The Hunter (16 page)

“Please,” she entreated. “Sit down? Rest yourself.”

His chin dipped in a nod, sending a gleam of lantern light through his thick auburn hair. Bending his long legs, he claimed the seat, looking almost ridiculous on such a dainty piece of furniture.

“Right. Yes.” Millie remembered herself, snatching her costume from the mannequin and dragging it behind the screen with her.

The cream silk of the screen did little to truly cover her, and Millie moved one of the lanterns from behind it so she would only cast a nominal shadow while she dressed. Not only because she didn’t particularly want to entice him further, but because his presence in her rooms caused little jolts of anxiety and awareness to sing along her veins. Everything she did took on a distinctly erotic undertone. The whisper of her silk robe over her skin when she slipped it off. The heavy warmth of the velvet dress. When she tucked, and tied, and shimmied into it, she could feel an extra tingle in her breasts, was aware of the feminine curve of her waist beneath her corset. She thought of all the places that might be bared to him later. All the places where he would put his hands.

Or his mouth.

Millie suddenly felt dizzy, and succumbed to her own need to sit down as her head swam. Though she didn’t look at him, she could sense the assassin’s eyes on her as she made her way to her dressing table. Somehow, she knew that despite her efforts, he’d watched her shadow behind the screen.

“Did you get enough to eat, Jakub?” she asked, glancing toward her son in the corner as she lowered herself in front of the large mirror. “Jakub?
Kochanie?
”

Lost to his paints, he didn’t even acknowledge her.

Which left her only one companion for conversation, the terse giant with the startling eyes.

Drat.

Fumbling for her rouge, she refused to look at him as she added more color to her cheeks. Her hand paused just as the brush reached her face. Even beneath the makeup, it was obvious her color was unnaturally high. She reached for her lip rouge instead. Try as she might, she simply couldn’t ignore her assassin-turned-protector. It was utterly impossible. He sat so immense and motionless and silent.

She hazarded a glance at him, if only to make certain he still breathed.

Which, indeed, he did, his big chest lifting and flexing beneath his suit coat. He gazed at her with unparalleled intensity, watching the movements of her fingers with undue interest.

Clearing nerves from her throat, she met his eyes in the mirror and was startled to see that he was the first one to look away.

“Do you enjoy the theater, Mr. Argent?” She ventured a moment of civility.

“I’ve only attended the once,” he replied, seeming to study a wig of long crimson ringlets, going so far as to reach out and test its texture between his thumb and forefinger.

Millie had to look away. “And … did you like it?” she prompted. When she gathered the courage to glimpse at him again, she was surprised to see him seriously considering the question.

“Your performance was without a single flaw,” he said with no trace of flattery or farce in his voice. “But I find myself unable to suspend disbelief in the manner that is required to truly enjoy a production. I don’t understand why people dress in their finest to watch others pretend to be in love. To feign jealousy and cruelty and even death. Why
play
at fighting and killing? There’s plenty to be done out in the real world.”

And he’d done plenty of his own.

Millie swallowed audibly, trying to decide whether to be pleased at his honest compliment, or to be offended by his dismissal of her entire profession. “Not all of us live a life as exciting and treacherous as yours, Mr. Argent,” she said as she added a few more jeweled pins to her intricate coiffure, if only to give her restless hands something to do. “Most of us merely like to be kissed by danger or violence or death. Maybe even let it kiss us, upon occasion. We like to make it a spectacle at which to gasp and laugh, or cry. Though it is only the thrill we want to take home with us, not the reality. We still desire to return to our warm beds, all safe and sound, when the night is over.” She considered her words only after she’d said them. She was taking the danger home with her tonight, wasn’t she? There was a very good chance her bed would be anything but safe.

And, Lord forgive her, it was more thrilling than she’d like to admit.

“But not everyone makes it home safe and sound,” he rumbled.

Not with men like him about.

Millie’s heart stalled and her hand froze halfway to her hair. “True…” She drew the word out, searching for what to say next. “But we expect to. We hope to, don’t we?”

“I know nothing of hope.” He leaned forward and placed his elbows on his long, powerful legs. “So people attend the theater to feel afraid and safe at the same time?”

Millie chewed her lip, considering her words carefully. “Sometimes, surely, but mostly they go to play voyeur to the human experience. Drama, I think, does one of two things for a person, it allows us to be a little more grateful for the humdrum of the everyday, or makes us yearn for something above whom and what we are. It can remind us to not let every moment slip into the next without reaching for more. Whether we reach within ourselves or for something we want out in the world. A dream, a home, money, adventure … or love.”

Feeling impassioned, she turned in her seat to gesture at him. “Drama can make you experience the very extremes of emotion. A good playwright, Shakespeare, for example, can use language to allow an actor to convey an emotion that resonates with the audience. That allows them—sometimes even forces them—to
feel
. Coupled with the performance and the right music and lighting … I think that emotion is contagious and complex, and often a person doesn’t know which until they experience it under the Bard’s very own tutelage. It’s quite extraordinary, really, almost magical and—” Millie let her voice die away, noticing that Christopher Argent hadn’t blinked for an astonishingly long time.

In the middle of her dressing room, done in all shades of chaos and color, he was a monochromatic study in dove and granite. All but for his eyes and hair, both of which were uncommon in their variegation. His jaw was too wide to be called handsome, his mouth too caustic for its fullness, surrounded by brackets that made him look alternately cruel and somehow inanimate. His eyes made him appear ancient. Not so much in years, but in experience.

What horrors he must have seen in his life, some of them perpetrated by his own hands.

“Forgive me,” she breathed, entranced by the moment, as though he were a serpent and she his prey, mesmerized by his menace. “I do tend to get carried away.”

He once more brushed aside her words. “You have … experienced all these emotions?”

What an odd question. “Most of them, yes.”

“Are you—in love—with someone?”

She hadn’t realized that someone so still could become even more motionless. It was as though he’d stopped breathing in anticipation of her answer.

“No,” she answered honestly, and had the impression that his chest compressed.

“Have you ever been?”

“I can’t say that I have truly loved anyone, except Jakub.” She glanced at her son, still oblivious to the world around him, and then back to the assassin.

An expression flickered across his features, but was gone before she could identify it. This time when he looked at her, his eyes were gentler, somehow. Still frightfully opaque, but they had lost some of their frost.

“Do you wish to be in love?”

Had any other man asked, she’d have told him that it was no business of his. She’d have lied or misdirected him somehow, to avoid the question. But behind the callousness of Christopher Argent’s expression was an earnest curiosity. A lack of judgment or malice.

It was a sincere question that deserved a sincere answer.

“I—I’m never really certain. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Shakespeare, from most any playwright, it is that love is just as dangerous an emotion as hatred or anger or the lust for power. I think love can make you a stranger, even to yourself. Maybe even a monster. It can be a wild creature just waiting to be unbound. A beast. A feral and selfish thing that will turn you against the world, against nature or reason, against God, Himself. And every time I’m tempted to allow myself to fall, I wonder … is it worth the risk?”

His brows drew together. “What if there is no risk? What if God, if He even exists, has turned away from you, and so to turn from Him would be no great sin? There would be nothing in the way of reaching for what you wanted.”

Millie blinked, startled by his bleak assessment. “Is that what is going on here? Do you believe God has forsaken you, and so you no longer fear Him? Is that how you’re able to…” She paused, checking on Jakub to make certain he wasn’t listening in. “To
do
what it is that you
do
?”

He lifted his massive shoulders in a dismissive gesture. “Perhaps. I have no fear of God.”

“So you do not believe in heaven?”

“This world is all I know.”

“What about hell, the devil? Are you not afraid you’ll have to answer for your sins, for the blood you’ve spilled?”

He shook his head, a more adamant gesture than she could remember him making—apart from the times he’d kissed her.

“I do not know what happens when this life is over; therefore it does little good to speculate. All I know for certain is that God and the devil are symbols. Beings greater than ourselves to be loved or feared, blessed or blamed. And to me it doesn’t matter which. It is an easy thing to commit a sin and say that ‘the devil made me do it,’ and then cast that sin on him. But this life has taught me that we make ourselves into the monsters that we are. That the blood we spill is on our own hands.

“I’ve been able to cast my burdens on no one’s shoulders but my own. Carrying them makes me strong, and I’ve needed that strength to survive. For God has never saved me from the evil I’ve seen in the eyes of men. And it’s hard for me to imagine that hell is worse than some of the places I’ve already been. So instead of fearing that which I do not know, I’ve made of myself a symbol, of sorts. A man to be feared, whose vengeance is immediate rather than ultimate, and for many so-called godly men, my form of justice is effective.” This time it was Argent who seemed to remember himself, and clamped his hard jaw shut.

Millie wondered if that might be the longest he’d ever spoken at one time. Even though his tone had been dispassionate, his words carried with them a cavernous sort of pain. Only hell could spit out such a cold and lethal man, surely.

“Do you mean for me to fear you, Mr. Argent?” she whispered solemnly, not for the first time dreading the devil’s bargain she’d made.

“I do not blame you if you fear me,” he answered, his eyes nearly meeting hers. “But for all that is unknown, you can be unequivocally certain that I do not wish you harmed.”

Mutely, Millie nodded and turned back to her mirror, unable to bear the intensity between them as he watched her smooth crimson color on her lips. A small vine of sadness appeared beneath her ribs and blossomed into compassion. What he must have endured to fashion him into the heartless killer he’d become, she thought.

Millie knew she understood him better now, but that didn’t mean she feared him any less.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

“I have to use the necessary.” The boy standing next to Argent bent his knees and blinked up at him with a grimace.

Argent frowned as he glanced from a luminous Millie on stage, to her light-haired boy, and back. “Can’t it wait until she’s finished?” he asked.

“I’ve already been trying, but Mama said not to leave your side. It’s critical. I’m afraid I won’t make it until she’s done with the scene.”

It was
the
scene, as well. The one where she died and had to remain on stage for a long while.

Swearing under his breath, Argent glanced around the backstage area. People bustled about in Elizabethan costumes, ducking around ropes, pulleys, curtains, props, and each other. It was difficult to be vigilant with this much chaos. Argent knew he couldn’t relax until he’d taken her somewhere safe.

And alone.

He didn’t want to take his eyes off Millie. He’d known her to be exquisitely beautiful, but before tonight, she’d been just that. A rare and dark gem, sparkling despite the danger and blood surrounding her. Something to be possessed. To bring him pleasure.

Something he coveted.

But now, after he’d seen the passion in her eyes, watched her gesture with fervency and emotion and animated affectation …

“Mr. Argent.” Jakub tugged on his arm with urgency.

He knew she’d be relatively safe on stage in front of a thousand people. Millie had told him that her son was to be his first priority. If there was a good time to take the boy, this would be it. “Where is the closest one?”

“In the dressing room.”

“Why didn’t you go before we left the dressing room?”

“I didn’t have to go then.”

He glanced sharply down at the boy once more, wondering if all children lacked any kind of foresight. “You must hurry, understand?”

“I promise.”

Millie’s dressing room was visible from backstage, and Argent followed the boy to it, amused at how the child walked with his knees together.

The dressing room seemed less brilliant and filled with more useless clutter without Millie there. Argent swept through the room and checked every corner and hiding place before he returned to the door to allow Jakub some privacy.

The boy hurried, as he’d promised, but dawdled at his painting corner.

“Come on then.” Argent gestured to the door.

“I just have to take something with me.” Jakub bent to retrieve two boxes and a long brush. “These are too valuable to be left—” A sound of terror escaped the child, just as a slow creak of the door closing behind Argent ripped a chill through his already taut muscles. He whirled to see the gleam of muddy eyes he’d thought never to encounter again.