He tightened his hold on her throat, the leather gloves he was wearing hot on her skin. “Which bloody circle,girl?”Frustration edged his question.
“I don’t know!”she cried, every word a sob.
The four figures in the crowd began pushing their way toward the alley, and Loren felt the blood in her head—what was left of it—drain down to her feet.
The man holding her at gunpoint spun her around to face him so quickly, she teetered in her heels, nearly pitching face-first onto the cobbles.
She lifted her gaze to his face, and her mouth literally fell open at the sight of him.
He was only a few years her senior—twenty-three or maybe twenty-four by the looks of him, though immortality made it a challenge to accurately determine a person’s age. Loren made a point to memorize anything about him that stood out, in case she managed to get away, but she found herself staring at him like an idiot for a much longer length of time than what was necessary, drinking him in feature by feature, and realizing with each passing second thateverythingabout him stood out.
His hair was jet-black and shorter on the sides than the top, the strands slicked back from a face as striking as it was lethal. His mouth was well formed, and his jawline strong. He had a straight nose that had clearly never been broken before, which was rare for someone of his…expertise. Loren imagined that if she was able to see his hands beneath his gloves, there would be enough evidence there to suggest he was the one who got most of the hitting in during a fight.
Perhaps his most striking feature was his eyes. A steel-blue she’d never seen before, made brighter by the way they contrasted with his suntanned skin. Those eyes—whites and all—were swallowed up by the black of Sight as he swiftly scanned her aura. Towering well over six feet in height, he was all muscle and raw masculinity, his broad shoulders and biceps straining against the worn leather of the black jacket he wore, embroidered here and there with patches of symbols and words that belonged to a dead language. The zipper on his jacket was down just far enough to show the three silver pendants he wore around his neck: one a religious symbol, another a protection charm, and the third a wing-shaped locket.
Loren had never picked up a paintbrush in all her life, but for one terrifying second she found herself wanting to capture this moment on paper and trap it under glass.
Had she the chance, she would’ve called the painting:Devil—King of the Wicked and the Damned.
And when she took note of the tattoo below the hellseher’s right ear—a tattoo of a horned letterSin the gothic script of an ancient world—she realized there would be no escaping this. No escapinghim.
Because not only was this man a Darkslayer—he was one of the Seven Devils. An elite unit of bounty hunting hellsehers known and feared by all of Terra. They had killed, cheated, and clawed their way to the top of an unjust hierarchy, where humans were no better than fodder, and the Terran Imperator ruled from its peak with an iron fist. Needless to say, the Devils and their kingpin Randal Slade held firmly to their place on the pyramid somewhere just below the Terran Imperator himself.
“I don’t believe it,” the Devil murmured, nostrils flaring widely. “You’re human.”
Still holding onto her with one hand, the other now pointing the gun below her jaw, the slayer scanned her—the skin-tight clothes that hid nothing—and then went for her crossbody bag.
“I don’t have anything.” She blinked against the spots of color drifting across her vision. The spots that were making it a challenge to see his face, no matter the fact that he was mere inches away from her. He’d already unzipped her bag and, judging from his unchanging expression as he rifled through the contents, he wasn’t surprised to find that his Sight hadn’t lied—she had no magical artefact on her, nothing more valuable than gum and lip-gloss.
Still, she found it necessary to voice the obvious as she went on to say, her tone one of panic, “There’s nothing on me that’s valuable—and I’mhuman.I swear to the eight gods of the Star that I’m human. And I don’t know how or why, butI’mwhat you’re looking.I’mwhat you want!” It wasn’t the smartest thing to say, and she figured she had just declared herself to the universe as the next missing person, when he froze.
He dropped her bag and straightened. Loren didn’t dare breathe as he scanned the alley behind her with the kind of lethal expertise that only a man ripped from the womb of the underworld would possess. Footsteps echoed against the brick walls of the businesses on either side of them.
Four sets of footsteps.
Loren swallowed a whimper.
One of the men in the group of four spoke. “Out of the way, Devil.” There was the click of a gun’s safety springing free. “Or we’ll have to kill you.”
Steel-blue eyes met her own. And somehow, despite the threat made on his life—and despite that he was outnumbered four to one—there was no fear in those eyes. And when he spoke, it wasn’t to the four people behind her who were now cocking their guns and taking aim.
It was toher.
“When it starts, get up against the wall and cover your head. Don’t move and don’t scream, or I’ll kill you.” Those eyes flicked again to the people she knew were only a few steps away—with more guns pointed at them than the single pistol the Darkslayer before her held casually at his side, as if it was more of a paintbrush than a killing tool, as if—
As if he didn’t need a weapon.
As if he didn’t have four pistols aimed at his head.
Loren barely had a chance to process his words before he opened fire on the figures blocking the mouth of the alley.
7
They didn’t stand a chance.
The Devil moved so swiftly, not one of them got in a single shot. And his pistol was so silent, no one in the avenue beyond had a clue what was happening as bullets buried into skulls.
Loren didn’t listen to him. As soon as the fourth gunman crumpled to the ground in a pool of blood, she pushed away from where she was huddled up against the wall, snatched up her phone, and sprinted for the mouth of the alley—for the safety of the crowd that lay just beyond the cool shade. Somehow, the clack of her heels was louder than any of those gunshots had been.
