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Again that eyebrow winged upward. I suspected amusement, although it was hard to tell given her emotionless demeanor. “About you. About her debt to the Directorate and what she might do to repay it.”
“She helped the guardians bring down more than her fair share of criminals.”
Hunter picked a piece of lint off her pants with long pink fingernails and flicked it idly away. I had a sudden image of her doing the same to me, and a brief smile touched her lips, then drifted away.
The bitch was reading my thoughts.
“If you wish your thoughts to remain unheard, then kindly keep them to yourself,” she commented. “You’ve already asked your friend Stane to acquire some nanowires, have you not?”
Stane was Stane Neale, Tao’s cousin. He wasn’t only a computer whiz, but a major black-market trader. And if she’d overheard me asking Tao to get the wires, then she either had super-hearing or there were bugs in our apartment. “Yes, but I suspect even the strongest wire available won’t be able to stop you.”
“Oh, it won’t,” she acknowledged. “But they require a little more effort on my part, and therefore would afford you some of your much-relished privacy. It might even stop the reaper from following your thoughts.”
Given that the wires were designed to work against those who wore flesh on a permanent basis, I doubted it would affect Azriel. And I wasn’t as worried about him catching my thoughts anyway.
“You could show a little restraint in the meantime,” I said.
“I could,” she agreed, and flicked away another piece of lint.
An imaginary one this time, I suspected, because I certainly wasn’t seeing anything on her pants.
Again that ghostly smile crossed her pale lips before she added, “But I am not here to discuss your mother.”
I leaned back against the desk, my stance casual even though both of us knew that was far from the truth. “I never thought you were.”
She nodded and leaned back in her chair. “We have a problem.”
“We as in the Directorate, or the council?”
“The council, of course. You will never be on the Directorate’s books.”
“Odd, given that the Directorate approached me several years ago about becoming a guardian.”
“Yes, but my brother has since been informed of my plans for you.”
Meaning he’d made the approach without her approval? Somehow I doubted that. I knew enough about Jack and the guardian division to know that while he might have autonomy over the day-to-day running of the division, there weren’t many decisions that didn’t go through Hunter first.
“And just what, exactly, are your plans for me?”
She made a casual movement with her hand. “Nothing more than what you’ve already agreed to.”
What I’d agreed to was being a consultant to the council, but her statement had sounded a whole lot more comprehensive.
“Besides,” she added, “I believe you have an aunt and uncle who would strenuously object to you becoming a guardian. And right now, the Directorate can’t afford to lose either of them.”
Riley and Rhoan would do more than object—they’d lock me in a small room and throw away the key. And then they’d storm Hunter’s citadel and demand my release from Directorate duty.
Thankfully, they had no idea I’d agreed to work for someone even more dangerous than the Directorate, and I fully intended to keep it that way. Right now I didn’t need any more grief in my life.
“Why can’t the Cazadors handle your problem?” Cazadors were the council’s vampire assassins. They were highly trained, extremely deadly, and they got the job done no matter who or what got in their way.
Uncle Quinn—Riley’s mate, and the half-Aedh who’d taught me how to use my own Aedh skills—had been one many
centuries ago. He was also one of the few Cazadors to not only survive the experience, but walk away virtually unscarred. And to me, that only emphasized just how deadly he could be.
“I have no doubt they could handle it—if we had any idea just who or what the problem is.”
“Then how do you know it’s a problem?”
