“Okay, I have to ask—we have to ask.” Kobal gestured between Raum and him when he rounded on her. “Why don’t you work with men? Both times we’ve all been together have been fucking amazing. Mind-blowing. Better than anything Raum or I had hoped for when we decided to start looking for a female to form a Triad with. And it’s not just the sex…we like you. We like having you around. Hell, Raum even talks when you’re around, and that’s more than a little unusual.” He shook his head, frustration stamped on his handsome features. “Even if it’s not to a bonding point for you, it still doesn’t make sense. You want to do your job well, anyone who’s met you can tell that, and the best way to do your job is to have a sexually amplified Triad. So, why?”
“I had a sexual bond with my first partner. It didn’t go well.” Understatement of the millennium. She wrapped her arms around herself defensively. The last thing she wanted was to talk about this in front of men she’d spent the night shagging. It was just sex. It had to be. Opening up was a mistake, letting anyone in was a mistake. Especially men she liked as much as she liked these men.
Something close to desperation shone in his blue eyes. “And you’re not willing to give it another chance?”
“No,” she said flatly.
“What happened?” He spread his hands and let them fall to his sides, the expression on his face making her chest tighten.
She closed her eyes and shook her head, her heart clenching. Telling them about her weakness and shame would help nothing. “That’s no one’s business but mine.”
“It would make it easier for us to understand why you don’t want us.” Those words from Raum stung. The rejection in his voice was like acid pouring over her skin.
Swallowing, she forced herself to meet his eyes. His expression made her flinch. His normal stoicism was gone, and his gaze reflected a deep pain that just made her want to sob. She hadn’t really cried in years, but it was all she could do to keep tears from welling in her eyes. It hurt her to hurt them, and she hated doing it. She wished she didn’t have to, wished her history had made her into a different person. Then again, when hadn’t she wished she could undo the damage Shax had done?
Maybe it would help them to understand why she could never give in. Maybe it would make them stop offering that sweet bond so openly. It was a punch to the gut to consider that the truth about her failures might turn them away from her entirely. That was what she wanted, wasn’t it? She shut down any protest from her soul. “He was my first partner—Shax.”
“What did he do to you?” Raum’s hand closed over the nape of her neck, the gesture one of support.
“Nothing. He didn’t do anything to me.” No, it was what he hadn’t done that made all the difference in the world. “I’d just come topside and Samael wanted to start me out with one partner at first, build me up to a Triad.”
She’d wanted to do the hunting rather than serving as a prison guard for the evil souls in hell. Active participation in shipping their sorry asses downstairs rather than just making sure they stayed locked there. She’d been determined to learn everything she could, but it had been harder than she’d ever imagined. Learning to blend in among humans was difficult, trying to stay in corporeal form was challenging, ripping a corrupted soul from its body was exhausting and had made her violently sick to her stomach the first few times. Shax had thought that meant she didn’t have what it took to be a hunter. He’d never said it, but they were bonded. She could sense his doubt in her, had felt that doubt coating her skin every time they’d gone out on assignment.
Her hand tightened on the elevator rail, a connection to the present when her mind was locked in the past. “Samael put me with one of his most experienced hunters, so he could show me the ropes. I think even Samael was surprised how deeply I bonded with Shax.”
Too deeply, it turned out, and Shax certainly hadn’t opened himself to the link as much as she had. But she’d never bonded before—there was no need for it below. They had all the power there. Not so much up here. She didn’t know how to keep any of herself back from the bond, hadn’t even known that she should.
“It was a rough transition to the hunter lifestyle, and he…didn’t think I had the chops to be a hunter.” Her own partner hadn’t thought she was good enough. How pathetic was that?
“Fool,” Raum growled. She could feel his anger as a palpable force in the elevator.
Kobal paced in the small space, and he made a sound of disgust in the back of his throat. “Did you put a blade in the asshole?”
She snorted, her eyes stinging. “No, I didn’t do anything to him.”
Though when she’d finally dug herself out of the pit of loss and despair, she’d wanted to. Her ex-partner had been damn lucky that Samael had shipped his ass to a silo in the swampy armpit of Africa—somewhere Shax was sure to despise. The high demon had immediately given her a new female partner and put her back to work, driving her relentlessly until she was too busy to think of Shax. It was probably the kindest thing her boss could have done for her—he hadn’t babied her at all. Combined with her burning need to prove Shax had been wrong about her, she’d risen to become one of the most productive hunters in their silo.
She pinned her gaze to the floor. She didn’t want to see the expressions on Kobal and Raum’s faces when she finished the ugly story. “We were out on a hunt one night, and it was a really bad one. I’d never come across a soul this evil, not even in hell.” She swallowed, trying not to recall how her gorge rose the moment that rotting stench had hit her nose. “It was bad.”
She felt Raum twitch beside her, and Kobal paused in his relentless pacing. Clearing her throat, she pushed on. Just get the story over and be done with it. “We caught him in the vortex, and started breaking his soul out of his body, but we were struggling to raise enough power to get it done. I poured everything I had into it, knowing the bond with Shax would hold me back from getting sucked in along with that ugly soul.”
“We’ve done that before. It can be effective,” Kobal interjected, but still she couldn’t look at him.
Because that kind of risk meant relying wholly on the bond, which she had. A mistake. “Shax didn’t think I had the power to finish it…and he thought if he kept the bond with me open, he’d be pulled in with me.”
The strangled sound Raum made had her flinching. Yeah. It was really that awful. She sometimes managed to convince herself that she’d made it worse in her mind, but no. The complete, utter selfish betrayal was as bad as she remembered.
“So, he cut our bond. Right there, in the middle of our soul retrieval. He walked away and didn’t look back.” Her stomach heaved as she said it.
“How did you manage to stop from getting sucked in?” Kobal’s voice was strained, a painful sound to hear.
She shook her head, never once looking up. “I don’t know. The best Samael can guess is that when the bond broke, I went into shock and slammed down all barriers on power, which cut the vortex too.”
“I didn’t know that was possible.” His feet began to thud against the floor again as he resumed walking around the car. “Once you commit to it that far…”
“I don’t know. It was days before I woke up in my apartment, and I wasn’t even in physical form. Samael had found me and brought me back. The soul escaped, and other hunters had to bring him in, but I was lucky I’d gone spirit form because he could have done anything he’d wanted to me. I was totally out of it. Comatose. I was that far gone without my bond to Shax.”