Lip curling up at him, she rolled her eyes. “Why do you act like this?”
“Act like what?” He sat up, snapping the twig she’d been flicking at in half.
“This.” She fluttered her fingers in his face. “All ‘my pet’ this and ‘my pet’ that. I don’t like it.”
“You don’t like it.” His words were flat.
“Not if you don’t mean it.” Wait? What? She hadn’t meant to say that.
Nixie wasn’t sure what it was about her words that’d made the flirtatious twinkle in his eyes die out, but suddenly she wasn’t staring at the irreverent Robin, but the one he was around his men.
The cold, silent leader who saw so much more than what met the eyes. A ruthless, cunning man stared back at her.
She felt silly for having blurted that out in such a way that it made her sound sorta psycho, it wasn’t like they were dating or anything. He was her master, he could address her anyway he liked, and yet…at least in the privacy of her mind she could admit that she hated it. Hated to hear him use a term of endearment in a way that meant nothing to him.
She sighed. “I’m sorry. You can call me whatever you—”
“You wish to know the way my mind works, is that it.”
It wasn’t really a question, so she didn’t treat it as one. Nixie nibbled on a corner of her lip, stomach suddenly growling with a need for food. There was food inside her lamp. All she’d have to do was slip inside and she’d have a nice, warm bed. Whatever food she liked, but the thought of going back in there, it made her want to cry.
Everything in there was fake, just a mirage, smoke and mirrors. The wind wasn’t real, her parents weren’t real, the beautiful Chicago skyline wasn’t real…none of it was real. This was real. The night. The fire.
Him.
Raising his legs, Robin crossed his arms over his knees and stared out at the flat, open stretch of forest. Robin had been very meticulous in where he’d chosen their camp tonight. She’d yet to see another living soul aside from him and his men, and yet, he constantly acted as though they were being followed.
Maybe all his years of hiding, of running from the law of his land had made him overly shifty and nervous. Then again, maybe his stories were entirely wrong, and Robin wasn’t running from the law at all. Maybe he lived in a nice hut, surrounded by a bunch of sweaty, smelly men who looked to sit around the campfire and make fart jokes all day.
Hell if she knew.
“Long ago I shut myself off. Turned off my emotions,” he answered his own question. But his eyes were distant, staring at a spot over her shoulder; he looked like he wasn’t even aware she was there anymore, like he was just speaking aloud to himself.
Nixie wanted to turn around, to look at whatever it was he did, but she didn’t dare for fear of breaking the spell. Instead she ran her fingers up the pink silk seam of her pants and screwed up her courage to say, “You have emotions. I’ve seen them.”
“No.” He finally looked at her, his electric-blue eyes glowed hypnotically, making her pulse pound and her legs feel weak and unsteady.
She was grateful she was sitting.
Beautiful eyes. Such beautiful eyes. She’d always thought it was a man’s smile that was her kryptonite, but Nixie was discovering that eyes held just as much appeal.
“What you see, what they all see, it’s my mask.” His voice was cold, inflectionless. “I’m sure there are emotions buried deep, but I’ve long since forgotten what they feel like. There is only one that feeds me now.”
She frowned. The night felt suddenly overwhelming and oppressive. Like she shouldn’t speak above a whisper for fear they’d be overheard—even though she could hear nothing heavier than the tread of animal paws around them.
“What feeds you?”
His look was cold, blank, when he said, “Vengeance. When you see me laugh, or erupt, or tease, it’s an act. It’s all an act.”
“I don’t believe that’s true.”
“How would you know? You know nothing of me, pet,” he sneered the last. “If you knew what I’ve seen, the things that’d been done to me, you would understand.”
“No.” She shook her head harder. Back on Earth, Nixie had been set on studying criminal psychology. She’d always been fascinated by the darkness of the mind, the places where it could take men, even good, brave men. The propensity even the sanest had for evil was a simple fact of human nature.
Strip a human down to their basest form and they were really nothing more than animals.
Of course, she’d never gotten the chance to do much more than enroll in college for it before she’d been snatched away, but all her life Nixie had had an obsession with studying the human mind.