Born of Fire

Shahara approached him like a hunting lorina. She stood over him with her feet braced wide apart. Her hand was as still and steady as any assassin’s he’d ever seen.

She aimed for his heart. There was no pity or trembling in any part of her. “I said open the door, convict. Or die.”

Syn stared up at her cold eyes, unable to believe he’d allowed her to deceive him so completely. So be it. He’d always been prepared for the possibility of death. Hell, he’d wanted to die since the day he’d lost Paden.

But he wasn’t about to die in a Ritadarion prison at the hands of an interrogator. He would sooner take his secrets to the grave.

And if she died with him, Nykyrian would have one less tracer after him.

“Shoot me,” he said calmly.

Her eyes narrowed. She grabbed him by the shirt collar and pulled him up to her face.

She pressed the cold, steel barrel against his cheek. “This is your last chance. Open the door.”

He shook his head slowly. “Fine,” Shahara snarled. “Then I’ll see you in hell.”





CHAPTER 4


Shahara stared at Syn’s blank gaze. Her mind screamed at her to kill him, but try as she might, she kept seeing the picture of him as a child with the girl gripping him. The haunted look in his eyes while he held onto the girl, the bruise on his young face, and she just couldn’t make herself pull the trigger.

Besides, she wasn’t a murderer. She’d only killed a dozen men in her career, all out of self-defense. Every instance left jagged scars on her soul and she had sworn she’d never kill again unless she absolutely had to.

Today, she didn’t have to.

With a fierce curse, she flung the weapon away from her and released him.

Syn lay on the floor, looking up at her with a taunting stare she found hard to tolerate.

Did nothing scare this man?

Did he want to die? If that was the case, then she was definitely in trouble. A man with a death wish couldn’t be controlled or intimidated.

“No stomach for it?” he asked bitterly.

She curled her lip at him. “Unlike you, I don’t find pleasure in killing people.”

Without responding to her words, he pushed himself off the floor and made his way into the bathroom. She told herself he deserved it, that he’d hurt more people in his career than she could count and he deserved to pay for his crimes. But it still didn’t shut down her conscience or keep it from nagging her.

She’d shot a defenseless man and broken the code of a seax. What she’d done was wrong and no matter what arguments she might make, deep inside, she knew it wasn’t justified.

When did I sink so low as to become one of the monsters I hunt? Caillen always said that if a person stared too long into the darkness, it would absorb them.

But she didn’t want to be one of the bad guys. Determined to try and redeem her cruelty, she followed him.

As she entered the bathroom, her gaze focused on his bare back and she gasped in shock.

Syn looked up from the doctor’s bag he was rummaging in and caught her horrified gaze in the mirror. “Thinking of ways to add to them?” His tone was frigid.

Slowly she shook her head, still transfixed by the awful scars crisscrossing the muscled planes of his back. She’d seen plenty of street people beaten by an enforcer’s glazen whip, had even received a lash or two herself by desperate felons, but never to the extent of what marred his flesh.

How could anyone survive such a beating?

No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t stop staring at them. “Are they from prison?”

Syn wiped a pungent smelling cloth over his wounded shoulder. “Some.”

“And the others?”

He looked over his shoulder and captured her gaze with his own. Something strange and primal darkened his eyes before they turned dead.

“My father,” he said simply.

Shahara bit her lip while Syn returned to tending his wound. She glanced away as he picked up a searer to seal the wound closed and did her best not to hear the sizzle of knitting flesh. She knew from her own experience how bad that hurt. To do it to himself . . . she was impressed.

And appalled.

Still she saw those scars. What could he have possibly done for his father to have beaten him so ferociously? “Did you deserve it?”

Syn tossed the searer down, then moved to stand right before her. She could feel his body heat, smell the masculine scent of his skin, and even though she was sure she imagined it, she could almost swear she heard his heart pound in fury.

She trailed her gaze up from the steely muscles of his chest to the bandage over his shoulder and finally up to the loathing that flickered in the black depths of his eyes. They were every bit as cold as space.

“Why else would he have beaten me?”