Лорел Гамильтон - Rafael

Helios stepped not just closer to Kane, but so he moved the other man back a little from Claudia. I don’t think he wanted to know what the punishment would be if Kane took a swing at her. “I’m learning a lot from all the training here in St. Louis. I’m a teams guy, I came in here with serious skills, but Jake has hundreds of years of fighting practice. I’m learning things from him that no one else could teach me. I don’t care if he’s a werewolf.”

“Jake has only lived that long because he’s tied to his vampire master. He’s a slave to the vampires.”

“Oh, come on, you’re Asher’s moitié bête , his animal to call, just like Jake and his master,” I said, and instantly regretted saying anything.

“You stay out of this!” Kane said, and he was instantly angry again. I had that effect on him.

Helios tried to move him back away from both of us, but Kane went wide around the bench toward me. I wasn’t armed, not even with a knife, because I was in the gym underneath the Circus of the Damned. If I wasn’t safe in our inner sanctum, then something was wrong. I hoped that something wasn’t six feet of tall, dark, and stupid.

Helios moved so fast it was just a blur and he was between me and Kane. The military trained the special forces to be better than the best; add to that the extra speed of a wereanimal and they were scary good.

“Back it up, Kane,” Helios said.

I used Helios’s body to hide the fact that I was backing up and around the weight racks. I did not want Kane to take a swing at me with me pressed up against the weights with nowhere to go. I’d beat him once hand to hand, but I’d sucker punched him while he was still arguing about the rules. Professionals act while amateurs are still asking what the fuck just happened. Sometimes being a professional doesn’t mean throwing the first punch, it means avoiding the fight altogether.

“Are you going to hide behind one of your guards, Anita?”

“She’s supposed to hide behind us. We’re her bodyguards,” Helios said.

“Then why does she train with us? Why is she always down here training?”

I was far enough out into the room now. I figured between Claudia and Helios they could wrestle Kane without involving me. He’d been training harder in the fighting part of things since I kicked his ass. He didn’t work harder anywhere else; I think he wanted a rematch, but I didn’t. He was at least cruiserweight, or even heavyweight, and I was bantamweight at best, and if two fighters are equally trained, size matters.

“I’m a U.S. Marshal for the Preternatural Branch; I train so I can go up against the monsters and survive.”

“She just called us all monsters, the kind she executes.”

“I’ve seen what happens when one of us goes rogue,” Helios said. “We are monsters. We need people like Blake who can take us out when we go full beast mode.”

“Why are you taking her side? Did she fuck you like she fucks all the other men?”

“That’s out of line,” Helios said.

“So, you did fuck her!”

“Oh, for the love of God, Kane, it’s not my fault that Asher is bisexual and not just gay the way you want him to be,” I said.

“He’d be gay if it wasn’t for you,” Kane said, and he had moved so he could see me around the other man.

“Asher is Asher, he’s over six hundred years old, I didn’t change any of his sexual preferences.”

“Liar!” He screamed it at me.

“I’m not sleeping with your boyfriend, Kane.”

“But he still wants you!”

“And that is not my fault,” I said.

“Lying bitch!” Kane moved toward me and Helios stepped in between us. Kane pushed him hard enough to make the other man stumble. Helios made a fist, and part of me wanted him to take the swing.

Kane seemed to see it, too, because he calmed for a second and said, “Sorry, Helios, it’s not your fault, it’s hers.” And the calm was gone as if it had never been, he was right back to being furious—at me.

“Let Asher sleep with other women, and maybe he’ll get me out of his system.”

“No! It’s not women he wants, it’s just you, he’s only hetero for you.” I tried to see something in his face that I could reason with, but there was nothing but the jealous rage. It pinched his features down so that the handsome was all gone. Some people really are pretty when they’re angry; Kane wasn’t one of them.

“You act like I’m the only woman he ever slept with, Kane. I know he slept with Dulcia, the leader of your old hyena clan.”

“Only because Jean-Claude told him to seduce her.”

“What about Belle Morte and Julianna?”

Kane made a sound low in his chest, and an eerie high-pitched growl spilled out of his human lips.

“Anita, just go, hit the showers. He’ll calm down once you’re gone,” Claudia said.

“Asher is bisexual, Kane. You can’t change that about him.”

His human words came out with that hyena squeal threading through them, so the sound raised the hairs at the back of my neck. “I can love him enough so he won’t need anyone else.”

“You sound like a woman who marries a gay man convinced she can love him straight.” I shouldn’t have said it, but I was just so tired of him.

He started rushing me, but Helios was there wrapping his arms around him from behind. I expected Kane to fight Helios then, but he just kept staring at me, trying to get at me like a dog on a chain.

I looked at the big man who was almost foaming at the mouth with rage. The anger didn’t smell good to me now, as if he’d gone past healthy anger into something more, or worse. Whatever was twisting Kane up inside was nothing I wanted to feed on.

Claudia got close enough to me to lower her voice over Kane’s yells. “Go, I’ll make sure he’s got a battle buddy with him at all times.” There was a very serious look in her eyes; she was acknowledging that I might not be safe alone with Kane.

I didn’t argue, just took my towel and left my water bottle by the weight bench. I didn’t want it badly enough to get that close to Kane when he was having one of his fits. I was beginning to believe that his possessive jealousy of Asher was just that insane, as in something was broken inside Kane that needed either talk therapy or medication, or both. Crazy in love wasn’t just a phrase for Kane and Asher, which was one reason I wasn’t sleeping with Asher. Under other circumstances we would have fired Kane and sent him to another city to be someone else’s problem, but thanks to Asher having made him his beast half, if Kane left, then so did Asher, and though I wasn’t sleeping with him, there were others who were, or who were working their way back to it. There were people here who were in love with Asher; too bad we all hated Kane, and he hated us right back.

2

I TURNED A corner toward the locker rooms and nearly ran into Rafael. He had to catch me in his arms, or I’d have smacked face-first into his chest. I was more bothered by Kane than I’d thought, since I didn’t sense Rafael’s energy with his main bodyguard, Benito, right beside him. Even without the otherworldly energy they were both tall: dark, muscled, and handsome for Rafael, more sinister for Benito. They both had short black hair and brown eyes, but Benito had deep facial scarring from something that looked like more than acne, but it wasn’t just the scars. I had other people in my life who had facial scars, and none of them seemed like a villainous henchman in a superhero movie, but Benito did. Maybe it was the fact that he worked so hard being scary as Rafael’s main bodyguard.

I started to push away from Rafael, partly because I was startled and partly because that had been my reaction to getting close for so long. Luckily for all of us I’d worked on my issues enough to let myself realize that a hug might be nice, not for romance, but because Kane’s hatred of me was beginning to be unnerving. It never feels good when someone hates you, but when it’s for things you can’t change, like being a woman and having a past relationship with someone’s boyfriend . . . you can’t fix that.