Kiss of a Dark Moon (5 page)

 

He leaned against a tree, chest lifting in ragged breaths that sawed from his lips as he listened to the light footsteps of Kit March as she moved across the street. He dared not look. Not if he wanted to remain where he was. In his mind he could see her. Her tan legs, her sweet ass, round and firm in her boxers. That was temptation enough.

That's it. Run. Run fast. Run far.

He could still smell her. Clean woman. Her mild scented soap. She had showered, but he still detected on her the faint vanilla from earlier in the evening.

Dragging a hand through his hair, he glanced at the watching moon and cursed. His cock pushed painfully against his jeans, begging for relief. The relief he could have had moments ago. With Kit March.

She hadn't wanted him to stop. At least her body hadn't. He could have persuaded her, could have pushed those boxers down her hips, wrapped her legs around him, and slid inside her heat right there against that tree.

It would have been good. Great.

Wrong.

He heard a door open and shut as she entered her house and he heaved a sigh of relief. Hands clenched at his sides, he beat the back of his head against the tree, punishing himself, feeling more alone than he had ever felt before. Bereft. Even worse than when his mother banished him and his brother to the mountains that summer, isolating them from the world. Freaks to be cut off from mankind.

The blood pumped through him, hot and thick. “Shit.” This assignment had just gone from tricky to total and utter shit.

He'd stepped over the line. In a big way.

It wouldn't happen again. Kit March was a job. Nothing more. He wouldn't let her get under his skin again.

K
it woke with a jolt, the remnants of a dream crumbling like dust around her. Chest heaving, she choked on air, a pair of familiar dark eyes flashing across her mind. Dark eyes with unusually bright centers.

Rubbing her chin, she sat up, immediately remembering the night before. Her breasts remembered, too, growing heavy at the memory of his fingers on her, tormenting her in the most wicked ways. Moaning, she fell back on her pillow and pulled the comforter to her neck.

She
so
needed sex. And not with some damn EFLA agent.

Sighing, she stared out the window. The gray dawn air washing the room somehow soothed her. Dawn. She always preferred this time of day. Even when the moon was at its peak, lycans would retreat and head for home at dawn. And so would she. A time of retreat. Rest. It meant she had survived another hunt.

“You look like a little girl when you sleep,” a deep voice murmured, cold as glacial wind.

Her hand dove beneath her pillow, and she lurched up in bed with the gun clasped and ready. For a moment she feared it was him, Rafe Santiago. Again.

That would explain why she was trembling.

There was something about him. Something more threatening to her than his association with EFLA and his not-so-subtle threats to her family. He rattled her. Made her belly tighten and breath come quick and hard.

Her eyes focused through the gloom to the large figure standing before her bed. Pewter-colored eyes glowed down at her.

Not Rafe.

But not someone she wanted to see, either. Even if he wasn't one of the oldest lycans on record, he was one tough-looking son of a bitch. Dressed from head to toe in black, he was the kind of guy who stood out in a crowd. Which was strange, considering he led a fairly discreet existence.

Handsome, she supposed, with a square jaw and hair so black it glowed blue in the light. His lips were well-carved but looked incapable of curving into a smile.

“Darius? What are you doing here?”

In the softening air, his unnerving stare raked over her. “Kit. Charming as always, I see.”

Lowering her gun, she snapped, “What do you want? Gideon's not here.”

Gideon called him friend, but she did not. Would not. He was a lycan. No different than the monsters she hunted. Like any other lycan. He was damned. Cursed. A predator. Even if he hadn't killed in generations. Even if he locked himself away every full moon to resist the overwhelming need to feed. Remove those walls, and he would kill, feed—on her. On Gideon. Friend or no. She could never forget that. Never trust him. And he knew that. Knew she thought he deserved a bullet in his head.

“I know he's not here,” Darius replied in strange formal accents that hinted at an age lived and lost within the annals of time. He moved closer, with all the grace and stealth of a jungle cat, eyes forever glowing.

She snorted. Of course. Her brother had probably given him an itinerary of their trip.

“Then why are you here?” She pulled the sheets higher, trying to pretend his presence did not affect her, did not make her uneasy. She was accustomed to being around lycans—just not to conversing with them as though they were anything less than bloodthirsty monsters.

A deep breath rattled loose from his chest, a hint of humanity she would never have credited he possessed. Several moments passed before he answered, his deep voice clipped. “Cooper's dead.”

His words penetrated slowly through her mind, like a pebble sinking through water. Still, she heard herself ask in a faint voice she did not recognize, “What?”

“Cooper's dead.” His lips barely moved as he spoke, and she wondered if he felt anything at all. Or was he every bit the cold bastard she'd always suspected.

“He can't be.” She shook her head. “He called here last night—”

“Trust me. He's dead.”

“No,” she insisted, her hands fisting under the sheets, her chest tightening. “Who told you this? How can you be sure?” The words flew out of her mouth as fast as gunfire. “Cooper wasn't exactly your friend. He only let you live because of Gideon. I doubt you made it to his call-in-case-of-an-emergency-list.”

She didn't want to believe him, wanted to deny his words, but she knew through Gideon that Darius had an uncanny way of knowing everything that went on in NODEAL and among the larger lycan packs in the city. He had informants everywhere. If Cooper were dead, he would likely know.

She supposed she shouldn't put it past him to know all the comings and goings of NODEAL—and EFLA, for that matter. The guy was richer than Donald Trump, living in a fortresslike mausoleum with a full staff to wait on his every whim. Not to mention a state-of-the-art research lab staffed with a pair of Caltech scientists working around the clock to find an antidote to his curse. What a joke. He didn't deserve a chance at redemption. The only thing staying her hand from reaching for her gun was Gideon.

Cooper. Dead.

A terrible pain, swift as wind, swept through her too-tight chest.

She could only shake her head. She should have kept calling last night. She should have driven over to Cooper's house. Done something. Anything.

“A delegation from EFLA has arrived in Houston.”

Her mind leapt to Rafe and his ominous dark eyes as he proclaimed himself an EFLA agent. “Yes. I met one of them—”

“You met one? When?” The hard line of his lips barely moved as he spoke.

“Last night.”

“And he let you go?”

She frowned, thinking over their tussle out in the street. Staring into Darius's chilly silver eyes, she knotted her hands in the sheet and replied, “Why shouldn't he?”

“For the very reason Cooper is dead,” he replied, his accents crisp. “EFLA wants you dead. You and Gideon. I'm guessing Cooper wouldn't go along with it.”

“He sounded…anxious on the message,” she murmured, her lips numb as they moved. She lifted one hand from the sheet and pressed it to her forehead. The skin felt tight and hot as a balloon in the sun, ready to burst.

Had Rafe Santiago been the one to pull the trigger? An angry burning sensation crept up her neck. She should have killed him last night, instead of letting him put his hands all over her. “I don't understand any of this. Why is it so important to kill us just because we go against—”

“A hit has been placed on you and Gideon. It's all over town. The packs are allying. You're not safe.”

“A hit?” she exclaimed, shaking her head. “That's absurd. Why are they going through so much trouble for us?”

“EFLA's in charge, Kit. It's what they've been working toward for over a century. They want to bring NODEAL to heel, rid it of all rogue agents and policy breakers. Gideon. You.”

She pressed both hands to her cheeks. “This can't be happening.”

“The top players with NODEAL wanted Cooper gone. They've never liked the way he handled the Houston division. They knew he tolerated Gideon and you.”

“So they killed him.”
Bastards.
She pressed her fingertips to her suddenly throbbing temples. “None of this makes sense. Even with everything I've heard about EFLA, I can't believe they would kill Cooper after all his years of service—that NODEAL would allow that to happen.”

“They believed him untrustworthy. Disloyal.”

She recalled Cooper's cryptic message, the urgency in his voice. She recalled the uneasy feeling in her stomach.

Darius's pewter-colored eyes glowed down at her, his face a granite mask, impenetrable, incapable of any expression that might reflect emotion. “It's time to get out of town.”

She studied him for a moment, his ink-black hair darker than the room's deepest shadows. Fury burned in her chest. She did not want to run. She wanted to make them pay. She owed Cooper that much. He had saved her life all those years ago. Hers and Gideon's.

“You'll be next,” Darius added, his voice matter-of-fact. Heartless bastard. “And Gideon.”

“Because we're rogue operators? They'll kill us?” Even for EFLA, known for its extreme measures in the hunting and exterminating of lycans, it seemed drastic. “I don't buy it. There's something more going on here.”

His silver eyes drilled into her, steady and piercing. “Maybe,” he replied vaguely. “But that doesn't change the fact that there's a hit on your life. Get out of town. And make certain Gideon stays away, too.”

Heat burned up her neck and to her face. She surged to her feet and faced him. “You don't think we're smart enough to outmaneuver these bastards? I've seen NODEAL's agents at work before. I'm not impressed. Half of them couldn't find their asses in the dark.”

“It's not NODEAL that concerns me.”

“EFLA, then?” An image of Rafe Santiago flashed through her mind. True, he possessed an aura of menace, but she knew his weakness now. Her face burned at the memory, and her breasts grew heavy. She. She was his weakness.

The skin near Darius's left eye twitched, the only indication that he was about to tell her something out of the ordinary. “They've released your identities.”

The skin at the back of her skull tightened, tingling as though pricked with a thousand needles, drawing forth a dull ache inside her head.

“What?” she whispered, dropping back on to the bed, the well-worn springs squeaking beneath her. She ran a hand through her waves, massaging her scalp with her fingertips. “Released our identities? To whom?”

“You understand my meaning,” he replied in that oddly formal fashion that hinted at an age lived and lost. “You're lucky to have survived the night. Lucky I got here first.”

She compressed her lips, deciding against telling him that he had not gotten to her first. Rafe had. Twice, the night before.

She nodded slowly. “They've released our identities to the lycan population.” She was lucky, indeed. Lucky Rafe had been her only late-night visitor.

“Do you know a better way to guarantee your death?”

“Every lycan in town knows who we are?” Her gaze darted about the room, almost as though she feared the monsters would spring out from the walls.

“If not yet, then soon enough. The packs have a network in place. Of sorts.” He smiled grimly. “As competitive as they are among themselves, they'll ally themselves in an effort to destroy you and Gideon. They despise hunters. And a female hunter such as you…”

His eerie silver gaze crawled over her. The air seemed to change, grow charged, electric. In that moment, she was reminded of just what he was. Danger. A predator ruled by hunger. Perhaps the most dangerous lycan of all, because he denied himself what he craved. She shivered, her gaze skimming the black strands of hair that reached his shoulders.

“They'll find you an irresistible challenge.” His chest lifted on a breath, and for a moment she thought he might approach her. Touch her.

Holding her breath, she tensed, bracing herself.

The moment passed, and he looked to the window, eyes narrowing as though he could see through the blinds. “I imagine they know where you live by now.” Moving to the window, he parted the blinds and peered out at the quiet morning. “Every moment you remain here you risk your life.”

She rose from the bed and began tossing things into her duffel bag. “I'll go,” she ground out, the bitterness filling her mouth, threatening to choke her.

Darius leaned back against the wall, arms crossed over his broad chest. Shoulders of a linebacker. “I'll escort you out.”

She snorted and sent him a sharp look. He still talked as if he lived in another century, further reminding her of the gulf between them—of what he was: the very thing she loathed. A bad taste filled her mouth as she studied him. “No, thanks.”

He dipped his head and looked down at her with those damnable silver eyes, his voice clipped and reproving, “Kit—”

“No.” She flung her last shirt into her bag and fought with the stubborn zipper, careful to keep her gaze away from him, knowing the full power of those lycan eyes, their ability to enthrall, if she let him get the better of her. No lycan had before. She'd be damned if one succeeded now—even if he was an ally of sorts. “I don't need your help.”

“No?” His voice was mocking, sharp with skepticism, and she knew what he was thinking. That if it weren't for him, she might very well have gone blithely about her business this morning. And found herself dead.

The zipper finally sang closed. Nostrils flaring, she slung the duffel over her shoulder, ready to move into the bathroom to gather her few things there.

“Thanks for warning me.” Even those words stuck in her throat. “Now go. I can handle myself.”

One of his dark brows lifted.

She motioned to the door, needing him gone, too flustered when he was around. “I don't need your help.”

“You mean you don't want it?”

She shrugged. “Whatever. I don't want it.”