Blood of the Wicked (11 page)

When he stepped into the tub, the first icy shock of it had him swearing through gritted teeth. Silas ducked his head under it, let bitterly cold rivulets glide over his sore back and thread over the stubborn hard-on he desperately wanted to kill.

Bad for business. Bad for his own peace of mind. Hell, he was bad for Jessie, and his head knew it. Screamed it at him. His body didn’t care. His body still remembered what she’d felt like as he shoved her hard against that damned wall and slid deeply inside her willing body.

Warm, wet. Willing. All his favorite adjectives.

“Fuck,” he hissed. The cold water treatment did exactly jack for him while his thoughts wandered over her naked curves. He cursed again, once more for the sheer aggravation of it, and changed the water back to hot.

Steam soon billowed as he braced himself beneath the spray and closed his eyes.

It’d been a long time since he’d contended with an eternal erection. It wasn’t something he particularly wanted to take care of now, not with Jessie in the next room, and he’d be damned if he resorted to his own hands when she actually
was
in the next damn room. He’d cope, deal. Overcome.

He always did.

When the mission was over, he’d—

Right
. He’d what?

Silas heaved out a hard breath, repositioned himself under the water. It slid down his back, hot rivulets working a warm, soothing trail across his aching shoulders. If he was going to be honest with himself, he knew there wasn’t going to be an
after this
. For anyone else,
after this
meant civilian life.

Work. Home. Family. Normal, everyday life.

The kind of shit he’d never figured out.

He braced his forearms against the broken tile and let himself sag, let the wall take some of the weight his knee throbbed under. Muscles rippled across his chest and shoulder, stiff with tension and the abuse he’d let the red-haired witch heap on him.

He felt like he’d been kicked down a fucking flight of stairs, and this after only one fight. Jesus, it was no wonder hunters over thirty became desk jockeys and team leaders. He wasn’t just pushing it at thirty-four, he was painting a solid gold bull’s-eye on his back.

Jaw clenching, he rested his forehead against his crossed forearms. He didn’t have to see the leather cord around his wrist to know it was there.

There’d be no desk in his future. No leading. And since Peterson had a thorn up his ass, no more Mission, either. Not after this operation ended.

As the water beat down on his tired body, washed over his tired thoughts, Silas couldn’t hear the door ease open. Didn’t see the silhouette as it moved across the tiny bathroom, and only too late realized what was happening as the curtain slid open. Before he could say anything, do anything, Jessie stepped into the tub with him.

Her eyes gleamed, quiet and dark, filled to the brim with a sympathy he didn’t know how to acknowledge. As if sensing it, as if she knew what warred in his mind, she waited. Her naked body glistened like marble in the poor light, her skin dappled by the water spraying off him. It rolled in wet rivulets, traced slim curves and the mouthwatering valleys of her body.

He stared at her. Swallowed hard. No words made it through the haze of primal lust and hot-blooded arousal, of deeply rooted alarm.

What the hell did a man say to a goddess?

Absently, even self-consciously, Jessie raised her long, slim arms and gathered her shoulder-length hair into a knot, scraped it back from her face. The motion drew his gaze to the bare curve of her breasts, pink-tipped and already hardened to puckered points. Because of the cooler air?

Because of him?

His gut clenched. “Jessie—”

“I think—”

She stopped, bit her lip. Her white teeth left an indent that Silas desperately wanted to taste, to tongue away.

She’d let him. He knew she would, and she’d like it.

It took monumental effort, but he didn’t reach for her. Muscles locked tightly against every instinct screaming in the back of his mind, he forcefully fisted his hands behind him. Very carefully shifted away from the inhuman temptation of her soft, wet, naked body.

Humor, challenge lit her eyes to gold. “You’re one of those men that think sex is something else, aren’t you?”

Shit. Jesus. “Exactly the opposite,” he said flatly. “Sex is sex. Two people, two orgasms.”

“Only two?”

Oh, fuck
. Silas laughed hoarsely, surprise and amusement and, damn it, appreciation sliding through him. And need. God, the need. “At least two.”

Jessie slid forward, bare feet gliding effortlessly across the slick tub. He sucked in a breath, smelled her scent on the steam. Something sweet, something soft. Jesus, even her skin smelled like sex.

Dangerous, debilitating, mind-bending sex.

His chest muscles jerked as she laid both palms on him. The sudden flex mimicked the sudden velocity of his heart, the thunderous rush of blood pounding in his ears. “Don’t,” he warned through gritted teeth.

She paused. Didn’t move. “You’ve said that before,” she said lightly. “Do you mean it?”

Yes, fuck, yes, hell, yes.

Silas searched her eyes, fought with himself. With his own pulse and his own craving. She was a witch’s sister. She was going to loathe him for killing her brother.

She was going to get hurt. Maybe even killed.

No, he didn’t mean it.
Idiot
. Hell, no.

Silas closed his eyes against the searching uncertainty buried deeply behind her smile, nearly groaned under the sheer torture of it as her fingers slid over his wet skin. Edged into the aching muscle and skimmed across his left nipple. “Jess, I’m not—”

Her fingers curved, nails dragged over his skin. He shuddered. Uncoiled like a spring wound too tight.

“Damn it.” Silas pulled her into the hot water. She tripped on her own feet, gasped and laughed as he whirled her around and plastered her back to the tile. She hooked a limber, damp leg around his hip, met his eyes in fierce appreciation. His body hummed—hell—
roared
approval as she arched into the water, into him nestled between her legs.

As if she’d been made for him. To fit him.

So wrong. Silas’s thoughts fractured into a thousand shards at the sleek, wet warmth of her body stroking his straining cock. Beckoning. His hips jerked, slid against her flesh, and he swore viciously as her heat scorched him to the bone.

So, so hot.

Jessie wrapped her hands around the back of his neck, cheeks flushed, and bit out a cry as he stroked himself against her, coated himself with her. Breath hitched, her lashes swept down to shadow her cheeks. Silas thought she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in this godforsaken world.

He couldn’t do this to her. He knew he’d walk away, and she’d have only a corpse to remember him by.

“Jess,” he groaned, unable to help himself. Unable to stop, damn it. “This isn’t—”

“Don’t.” Her eyes sparkled, snapped, as she opened them to meet his gaze. “Don’t think. Stop thinking.” Her hips rolled, twisted, and he snapped his teeth on a groan as every nerve from crotch to brain sparked.

Detonated.

“Not here,” he managed, incoherent with need. He palmed her breasts in both hands, rolled her nipples between his fingers until she cried out. “Not here. Damn it—”

Half laughing, half whimpering under his assault, Jessie uncurled her leg from his hip and kicked the faucet. Once, twice. The water trickled off. Silas pulled her close, crushed his mouth to hers as he yanked her off her feet and guided her legs around his waist.

She hooked her ankles in the small of his back, devoured his kiss with as much desperation as the wild need clawing inside his skin. She bit his lip, licked it when he grunted in mingled pleasure and pain. Laughed against the wet curve of his neck when it took him three tries to get the goddamned door open.

Wet, shivering, he wrapped his arms tight under her amazing ass, found the bedroom by luck. She speared her fingers through his hair, sank her teeth delicately into the sensitive shell of his ear.

Cursing, Silas tumbled them into the double bed, into the nest of colorful blankets, and covered her body with his own. She was all long limbs and soft skin, damp heat and, God, her laughter. Like sex in the sunshine.

“Now,” she demanded, breathy and wanton. She grabbed his hair, spread her legs for him. “Now!”

Silas obliged. His arms braced against the mattress, he pushed himself up, met her eyes, and buried himself to the hilt inside her. For a second, a single split second, his vision went black. Pleasure ripped through him, tore bloody furrows across the chains of his control, and he moved before he was ready. Before she was ready.

She moaned, locked her legs tighter around him as she reached blindly for something, anything to hold on to. He thrust into her, pulled out, angled his hips and slid himself against a spot that made her seize the blankets in both hands and cry out his name.

Heat spiraled into blatant greed, but Silas wrestled with his own control. Struggled to tame the angry edge of his desire. He watched Jessie writhe beneath him. Her eyes tightly closed, her skin flushed, he stroked long and hard and deep inside her.

He watched her mouth twist, watched her clamp down on her lower lip. Fight herself.

“Come on,” he whispered hoarsely. God damn it, he’d barely survived the first time. “Come on. Don’t wait—”

Jessie arched, breasts thrust so close he couldn’t stop himself from tasting them. Lowering his head and drawing one nipple into his mouth even as he thrust again and again. Bit down hard enough to feel her shudder and clench around him.

“More,” he demanded against her heated, damp skin. Sweat blossomed across his back, gathered over his shoulders as he fought to reclaim himself. To watch her come apart beneath him, hands buried in the blankets.

She did. Holy God, she did.

Her eyes snapped open, ethereal gold against the tangled waves of her burnished hair. Bottomless, half blind with pleasure and lust, he read her climax there first, felt it follow as her muscles clenched hard around him. He lost it.

Lost the battle, lost himself.

Jessie’s hips bucked as he thrust hard and deep, rose to meet him as he shuddered. Smooth, tight, she clamped around him so powerfully he gritted out something wordless, something guttural as his own orgasm left him without thought or reason.

He didn’t collapse on her. It was a near thing, but he caught himself before he crushed her to the mattress. Braced on his elbows, balls-deep inside her pulsing flesh, he gasped for breath against her shoulder and tried to remember what it was like to think. To breathe.

Her heart pounded wildly against his ear. Around his body.

In his head.

Fuck
.

Jessie stirred, stretched languidly beneath him. “Silas?”

He raised his head, met her muted, steady gaze, and everything inside him braced for impact.
Shit
, here it’d come. The declarations, the recriminations.

But she only raised one hand to his, skimmed his left wrist. The tattoo. “Who’s Nina?” she asked.

Chapter Twelve

S
he’d made a mistake. As soon as the question slid out of her mouth, she’d sensed him flinch, felt him withdraw mentally as much as he did physically, sliding out of her and rolling away.

Now he hunted for something to cover up with, and she wasn’t sure how to ask again. If she should.

If she wanted to know the answer.

Jessie propped her chin on her palm and studied his profile as he wrapped a blanket around his waist. She didn’t bother. Naked, shivering a little as the sweat cooled on her skin, she watched light play across his broad shoulders and edgily defined muscle.

He had an amazing body.

That probably belonged to someone else.

That would never, ever belong to her even if it didn’t. Jessie slid out of bed, pulling a blanket with her. “I’m not going to go all clingy and demanding on you,” she said, struggling to keep her voice light. Easy. “If you have a wife somewhere, I underst—”

He turned so fast, she barely registered the motion. He was simply there, a sudden frenetic beat of energy that overwhelmed her senses, made her flinch as he thrust his face in too close to hers. His eyes blazed. “No,” he cut in, a single syllable of serrated fury. “Don’t push. Not on this.”

She blinked, barely cognizant of his fingers like iron bands at her upper arms. Half-raised on her toes, she stared into his gray-green eyes and saw the same anger, the same pain that she’d
seen
when he’d stood in front of his Mission team.

Felt it like shards of glass, brittle and sharp.

Her throat ached around a sudden lump of grief. “Oh, Silas.” The tears rose from nowhere, sympathy, bitter compassion.

Understanding.

The sharp edges of his fury softened, rearranged to something repentant, fiercely uncomfortable. “Don’t,” he said again. Silas let go of her arms to cup her face. Swiped at her tears with callused thumbs. “Jesus Christ, don’t do that.”

Jessie couldn’t stop her watery laugh. “Don’t sympathize?”

“Don’t cry.” He gathered her close, wrapped strong, bare arms around her back. Tucked her head against his chest. “Not for me, Jess. There are better things.”

Were there? Really? She inhaled deeply, took in the scent of his skin. Strong, musky. Masculine. Her shoulders twisted. “It’s just—”

What?

Just that he seemed so alone? So unhappy? That she knew what it was to feel both? To feel for him? Her brother’s hunter?

She squeezed her eyes shut. Battled back her tears, her idiocy. Sympathy wouldn’t help her. It’d only get her killed.

He stroked his hands over her hair, over her back, and rested his chin on top of her head. “You really want to know?” he asked quietly.

Jessie drew back. Studied his face. Did she?

Her mouth shaped the word before her brain could argue. “Yes.”

Silas’s eyes closed. “Nina Arbor was fourteen when a coven of witches kidnapped her from school. She was the third in as many weeks, and I was fresh out of training.”

Witches. Of course. Jessie slid her hands over his hips, hooked her thumbs into the rolled blanket.

“It was supposed to be in and out,” he continued as his fingers skimmed over the bare skin of her back, traced over the patch of ink stamped crookedly over her spine. She shivered. “As easy as it gets. A lead, two field agents, a tech.”

“Except?” she prompted when he fell silent. “Something went wrong?” Beneath her cheek, his heart thudded steadily. She flattened her palm against his muscles, felt him suck in a deep breath.

“Yeah,” he replied on a hard exhale. “I wanted to take them down. So I made the call. The two field agents went in, started taking out the guards, and I went in around them.”

Jessie’s chest squeezed. His voice was flat, as cool as if he read it all from a report. She pressed her lips to his shoulder, barely even a whisper of a kiss.

“The tech covered my six best as he could, but I was on my own. I found Nina by her screams.” His voice roughened, snarling somewhere in his chest. “The bastards had cut her. For the ritual, they—they took her blood, cut her open.”

Oh, God
. Acid sizzled in her stomach. Blood was a damn good focus. Her hands tightened at his waist.

“With a black knife,” Silas said hoarsely. “And she looked up at me with these— Fuck.” He cleared his throat. “She looked at me with these big blue eyes and smiled. Terrified, but she smiled like she knew I was going to make it all right.”

His fingers tangled into her hair, and Jessie could only close her eyes at his pain that festered so deep, to the bone.

“I didn’t wait. I killed the bastard with the knife, but there were three others. One came at me, and one just . . .” Rigid with strain, Silas dropped his forehead to her temple and let out a tight, angry breath. “One just pulled out a gun and shot her. Right in the head. That little girl’s brains splattered over the altar before he turned the gun on the other witches and shot them, too. I killed him before he could do it himself.”

Jessie closed her eyes. “Oh, Silas.”

“The worst part,” he said, his breath hot at her cheek, shaking. “The worst part was the communication. They were ready. Knew what to do if they were interrupted. Had a contingency. I found Molly’s body on my way out, and when I heard the explosion, I got there in time to see Paul’s corpse hit the dirt by the truck.”

She shuddered, cringed when his arms tightened around her. He shouldn’t do it, she shouldn’t let him, but she couldn’t stop it. Didn’t want to. She eased closer, tucked herself so close that she fed on his body heat. Tried desperately to give her own.

He met her searching gaze, his own raw and fogged with pain, with the memories that slid under his skin like broken glass. His smile drew blood, it was so sharp. “Hardly a complete waste,” he said in gritty, mocking optimism. “Jonas killed two before the blast shattered every goddamned bone in his body and left him maimed for life.”

Oh, God. Tears slid over her cheeks. She framed Silas’s face in her hands. “Oh, no. No, don’t do that,” she whispered unhappily. “Don’t make it so . . . so soulless.”

He curled his hands around her wrists. Held on as much as holding her away. “It is soulless,” he said flatly. “We go in, we kill, we leave. Everything dies, in the end. Every one of them. Do you understand that?”

Her breath sobbed out on mingled anger and grief. She knew it. She knew it too well, and all she could do was shake her head.

“Don’t you get it? Witches kill, Jessie, and they— Son of a
bitch
.” Silas yanked her hands from his face, violently wrenched her away from his body. She teetered, but he held her steady, one long-fingered hand viselike around both wrists. Kept her from falling, from fleeing. His eyes burned into hers. “Witches kill and maim and destroy. Your brother kills, maims, and destroys. You wanted to know. Now you know. Don’t think it’ll change anything.”

It changed everything. And it changed nothing at all. She’d known it already.

She raised her chin, met his eyes. He’d just given her one less lie, that was all this meant. It changed nothing.

God damn it. It changed nothing.

Silas’s jaw set. “Say you understand, Jessie.”

She did. More than he knew. So she twisted, just enough, and the blanket unwound, pooled to the floor in a stream of color. Naked, trapped by his grip on her wrists, she stepped into him. Naked skin to half-naked skin.

Curve to hard muscle.

His eyes darkened. “Say it.” But his muscles strained, as if he desperately wanted to push her away. Desperately needed to pull her closer.

Heart pounding, Jessie licked her lips. “I underst—”

He bent his head, swallowed her words with a kiss that set the world on fire. Angry, aggressive, he stripped the blanket from his waist and backed her toward the bed. He found her damp core with hot, searching fingers and worked her body until she twisted, needing.

She sobbed his name as she came, forgot everything but torturous pleasure and liquid heat when he thrust inside her and began all over again.

When they were both exhausted, tangled in the blankets and each other, Jessie listened to the steady thrum of his heartbeat under her ear and knew, understood, that Silas Smith was going to be the death of her.

If he didn’t kill her, Caleb’s prophecies would.