A wild kind of anger sparked to life as he watched her, like her helplessness and ignorance were a personal slight. How could she not sense him there, crouched mere feet away? Had she even bothered to look around the alley before she stepped out? Didn’t she realize what an elf could do to her with barely any thought at all?
Their bones were harder than concrete. Their claws had a molecular structure similar to diamonds. Their upper and lower fangs were self-sharpening and could come together with a bite force great enough to bend steel. He was a predator unlike anything else on the planet and she was…
Beautiful.
Sloane blinked, taken off-guard by the thought. As far as he could remember, he’d never used the word in his life. There hadn’t been any reason.
But when she tucked her phone back in her bag with a soft sigh and brushed her hair back behind her ear, it was the onlyword that made sense. She was beautiful. Something in the way her features were put together and the softness that radiated out of her like heat off blacktop made her that way.
Sloane reared back, sinking further into the shadows as he examined the strange creature. To him, she seemed like something that came from another world. The reasons why wouldn’t come to him no matter how hard he tried to drag them out.
She wasn’t any different from the thousands of people he’d encountered — and hundreds he’d killed — in his lifetime. A human was a human. An elf was an elf. Everyone could be killed, so no one was special.
She wasn’t even doing anything interesting. He doubted she was on her way to commit a crime. Going by the short black dress under the pink sweater and the fact that she used the employee exit told him she was likely a server just getting off work for the night. There was nothing,nothing,noteworthy about her at all.
But he followed her.
When she walked out of the alley in her tennis shoes, a hum in her elegant throat, he was right behind her. The reasons why continued to evade him but they mattered less and less with every step.
It took him a block to realize what he was doing, and only after a man passed a little too close to her for his comfort.
Protection duty.
His boot nearly hit a discarded can as he quickly dipped into the shadows between buildings, his gaze locked on the slim shape of her back and swaying hair. He’d never been allowed on a protection assignment before. Those were given to Vesta and Cesare, who liked people best, or Arlo and Lucien, who were inseparable and required unique assignments. No one, not eventheir new, progressive captain, would consider Sloane fit for a job that didn’t require killing.
But he followed her. And he was pretty sure he didn’t want to kill her.
Sloane’s vision narrowed until all he could see was the shape of his prey. The sense that something terrible was going to happen to her, that if he looked away for even a moment she’d be taken from him, was overwhelming.
His blood rushed in his ears, nearly blocking out the sounds of the street that filtered in through his helmet’s speakers. It felt hotter than normal. Brighter. Like he’d been injected with something that made him feel… more. Bigger.
So when she turned a corner into another dark alley, clearly intending to cut time on her walk, it was a shock to feel something in his chest lurch. The fine hair on the back of his neck prickled with unease.
She clearly didn’t hear the shuffling footsteps at the other end of the alley or have the honed instinct to detect threats that he did. Something was wrong. Something was waiting. For the first time in his life, the urge to reveal himself not to kill but to protect nearly overwhelmed him.
Sloane abandoned his cover just in time to hear a high, nervous laugh.
“Oh, Cole! I didn’t see you,” she exclaimed, too far away.
When Sloane entered the long, narrow alley, he found a reedy man standing over the doe, one hand clasped on the softest part of her upper arm. Neither appeared to notice their audience when the man replied, “Your blonde friend wasn’t working tonight. I figured you’d need some company walking home, so I caught up with you.”
“That’s really nice of you, but I don’t think Roxanna would be too happy if she knew you were walking other girls home, Cole. Best you should get along, huh?” The cadence of her voicechanged. It slowed and sweetened, reminding him of the way he’d heard some people speak to their pets or bawling young.
Sloane walked slowly, the tread of his boots silent on the cracked concrete. That needy, aching thing in him began to beat at the underside of his sternum — a steadythump, thump, thumpto match his footsteps.
“C’mon, Cece,” Cole whined, “she won’t know. She’s been too busy for me, anyway.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, but I really need to get home.” The woman,Cece— such an odd, pretty name for an odd, pretty woman — moved to step around Cole.
Several things happened at once: the man grabbed her arm to yank her back toward the dingy brick wall, Cece yelped, and Sloane moved.
Fighting and killing were muscle memory. Blinded, bleeding, and impaired by a severe head wound — it wouldn’t make a difference. He’d fight entirely on autopilot and win, because losing hadn’t been an option since he was six years old.
His reaction to the sight of a man grabbingher,however, was something altogether different.
It wasn’t autopilot. It wasn’t even instinct. It was a sudden and explosive severing of a nerve, that essential mechanism that kept him so tenuously tethered to basic decency.
One moment he was standing in the shadows, watching a hand close around her pink-swathed arm, and the next his own hand held the back of Cole’s head against the gritty brick and mortar. A watery scream escaped the man’s throat as the delicate bones and cartilage of his face gave way under the pressure.
