Page 63 of Bond of Passion

Tough shit. He’d murdered her. He was going to talk about it. “Well, too damned bad. I saved your life and could have lost mine in the process. I think you owe me at least that much.”

Red stains spread across his cheeks, and awareness of…something…trickled through her. Shame? Maybe. More likely anger that she called him on his bullshit.

Flecks of gold flickered in his eyes. Anger, then. He glared at her for a few long breaths, then closed his eyes and scrubbed his face with both hands.

“You’re right. Fuck me, you’re right.” He dropped his hands to his sides. “What do you want to know?”

She rubbed her arms against the nip in the air. “How did you become an assassin?”

He frowned. “Really? You want to go back that far?” At her shrug, he seemed to accept his fate and tossed her a pair of sweats. Had he felt her chill through the bond? “Gambling debt. I was young and dumb and got myself into trouble with some demons you don’t fuck around with. They basically sold me into the assassination guild.”

“How could they just sell you?” She wriggled into the pants. “There are laws. The Judicia, the Carceris—”

“I willingly signed on. In blood. It was either that, or they were going to murder my family and tear me apart really, really slowly. Or maybe sell me on the black market to people who make aphrodisiacs out of our semen. None of their alternatives sounded fun, so I signed almost a century of my life away as an assassin. I served two bosses, and I was released from my bond fifty years early last year when the Horsemen went after anyone who used bonds to control people, starting with slavers and working down to assassin guilds.”

The Horsemen again. She was starting to want to meet these people. Thanatos, the Horseman known as Death, had come by for the fallen angel, but she’d been checking on Tavin when he arrived, so she hadn’t gotten the chance to see him.

“Are you saying there are no more slaves or assassin guilds?” She’d missed a lot while imprisoned in Sheoul-gra as a soul, but she thought she’d have heard such momentous news as the end of all slavery in the demon realm after being re-embodied.

The Neethul people were largely dependent on the slave trade. They must be furious.

Tavin gave a spiteful snort as he picked up his phone. “The slave market and assassin guilds will always be around. Now, they’re just doing it with different kinds of bonds and without drawing the Horsemen’s attention.”

Hmm. Now she was more than a little curious about the Horsemen. But even more curious about Tavin. “So, you went to work as an assassin. Who did you kill?”

“I killed anyone my den master told me to kill.” He checked his phone’s shattered screen. “He’d get a contract from the guild and choose an assassin to carry it out. We had no say in the matter. A job was a job, and most of them were scumbags anyway. No one hires a hitman to kill a grandma who bakes gizzard cookies for all the demonlings in the neighborhood, you know?”

“What would happen if you refused? For example, if your target wasn’t a scumbag?”

Like Gristlen.

He tossed his phone to the bed with a bitter laugh. “You don’t refuse a den master.”

“Ever?”

“Some let you refuse one per year. Others more. Most never allowed any refusals. There were serious penalties for not carrying out the mission before the deadline or for not doing it at all.” He moved to the bedroom window and peered out at the ocean beyond the cliffs, and she wondered if he was avoiding looking at her.

“So all the people who came for revenge…why did they have contracted hits on them?”

“I don’t know,” he said, still looking out the window. “We rarely got the why of it. We never knew who was behind the contract. We were told who to kill and sometimes how to kill them, and that was it.”

“People told you how they wanted the victim to die? Like…what?”

One shoulder shrugged in response to her question, but he didn’t turn from his view. “They requested things like drowning or disembowelment. Sometimes they wanted me to make it look like a suicide or an accident. Things like that. Or they wanted something done with the body. Buried, tossed into a lava flow, ground up and fed to the victim’s offspring…”

Given her upbringing, she shouldn’t have been shocked by what he was saying. If she’d been forced to take a Neethul mate, she wouldn’t even blink at the idea that he might feed a parent to a child. But this was the Tavin who had taken her to a Greek beach to show her white sand for the first time. And to an Oregon beach to show her the precious sea life inside tide pools. The Tavin who had kissed her toe when she’d stubbed it and brought her colorful flowers and a decadent human dessert called chocolate mousse.

“You did that? You ground up someone and fed them to their children?”

He made a sound of disgust. “No, I lucked out on that one. I had a broken leg when my den master got that contract, so another assassin got the job.” He shook his head. “That was fucked-up.”

She couldn’t even imagine having to do something like that. And yet, any normal Neethul wouldn’t bat an eye. Hell, that would be entertainment.

“So…did you ever get out of any jobs?”

“A couple.” He idly traced a spiderweb on the other side of the pane of glass with his finger. “The problem is, even if you turn them down, someone else will still do it. You’re not saving a life. You’re just passing the buck. Probably making their deaths even worse.”

The spider belonging to the web scooted across it after a fly. “So, you just did your job and never looked back.”