together. The connection has yet to grow.”
“And now it won’t?”
He shook his head.
“And what about my connection to you? Will that go away, too?”
“No. It’s a rite of passage—similar to leaving a father’s household for a husband’s. The handler/Mark link grows during the Heat, as does the Mark’s connection to his firm leader.”
“Gadara.”
“In your case, yes.”
“Boy, that sure works out for him, doesn’t it?” She watched the confusion drift over his handsome features, his train of thought following hers.
“It doesn’t work that way. It’s not vulnerable to manipulation.”
Eve rounded him so that they faced each other again. The transition was akin to stepping out of a cool house into sweltering desert heat. Her temperature shot up to an alarming degree, making her dizzy. “Tell me how it works.”
His gaze was as hot as she was. But when he spoke, his voice was calm and sure. “A Mark is trained. Then exposed to missions. They witness deaths and battle various Infernals. They absorb information from their mentors. Somehow, that combination eventually sets off the Novium.”
“Okay. Let’s see.” She started counting down on her fingers. “I’ve been exposed to missions. I’ve witnessed deaths and battled various Infernals. And I have a romantic relationship with my mentor. Good enough?”
“You’re forgetting time.”
“Maybe it’s not so much time as it is a buildup,” she speculated. “I’ve had everything thrown at me at once, then I was killed and resurrected, which has to mess with a person, right?”
“Right, which exonerates Raguel.”
“Not necessarily, since he’s the one who sent me on the missions to begin with. Plus, he’s been suspiciously stubborn about acknowledging my present condition.”
“There’s so much more to this than that, such as how you met Cain and how you were killed. Raguel didn’t have a hand in any of that.”
“I’m not saying he orchestrated this thing from the very beginning, but once he realized how it had been set up, he could have manipulated things from there. If I’m more connected to him than I am to Alec, it benefits him exclusively.”
Growling, Reed ran both hands through his thick hair. “What do these paranoid delusions have to do with your classmate dying?”
Eve studied him, noting the fine sheen of perspiration that glistened on the skin of his throat. She would guess it was no more than fifty-eight degrees in Monterey today, but they were sweating as if it were double that temperature. If she concentrated hard, she could feel the morass of thoughts and emotions roiling within him.
“Answer me, Eve!”
She shook her head, trying to dissipate the ethereal connection to him that was making it hard for her to think. Instead she lost her balance and fell into him. Jolted by the collision with something so hard and solid, she gasped and clutched at him. The sudden surge of cooling relief she felt was so astonishing and so welcome that she sobbed her gratitude.
“Babe . . .” His arms tightened around her and his lips pressed to her sticky forehead.
She stammered over her dry tongue, “How l-long does this l-last?”
“The Novium usually begins during a hunt,” he murmured, “and ends with the kill. A few days, usually.”
“Days!” Her nails dug into his skin through his shirt. “It hasn’t even been one yet and I’m sick of it.”
“This is supposed to happen in the field, where it actually helps a Mark by imparting confidence and fearlessness. Without the culmination of a kill, I don’t know how long it will last, and since you’re restrained, all that energy and bloodlust has nowhere to go.”
It was going somewhere all right. To intimate places on her body. The familiar and longed-for sensation of his embrace only exacerbated her condition. “Touching you helps,” she whispered.
“It’s killing me.”
Her hands moved of their own volition, unclenching and resting flat against him.
Reed stiffened. “Don’t do this, Eve. I’m not a saint.”
“I’m not doing anything.” She was barely moving, arrested by the volatility between them.
“You’re thinking about things you shouldn’t be. You’re a one-man woman.”
“There’s just one of you.”
He moved too fast to register. His fist captured her ponytail, arching her back. She found herself wrapped with him, mantled by his powerfully aroused body. There was no denying that he was hard for her, not when she could feel nearly every inch of him against her.
Armani and steel. Elegance and brutal passion.
Desire burst across her mark-regulated senses, exploding across her nerve endings and leaving her shaken. She groaned into his hovering mouth, her n**ples hardening and thrusting into his chest.
“You’re playing with the wrong brother.” His lips moved against hers, his words so softly spoken they were menacing.
“I’m not playing with you,” she whispered, repeating the words he had once said to her.
Reed’s tongue followed the line of her cheekbone, then dipped into her ear. “Then, what are you doing?”
Eve swallowed hard. “I g-guess I’m . . . coveting.”
He cupped her buttock with one hand and ground his erection against her. The lewd gesture was so patently Reed, it made her weak in the knees. “You can’t covet what belongs to you.”
Reed was deeply pained by the admission, she could feel it. That only made his feelings more precious to her.
How was it possible for her to love Alec, yet want Reed so strongly? However her affection had grown, it needed to stop. Alec had killed Reed—again—for touching her the last time. She couldn’t put any of them through that twice. It wasn’t fair. It hurt people she cared about. It made her not like herself. She wasn’t a cheater; she respected herself and her partners too much.
“Remember what I told you in the beginning?” His voice was low and gruff, the words breathed into her mouth. “You’re a predator now. Predators like to fuck. That’s all this is.”
“Don’t lie. Not about this.”
His tumult was palpable and added to hers. She felt safe with Alec; she felt far from it with Reed. The fact that fear pushed her forward instead of urging retreat scared her. What if he’s right about me? What if killing things is what I’m meant to do?
No, she refused to believe that being a Mark was her destiny. She couldn’t believe it, because if she did, it meant that all of her childhood dreams and hopes had to die. There would be no fairytale wedding, no possibility of a family. Everything and everyone she loved, the very aspects of her life that made her who she was, would grow old and leave her life. Who would she be then? Someone she didn’t know. Someone she might not like.
“Don’t count on me to put on the brakes, Eve. I’m selfish. I won’t say no to a prime piece of ass.”
She couldn’t stop the smile that curved her lips. “Isn’t that what you’re doing now?”
His mouth took on a mulish cast. “I don’t want you like this. I’ve seen the show, I know how it ends.”
“It was a good show.” Really good. Reed was rough, edgy, wild in a way she never expected to like, let alone crave. The fact was, the mark . . . Novium . . . whatever . . . didn’t make her want him. It only lowered her inhibitions enough to free her existing attraction.
He nipped her lower lip, then licked across the spot to soothe the sting. “Come to me again when you’re not strung out with the Heat. You’ll get a different answer.”
“Reed—”
“Enough.” Tilting his head, his mouth slanted across hers, taking her breath until she grew faint.
His fist in her hair tightened, arching her further backward, forcing her to mold into him. Her scalp ached with the pressure, the pain intensifying until she whimpered in protest and writhed. The prodding of the gun into her lower back was the final injury that pushed her over the edge.
She stomped on his foot and wrenched free, stumbling a few feet away. “You’re hurting me!” she accused.
Reed wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then adjusted the prominent bulge in his slacks with impatient movements. “Look what you’ve done to me. Look what you keep doing to me, you f**king c*ck tease.”
Eve blinked, shocked by the vehemence of his attack. And the justification behind it. “I’m sorry. I—”
He cut her off with a glare. “Cain’s the one getting laid. That means he’s the go-to guy for your crap, not me. I want to f**k you, not carry your baggage.”