“What?” My hand stilled on my arm as he reached for my sleeve and ripped it. I was about to yell that cashmere didn’t come cheap when I glanced down at my bare arm. At first it looked like flaking skin to me, but then Hunter was peeling it away in strips, like dead skin lifting from a healing sunburn, but in neat, even rows. “What the-?”
The bronzed slivers lifted, and the scar I’d gotten four months earlier from a Shadow agent named Liam Burke appeared. I realized immediately I hadn’t seen it since applying the makeup Regan had left in the ladies’ room. I’d barely been aware of the itching since then; it’d been as subtle as the bite of a mosquito in summer, something to be slapped at, but not concerned with.
“Shit.” She hadn’t left it by accident. “It’s the makeup.”
“It’s a tracking device,” Hunter clarified, and peeled a thin, flexible strip from my arm.
I was a fucking idiot.
And Regan made a brutal man named Ajax, and a psychotic one named Joaquin, look like kittens at play. Of course she wasn’t going to come at me with guns blazing. Women fought differently. I knew that.
Hunter pulled out a knife and a pair of goggles from the stacked tool chest next to us, and I sat stone-still as he cut a giant cross through the center of my turtleneck, then angled the blade toward my chest. The cool tip whispered against my skin until it caught on the edge of the compound. Hunter picked at the edge carefully, close enough I could feel his breath on my earlobe as he worked, the dark hair that was only just growing out again falling across his forehead in front of me. The blade scratched, moving between us, and I kept my hands clasped in my lap. Yet with his head lowered, eyes covered and his hands busy, I could allow my gaze to fall to his lips, slightly parted as he concentrated on my skin. Damn.
“There are microscopic wires embedded in the compound. They flattened as you spread the makeup out, and hardened into a flat web of interconnected transmitters.” There was still no censure in his voice, and I was thankful for that.
“That’s how she found me at Master Comics,” I said, trying to think back to all the times the compound had itched, indicating the feed was live. “And tonight.”
“Where else did you apply it?”
“My calf,” I told him, then froze. Oh shit. “The back of my thigh.”
He lifted his gaze to mine, and for a moment wickedness lived in his smile. “Bend over, baby.”
“Ah, maybe I should do it myself,” I said, holding out a hand for the knife.
He sobered immediately, shaking his head. “You have to be sure to get it all, or else she might be able to lock in on you using the remnants.”
He wasn’t angling, and he wasn’t flirting. It was fact, and we both knew it, so I sighed and began taking off my clothes-including my tattered turtleneck-while Hunter went to retrieve a solution he said would neutralize the compound and a wide-angle edged scraper used for sculpting putty. “Is there a toy you don’t have?” I called as he retreated, but he dismissed me with a wave and kept walking.
The intervening minutes gave me time to order my thoughts. It was good that I’d come here. Warren might have had a few choice words to fling in my direction, but Hunter hadn’t gone on attack, and his words had loosened a knot that’d been forming inside me. I still needed to take responsibility for the results of my own actions…but I didn’t need to weigh myself down with Regan’s as well.
And as for Regan…
“Time to pay a little visit to the state prison,” I murmured, folding my pants. Because if Regan wanted to play hard and fast with lives she had no right to touch, then I would match her move to move. I’d attack her next by honing in on her soft spots, and when I reached the bruised center of her life?
I’d push.
Hunter returned with a vat of what looked like water but smelled like petrol. He carefully sat it on the drafting table, then stood back to regard me in all his cotton-and denim-clad glory while I wore nothing but two swaths of silk and lace, utterly exposed but for my scars.
Turning my back, I decided, would at least hide my nervousness. So would being a smartass. “Geez, Hunt. Taking quite a chance being alone with the girl who spawns heart-eating look-alikes, allows herself to be tagged by a Shadow, and unwittingly injures mortals. Aren’t you afraid of my ill chi too?”
“You didn’t murder Jasmine,” he reminded me lightly, as if that would make up for the rest. “And I’m not afraid of much.”
I released a breath I hadn’t even known I’d been holding, and didn’t even mind Hunter scenting my relief. It was going to be okay. He was the one person who’d been inside me in all ways but the physical, and he thought I was fine. He always had, and though I was grateful, I still didn’t understand why. I hadn’t been exactly stable to begin with. But that wasn’t something I wanted to get into right now. “But you’re afraid of me working at Valhalla, right?”
“Worried,” he corrected, without looking up. The scrape of the blade gave way to a gentle tugging, the compound being removed. “For you.”
“I can take care of myself,” I said, still wondering why he was so against it.
“Clearly.”
Okay, so I deserved that.
Hunter placed a warm palm on my back as he deposited a skin-colored strip into the vat. It bubbled, disintegrated, and dissolved. The remaining solution looked cracked. It was the exposed wires of the tracer now that the makeup had been destroyed. Damned clever.
“The tracer was itching while I was here. Will Regan find the warehouse?”
He shrugged and dropped another strip into the steel vat, then moved up to begin work on the back of my thigh. “I’m neutralizing them pretty quickly. I can’t imagine she’d get an immediate bead on your location, but even so, this place has more traps than even your body could ever hold.”
I glanced over my shoulder at him and sneered. “Nice.”
He smiled now that he’d forced a fighting response from me. “She’d never get in, but I’ll lock the wires in the tool chest if you’re worried. The reinforced steel will interfere with the reception too. Here, I need you to move.”
He lowered the stool I’d been sitting on to knee height, then pushed me forward so I was bending over it. There was nothing sexual in the movement, but I caught our reflection in a pair of safety goggles across from us-Hunter bent over me, the muscles twitching beneath one of those gorgeous round shoulders as he did his exacting work, and me in pink panties and a bra-and knew the scene would replay itself in my midnight memories, but with a different ending.
“She might wait for you to come out,” I said, voice lower than I intended it. Think of Ben. Think of anyone and anything else. Just don’t think of the man behind you, whose touch makes you totally insensible.
“Worried over my welfare? Touching,” he said, as he gently touched me. I braced my hands on the drafting table, trying to get my equilibrium back.
“Hey, she knows about you too, Hunter.” I shifted, sounding calm again as he pushed at my thigh. “She’s not one to easily forget.”
“So I’ll have to make sure I don’t accept any cover-up from her in the near future.” And before I could respond, he whipped his hand up to place a finger against my mouth, and smiled as he leaned close. “I know. Fuck off.”
But I was very suddenly aware of the length of him curled around my half-naked body, and the slight pressure against my lips didn’t make me want to either shut up or return the smile. God help me, it made me want to give that finger one good long lick, and suckle it until he brought me something more satisfying. My lips, pressed together and readied for a hard retort, softened at the thought, and Hunter’s eyes flashed dark. Humor fled us both, and the pressure against me increased fractionally.