Total pages in book: 58
Estimated words: 53656 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 268(@200wpm)___ 215(@250wpm)___ 179(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 53656 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 268(@200wpm)___ 215(@250wpm)___ 179(@300wpm)
“Any news?” she asked when I hadn't responded.
“Some,” I said, snapping back to the present and offering her my wrist.
“I'm okay,” she said, but I gave her incredulous look.
“Drink,” I said. “There’s no reason at all to go to bed hungry. Not when I'm in it.”
She licked my wrist before sinking her fangs into it, and I groaned at the delightful sensation of her pulling my essence into her mouth. She swallowed a few mouthfuls before pulling back and licking the wounds closed. “Happy?”
“Very,” I said. “Warrick is doing well in training, and is being treated like every other potential assassin.”
“You asked about Warrick?”
“I did,” I answered, tilting my head. “Why the look of surprise?”
“It's just that...I didn't think that information was pertinent to the mission.”
I traced the line of her bare arm with the tip of my finger, struggling to find the right words. “I knew you'd want to know,” I said finally.
Something shifted in her gaze, those beautiful dark eyes studying mine with an openness and gratefulness that penetrated my heart.
“Thank you,” she said. “Anything else?”
“Zachariah and the rest were able to save some of those families you identified.”
She breathed a sigh of relief and nodded. “That's good. Every innocent family we save from the Sons of Honor, and quite possibly my brother or yours, brings us one step closer to beating them.”
I nodded and rolled to my back, stretching out my arm and welcoming her as she scooted up to my side and laid her head on my chest. The move was more natural than it should be, but it felt too damn right to question it.
“I wish we had more information to give Zachariah,” she said almost apologetically.
“We will,” I said. “We might be driven mad by the horrors of this place by the end of it, but we'll have the information we need.”
Cassandra chuckled, turning her head to look up at me. “That’s both horrible and optimistic.”
I shrugged.
She started tracing random shapes on my chest, furrowing her brow.
“What's that look for?” I asked.
“I was just wondering how hard it is to be away from your brothers, the other hunters? You’ve all been hunting together for centuries, and now I've...this mission has ripped you away from them.”
“We've been put in harder situations,” I said. “I miss them, but I was ordered by the king to be here. So here I am.”
“Tell me about one of those harder situations?” she asked, settling a little deeper against me.
I smirked down at her. “You want me to tell you a bedtime story, little viper?”
Cassandra smiled back before biting my chest, sucking up a quick mouthful of blood before licking the wounds closed. “I've decided that every time you call me a viper I'm going to bite you.”
I cocked a brow at her, my grin deepening. “That's a delightful little tidbit.”
“So are you going to tell me? Or should I keep biting you?”
“That's an incredibly hard choice,” I said, but I knew deep down what I needed to do. She’d given me a piece of her dark past, and I wanted to return the trust with that kind of story.
“I suppose the hardest thing we've ever had to do since becoming hunters was going into stasis. It was the hardest decision we've ever had to make, and trust me, in our earlier days, when bloodmadness was spreading like an infectious disease, we'd made some pretty hard fucking decisions.
“Saint was walking the edge when bloodmad vampires weren't as common, and the sitting king would’ve been forced to order his execution by our own hands. None of us could live with the idea, so we all made the decision to…retire as the modern day would call it. We said goodbye to friends and family we didn’t know if we’d ever see again. Looking back now, I should’ve realized that it’d been Samuel killing all those innocent human beings and not Saint. He’d been so against going into stasis, but if he’d fought any harder, we would’ve known his plan all along. The kind of patience he had for the long game terrifies me.” I sucked in a sharp breath.
“Almost as much as the fact that I didn't have a fucking clue that my own brother was betraying us. Even before that, it’d been an impossible decision because Zachariah had just met his mate—”
Cassandra gasped, shifting to look up at me in horror.
“Yeah,” I said. “We all felt his pain through our bonds as hunters. It hurt. Almost the equivalent of a death. He had to choose between keeping his brother alive or his mate, and it was an impossible decision. But he made it in the hopes that he would be reunited with her when we were awakened. I don't think any of us anticipated being asleep for five hundred years, but…that's the hardest situation we've ever been in.”