Morana blinked, taking a small breath to cool herself and deliberately curled her lips up in imitation of his. She let her body remember the time his fingers had been inside her, his breath hot on her neck, his cock pressing into her back.
She gave him a heated look from under her lashes and murmured in a low, sexy, just-fucked bedroom voice.
“Like I’m going to feel it every time I walk.”
Something flared sharply in his eyes for a second before it was gone. She’d have missed it had she blinked. But she hadn’t blinked. She’d seen it, and she knew he’d be remembering the question he’d asked her against the wall of her father’s house. The question she hadn’t answered for him.
One of the older men with a wicked mustache whistled loudly before speaking, “Come home with me tonight, baby. You’ll feel it for the next month.”
Everyone chuckled. Fucking bastard. She was fucking another asshole at the moment, so her schedule was full. Tristan Caine didn’t react to any of the men, just slid the gun back to her.
Six shots. Six questions. This was her last one.
Morana thought the question over for a minute, before wording it carefully.
“What happened to break the Alliance?”
She should have known he wouldn’t answer if he didn’t want to.
“The two parties disagreed on matters but didn’t want a war. Alliance ended.”
Morana exhaled, closing her eyes for a second. She’d lost her chance. She’d lost the one chance she’d had to make him answer some questions, and exposed her hand in the process.
She slid the gun back to him when suddenly, her heart started pounding.
It was the last shot. The last question. And something told her he wouldn’t waste it.
Morana felt her heart hammer in her chest as, for the first time, he picked up the gun, leaning back in his chair, completely relaxed yet ready to launch into action in a second, the barrel pointed at her chest.
His intention to shoot her in the heart became clear if she gave an answer he didn’t like.
Her hands shook as she held them together, keeping her jaw locked tight, her gaze trapped in his blue one.
“What do you know about my history and Alliance?”
Morana felt her throat lock.
She knew.
Oh lord, she knew.
She knew his sister had been one of the girls gone missing.
She’d figured it out pretty quickly into her research, knowing it had been twenty-two years ago, which would’ve made him eight. What she didn’t know, however, was what that had to do with the Alliance.
But as she looked at him, looked at the men around the room – all older than him, all afraid of him, respectful of him, of The Predator in a world where reputation mattered more than lives, none of them knowing a thing about Tristan Caine – Morana’s heart clenched.
He’d shared the memory of his sister with her on that rainy night. He’d volunteered that memory, on a lonely night, just a lone man with a lone woman, giving her a truce, a respite for a few hours.
He had the gun pointed at her heart, and his eyes remained hard and cold, but Morana knew she could not die knowing she’d betrayed the one beautiful, powerful memory she had. He’d given her something incredible that night, something that her soul was so immensely grateful for, and she could not rape that for her own means, could not repay that small truce from him despite his hatred, with this betrayal.
He’d cracked a small light for her. She couldn’t suffocate it.
Heart clenching with fear, the decision made, Morana held her breath and closed her eyes, remaining silent.
Silence.
There was utter silence.
No sound except her own blood rushing in her ears. Nothing except darkness behind her shut eyelids.
She was aware of every single man in the room holding his breath as they waited for the bullet to pierce her heart, aware of the blood throbbing in her body. She realized in that moment of facing death – the very death she’d been contemplating mere days ago – that she didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to die, not when she’d started living for the first time in her life, because of the very man holding the gun at her chest.
Her heart beat in staccato, taking as many beats as it could before it was forced to stop, her shaking hands clenching the arms of the chair, sweat rolling down the line of her spine.
She waited a breath.
Two.
Another.
And suddenly, the loud bang made her flinch –
Her heart stopped –
– right before her eyes flew open on a loud intake of breath. Her teeth grit in pain as fire burned down the length of her arm, flames licking along her flesh as agony seared through her.
Morana looked down at the blood soaking the fabric of her dress, not over her breasts, where she’d expected to see it, but on the outside of her arm.
She’d been shot on the outside of her arm.
Right on the where the bruise had been.
The bullet wasn’t even in her arm.
It was just a graze.
He’d not killed her. Not even injured her severely.
Her eyes flew to his, to find something completely unreadable in his eyes, his gaze heavy and intense with something she had no name for. She recognized the fury, the hatred, but there was something else, something so live, something she didn’t recognize. It pulsed between them, making her realize how utterly controlled he had been, and suddenly, the dam had burst.
His eyes held her ensnared, the blue ferocious in that foreignness. Her breathing stuttered, eyes on his, disbelief washing over her because he’d been pointing to her chest. The rule of the game was to answer or die. And yet, she was merely grazed on her bruised arm.
One of the men would kill her because they played by the rules. She couldn’t be allowed to leave alive after everything.
Yet she knew, she would. Because he’d decided she would live. Because he had shot her, and the men couldn’t argue with that.
Their eyes remained locked over the table, his hand holding the gun loosely and hers pressed down on her bleeding upper arm, her stomach in knots.
She should have felt angry. She should have felt betrayed. She should have felt hatred.
She should have felt relieved to be alive. She should have felt shaky at the close call. She should have felt uncertain about what was to come.
She should have, could have felt so many things…
But as she sat there, watching him, after she hadn’t spoken a word in this jungle of hunters to make him seem less than deadly, she was surprised at herself. Morana didn’t feel a single one of those emotions.
It almost made her want to smile.
Almost.
She should have felt a lot of things, yet what she felt was a change.
Something changed in the moment she chose to kept silent instead of speaking, forfeiting her life, and he chose to shoot her in the arm instead of her heart, sparing her life. Something between them changed, just like it had on that night in the dark, this time in the middle of a crowd of lethal men.
She felt the connection between them that she’d tried to deny so very hard, felt it roll itself round and round, deepening, thickening, choking every shadow it encountered in her mind, strangling every bit of uncertainty.
She’d chosen to not betray him to these people. He’d chosen not to let her die.
She didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to think of the implications. Didn’t want to acknowledge their connection that just kept folding itself over and over between them, something fundamental had shifted with her both their decisions.