The clock in the grey stone tower to his right continued to chime the hour.
Midnight.
The hundreds of fae, witches, demons and other species crammed into the large square of the underground town swayed, hugged and sung together in a discordant melody that grated in Hartt’s ears as he stood unmoving, the only still thing in a churning sea.
But inside him, it was a different matter.
His stomach twisted and his mind spun, thoughts colliding and breaking apart, emotions threatening to unravel the tentative hold he had on the darkness. It lurked, waiting in the deepest recesses of his soul, a creeping and malevolent thing that hunted for a weakness in him, the tiniest fissure in his will that it could slip its claws into and rip wide open.
He lifted his left hand and absently rubbed the spot over his sternum as acid filled the scraped out and raw abyss where his heart should have been.
He had been a fool again.
Hartt tried not to think about it as he stood there in the square, his back to one of the towering three-storey grey stone buildings that enclosed it on all sides. He tried not to think about her.
Or the death wish he had.
He must have one since he had just come close to stepping into Underworld, a nightclub in London, to speak with his ex. If he could call her an ex. Iolanthe had stood him up on their wedding day, had left him waiting at the grand celebration his family had put together.
Looking like a fool.
The rubbing grew harder as the empty pit ached, his heart attempting to resurrect itself. The temptation to call on his armour was strong. It would only take a simple mental command to the black and silver bands that encircled his wrists and the onyx scales would ripple over his body, transforming his fingers into talons that could easily slice through bone and remove the damned broken thing that passed for his heart, freeing him of its constant torment.
He had been free.
For centuries, he hadn’t thought about her. He had moved on with his life, had stepped off the route that had been laid before him by their parents and trod his own path in the world.
And he had been happy.
He had a friend who was like a brother to him, had founded an assassin guild that had a fearsome reputation and was undeniably the best one in Hell, and he had more coin than he could ever need. He wasn’t short on females either. If the mood struck him, he only had to take a walk through the town that had sprung up around his guild and take his pick of the females who lived in it.
He had been happy.
And then Harbin, a snow leopard shifter who was more like a friend than an employee, had done something reckless in the mortal realm.
And his world had collided with Iolanthe’s again.
And all the godsdamned feelings Hartt had thought long dead had come flooding back.
So, like the fool he was, he had gone to see her tonight, well aware that if her jaguar shifter mate so much as smelled him nearby, he was a dead man.
Worse, he had brought his family’s ring with him.
One she should have worn on her finger.
Hartt raised his hand and scrubbed it down his face, somehow held back a groan as he closed his eyes and shook his head. What the hell was wrong with him?
He blamed Fuery. His brother-not-by-blood was settling into his new life with his fated female, Shaia, a happy ending that the elf deserved after everything he had been through. Not only that, but Harbin was happily mated too. Seeing the two of them with their females was screwing with his head, rousing desires he should have forgotten.
He blamed Iolanthe too. The shock of seeing her again after all these centuries must have jolted something loose.
“She means nothing to me,” Hartt muttered as the people around him swayed and came close to jostling him too.
The square was far too packed. It felt as if every person living in the fae town that occupied a cavern beneath a mountain in the highlands of Scotland was out tonight, crammed into the small heart of it to celebrate the dawning of a new year.
Someone tried to grab him, leaning close to him, and he flashed fangs and snarled as he rolled his right shoulder and shirked them. The big shifter of undetermined species, although he smelled like a wet dog, grunted and shrugged, and grabbed one of the witches instead. She squealed in delight as he lifted her and spun, her petite booted feet coming up and almost clocking Hartt in the face.
He huffed and leaned back to avoid being struck, and the darkness writhed in response to the switch in his emotions. If it had been a living being, it would have smirked. Sometimes, it felt as if it was alive and had a will of its own.
Sometimes, he couldn’t control it, failed to contain it.
Bad things happened then.
Hartt sidestepped and peered at the crowd, forcing his mind back on track. The mission. The reason he had come to this fae town near Fort William.
The intel he had gathered pointed towards his mark being here tonight, somewhere in this dense throng of revellers. While he couldn’t imagine his target celebrating the new year, let alone being anywhere near a crowd of this size, following up the lead seemed like a good way of distracting himself.
He rubbed a hand over his mouth again.
Gods, he needed a distraction.
Taking on this contract was keeping him busy, but at a cost. Fuery wasn’t happy about it. His friend had been on his case about rolling solo on a mission since day one, didn’t care that the client had stipulated that he had to work alone on it.
And that it had to be him who took it on.
Fuery preferred him away from the frontlines, as far from danger as he could get, and while Hartt usually indulged him because he didn’t want Fuery to suffer, he couldn’t do it this time. He needed some action. He needed some space, some time away from the guild. He just needed a moment to breathe.
A distraction.
His gaze hopped over the heads of the gathered males and females, cataloguing them all, discerning their species whenever he could from a distance. The demons were easy to pick out from the crowd with their horns that flared from behind the tops of their pointed ears and the fact they stood a head taller than most of the crowd, as he did. The witches were equally as easy to identify for the most part thanks to their gender—mainly female—and the colourful and interesting fashion they wore.
Neither species were of interest to him.
He kept searching, picking out the vampires he could easily spot, studying them to see if they reacted to anyone else nearby, someone unseen by him. They were all too interested in eyeing up potential prey among the gathered, their crimson eyes following females or males that were clearly inebriated. Easy pickings.
His mark was here somewhere.
Hartt moved again, wove through the people and headed towards a set of broad grey stone steps that led up to a raised walkway that ran around three sides of the square. A better vantage point.
He stopped near the top step and his gaze caught on something on the other side of the square.
A distraction.
Her flame-red hair tumbled around slight shoulders in soft waves as she peered at the crowd. The dark makeup that surrounded her eyes and streaked across her temples made her honey-coloured eyes look stunningly bright as they sought something. Burgundy leather hugged long lean legs and a curvy waist, cupped breasts that had many males staring. She paid them no heed as she frowned at the gathered, a mulish or possibly dissatisfied twist to her red lips.
Hartt studied her in silence, still amidst the crowd as they pushed their way down the stairs behind him, as if his boots were rooted to the stone.
She was unmoving too, her amber gaze serenely taking in her surroundings, charting everything.
His black eyebrows pinched hard as she was forced to take a step back and then turned, drifting down into the crowd in the middle of a group of demons. He canted his head, curious now as he tracked her through the crowd, as she emerged from the trio of demons and left them behind. She slipped through a gaggle of witches and twittering succubi and stopped at the far end of the square, closer to the clock tower.
The crowd was thicker there, stealing her from view.
He growled as he lost sight of her as a large group of males pushed their way deeper into the busy square from the avenue that led to the northern section of the town. Shifters of some sort if he had to guess. They jostled and jabbed at each other, grinned and whistled at several females, gaining scowls from some and sultry smiles and interested looks from others.
Hartt focused and teleported, landing on one of the roofs of the tall dark grey stone buildings. The tight feeling in his breast loosened as he spotted the redhead again, and he didn’t try to decipher the reason why he had felt compelled to keep track of her, why he had felt a strange, almost desperate need to see her again.
He didn’t need to.
Every instinct he possessed told him there was something off about her.
Something wrong.
At first, he had thought she was simply looking for someone she knew, or perhaps she had lost her friends in the busy crowd.
Now, as he eased into a crouch at the edge of the pitched slate roof, he knew better.
His lips quirked into a half-smile.
She had been looking at everyone but him.
Diligently keeping those bright honey-coloured eyes away from him as she had scanned the crowd.
Eyes that now leaped to and locked onto the spot where he had been on the walkway.
A little frown creased her brow as she stared at it, and then her gaze was moving, roving over the crowd as that scowl intensified. Seeking him. He moved a foot to his right, pressed his side to the smoking chimney and peered around it, using it as cover as he observed her.
If he had to guess, he would say she was a fellow assassin.
He realised something else as she looked off to her right and her eyes remained fixed there, tracking something off to his left, at the opposite end of the square to the clock tower.
Hartt looked there too and cursed as he spotted what she had.
She was after the same mark as him.
His violet gaze leaped back to her, and something in the region of his stomach sank slowly towards his boots even as fire ignited in his veins. He had the terrible feeling that taking on this contract had been both a good and a terrible idea.
She was a beautiful distraction.
But he was going to have to kill her.