“You think I like this situation any better than you do?” He followed her, his steps loud on the gravel path. “This isn’t a game, Hellcat. Can’t you see I’m only trying to protect you?”
“No, you’re trying to make your own lifeeasier,just like when we were young.”
—
Raven caught her by the arm and swung her round to face him, all his good humor gone. He narrowed his eyes and she shrank back. Good. He wanted her afraid. This was too important to be nice. He needed her to grasp how tenuous her safety really was. “Do you recall my code name?”
She remained stubbornly silent.
“It’s Hades. But sometimes I use the code name Anubis. You’re the scholar. What do you know of Anubis?”
She tossed her head. “He’s the god of the Underworld. The patron of lost souls.”
The hope in her eyes was like a kick to his stomach. She was so damned optimistic, looking for goodness in him that just didn’t exist. His temper rose. She didn’t have him on a pedestal, far from it, but he needed to extinguish the last rays of hope that he was at heart a good man. He was broken and bitter and lost beyond measure. Steeped so deep in the black mire of revenge that there was no way back to the surface.
“What else?”
She licked her lips. “He was the god of the darkness, of death. Of embalming.”
He dropped his voice to a menacing whisper. “And what does he do?”
Her throat moved as she swallowed. “He escorts the souls of the dead to the afterlife.”
“Precisely.” He pressed forward. “What do you thinkIdo, Heloise?”
“You’re a smuggler. A spy.”
He held her gaze. “And what do you think happened to the man who shot at you in the garden?”
Her eyes widened. “You said he rode away.”
He pinned her with his gaze, refusing to let her look away. “He didn’t.”
She made a choked noise. His chest constricted as first disbelief, then horror filled her expression. “Youkilledhim?”
“He tried to kill you. My job is to keep you alive and I will do whatever is necessary. If I have to kill, then that’s what I’ll do.” There. He’d said it. The cold, unvarnished truth. He waited for her inevitable recoil.
“How many?” she whispered.
He didn’t pretend to misunderstand her. “I killed my first man at nineteen—one of the guards holding me hostage. After that I was recruited by Castlereagh and I’ve been at war for the past six years. I’ve never bothered to count.” He narrowed his eyes. “I don’t lose any sleep over the people I’ve killed. There might not be dragons anymore, but there are monsters, human monsters, who prey on the innocent and kill without mercy. Whatever you might think of me and my methods, it’s men like me who deal with them. It’s men like me who keep you safe.”
He watched wariness and fear creep into her eyes and cursed himself for putting it there, but she had to know what she was dealing with. “You are going to stay here and read those remaining codes. Do I make myself clear?”
She nodded, her face pale. She pulled free of his hands and scurried back to the library as if all the devils in hell were after her. Raven cursed. He hated to frighten her, but he knew he was right. Her safety was paramount.
Chapter 21
Georges Lavalle stood in the rain overlooking Raven’s empty dock and swore with impressive Gallic fluency.
“Fils de putain!”
Not only was his colleague dead, but the bungling amateur had failed to kill the English code-breaking bitch. Now he, Georges, had been sent to the far ends of this miserable, rain-sodden country to track down some scarred nitwit of a girl. Except she’d managed to escape, and it was no coincidence that it had happened at the property of her neighbor, Lord Ravenwood, the English spy known as Hades.
Georges knew Raven. They’d crossed paths on a handful of occasions in Europe over the past decade, never close enough to engage, but close enough to recognize each other by sight. The world of spying was relatively small. All the major European players had a reputation in the field, and Raven was no exception. His code name was appropriate. He was rumored to be a devil in a fight, unforgiving and merciless. Much like Georges himself.
He almost admired the bastard.
It had felt good cutting the throat of that London scholar, Edward Lamb. Georges smiled. Such a stupid name; he’d truly been like a lamb to the slaughter—he’d barely even put up a fight. The little lamb hadn’t bleated though. He’d stubbornly refused to reveal the location of their senior code-breaker in Spain.