Seeing as she desperately wanted to keep her job, had no desire to be electrocuted to death by the fence, and was more than a little skeeved out by the dark, there was only one option, really.
I have to hide.
Holding her hands out to her sides, she crept slowly between the rows of rose bushes until her shoe hit the edge of the bed. The heat gun fell out of her hand, lost to the inky darkness. Deciding that she would just have to pick it up in the morning, Zia wrapped her arms around her middle and tried to breathe.It’s okay. Just get to the greenhouse.Don’t focus on the dark, or the woods.
She could just make out the lip of the bed as she stepped over it and back onto the gravel path. Breath short, she tried to make as little noise as possible as she inched her way back toward the relative safety of the greenhouse.
Certainly Mr. Bounds wouldn’t go in there, right? He wouldn’t have any reason to. As far as she knew, he had never stepped foot in the greenhouse. Likely, with the weather as bad as it was, he wouldn’t even think to take a stroll through the garden. Everything would be fine.
And if anyone questioned why her car was left overnight, she could just say that she’d come back to cover the roses and then had car trouble. A friend had come to pick her up, perhaps, and that was why she’d left it. None of the staff would be able to call her bluff, since none of them knew she didn’t have any friends.
Her numb fingers found the old brass handle of the greenhouse door. Quickly pulling it open, she slipped inside and swung it shut behind her. The latch clicked. Somewhere outside, an owl threw out a haunting call.
Zia stood in the rapidly cooling greenhouse, surrounded by the ghoulish shapes of her familiar workspace, and thought,Oh, this isn’t going to be a very nice night at all.
ChapterTwo
Harlan Bounds didn’t wantfor anything. Not anymore.
Born in the darkest point of the Great War, left in the gutter for the sun to ravage, and raised as a soldier in the Amauri Family, he clawed his way to power and wealth. He broke nearly every law in the United Territories and Allies. He killed. He sold secrets. He lied and he took what wasn’t his. He became one of the most feared assassins to walk the filthy streets of the New Zone — the stretch of neutral territory between the Draakonriik and the Shifter Alliance — and he was good enough to retire from it all when it pleased him to do so.
He wanted for nothing, because he’d taken everything he desired with his own claws.
Except her.
Harlan looked for her every sunset and every sunrise.
He looked for her even when he knew she would not be there, simply because he could not bear the thought of accidentally missing her. It didn’t matter that he had surveillance sensors installed around her home so he always knew when she came and went. It didn’t matter that he knew her schedule, her routines. Helooked.
He wanted Zia North with every fiber of his being, and at some point in the year since she stepped foot on his estate for the first time, his entire life had become shaped by her presence. He rose early enough to catch the last fading streaks of sunset and stayed up until as far past dawn as he was able. He moved his bedroom furniture so that his view out into the rose garden would be entirely unobstructed.
Helooked,he hungered, and he thought of her relentlessly.
As he always did, Harlan checked the notifications from his security team as soon as he woke. The driving, instinctive need to see to her safety made it a damn compulsion.
It had been nearly two years since anyone tried to make their name by attempting to kill him, but he still worried about her, about what some young, bloodthirsty pricks would do if they knew how much he valued her.
Two hundred years of working for the Amauri Family as their personal assassin meant he accrued more than his fair share of enemies. Most of them were smart enough to leave him alone, but those green fools who thought they could build a reputation by taking outtheHarlan Bounds were a nuisance.
They were gnats. Killing them was easy, almost routine. It took more effort to ship their body parts back to their pitiful little factions than it did to execute them. But when he thought of his witch being targeted, Harlan was gutted by cold, merciless fear.
It was irrational, of course. They didn’t have a relationship and he’d never had the privilege of sinking his fangs into the hot, silken flesh of her throat or breast or thigh. She hadn’t taken his venom. She didn’t smell like him, or wear his bite. Unless one of his enemies got through the steel vault of his mind to pry out his innermost thoughts without him noticing, no one could know how much that lush creature meant to him.
Still, he assigned his guards to watch the surveillance equipment, just in case.
That was how he knew she had gone home before sunset that day, her trowel and clippers and advanced soil testing equipment neatly shelved in her greenhouse. The sensors registered that she returned to her little home and then left again just before nightfall.
He had to read the notification twice before he processed the words.Zia never leaves her home after dark,he thought, stomach sinking.
There was only one reason he could think of that might explain her sudden departure from routine: she was with someone.
Harlan tried to rein in his agitation as he tossed off his charcoal gray sheets and padded, naked, into his ensuite bathroom. He did not gnash his fangs as he took a quick, cold shower. He didn’t think about how she might be on a date at that very moment, out to dinner with someone else, while he tugged on a pair of running pants over a cock that hadn’t gone completely soft since the day he caught her scent through the open kitchen window.
He didn’t curse the short winter days, which meant she left for home earlier and earlier each day, as he cracked open a bottle of synthetic blood and watched balefully as the proprietary tech in the bottle heated it to the perfect body temperature.
And he tried very, very hard not to think about how sweet her blood would taste in comparison to the synthetic crap he’d lived on for so long.
“Fuck,” he groused, lowering the bottle to wipe at his mouth. It tasted like fuckingnothing.
