Scorched by Darkness: Eternal Mates Series Book 18 Read online

  Harbin made the mistake of stepping into his path.

  Hartt grabbed the silver-haired shifter by the front of his black T-shirt and twisted with him, slammed him so hard into the wall that the plaster cracked beneath the impact and Harbin grunted.

  And then hissed at him through emerging fangs as his irises brightened around his pupils.

  Aggression rolled off Harbin, stoking a need to fight in Hartt, one that only grew stronger as the snow leopard shifter grabbed his wrist and shoved him backwards, breaking his grip on him. Harbin growled again, silvery fur rippling over his corded forearms as he advanced on Hartt.

  Hartt stood his ground and stared the snow leopard down, goading him in a way. Harbin never could back down when someone challenged him, was easily provoked into fighting and defending his perceived territory, just like any feline shifter.

  And Hartt wanted a fight.

  It wouldn’t be the first time the two of them had ended up brawling when one of them needed to blow off steam. Harbin’s blood ran as hot as Hartt’s. Both of them were easily seduced by a hunger for violence, to bruise flesh and attempt to break bones.

  As predicted, Harbin launched at him on a roar, slammed into his chest with enough force to knock the air from his lungs and sent both of them stumbling into the centre of the large room. Hartt was quick to grab him by the back of his neck and yank him backwards in an attempt to shake him. Harbin dug his claws into Hartt’s shoulder, refusing to release him, and spun with him. The shifter’s leg hit the back of his and Hartt grunted as the male twisted him over it and his back smashed into the polished black stone floor.

  Harbin growled, flashing fangs as he leaped on top of him, as his fist ploughed into Hartt’s face. Hartt grinned at him, baring his own bloodied fangs as the coppery tang of it flooded his mouth. A need punched him hard in the gut, a hunger that rose swiftly to obliterate his awareness of the room.

  Not a need to fight.

  But a need to taste the sweet, smoky flavour of another’s blood.

  Mackenzie.

  He snarled, hooked his hand around Harbin’s nape and dragged him down as he reared up. He cracked his forehead against the silver-haired male’s and relished the grunt that burst from his lips. Pain spiderwebbed across Hartt’s skull, made his eyes ache and vision blur, but it didn’t slow him down. He shoved Harbin while he was recovering, pushing him off balance and onto his back, rolling on top of him so he was in control of the fight.

  Hartt slammed his right fist into Harbin’s face, splitting his lower lip, and followed it with a brutal left hook that knocked his head back the other way. Harbin snarled, growling low, a warning that sparked Hartt’s instinct to defend himself, because Harbin was about to lose it.

  Silvery fur rippled over the male’s arms as he launched them upwards, as he moved faster than even Hartt could dodge. He grunted as Harbin’s hands closed around his throat and he squeezed hard, cutting off his air supply. It still didn’t stop him. He delivered another punishing blow to Harbin’s jaw, raked claws over his forearm and bore down on him when his grip weakened. The scent of Harbin’s blood joined his in the air.

  Satisfaction rolled through Hartt.

  Followed by surprise as Harbin’s legs lurched upwards and he flipped Hartt over his head and landed on top of him. Harbin growled right in his face as he released Hartt’s throat, satisfaction gleaming in his bright silver eyes as he punched Hartt, striking him so hard his brain hurt.

  The next blow had shadows encroaching at the corners of his vision.

  Hartt couldn’t take another like it without passing out.

  He teleported, appeared a few feet from Harbin as the shifter roared, his anger clear in it.

  “Gods, is this my fault?” Fuery whispered, a wealth of pain and guilt in his voice.

  Hartt whipped to face him, the fight forgotten. “No, Fuery.”

  “It is. This is my fault. Your eyes are almost black, Hartt. This is because of my episode, isn’t it?” Hurt shone in Fuery’s violet eyes, the black that constantly edged his irises beginning to invade and vanquish that amethyst. “We must find a way to break this bond. You must wish it broken. If you could take it back—”

  “Never,” Hartt spat with conviction he felt right down to his soul. “If someone gave me the choice, I would not change what I did, Fuery.”

  Fuery took a step towards him, a desperate edge to his expression, one that made Hartt want to say whatever his friend needed to hear to make him believe he was speaking the truth.

  Harbin suddenly slammed into Hartt on a vicious growl, knocking him back into the wall near the door that led to the wing where their bedrooms were. It had taken the shifter longer than he had anticipated to succumb to the need to finish the fight. Harbin never could stop himself once he was coiled and ready to spring at an enemy to deliver a blow, and Hartt had left him ready to pounce when Fuery had spoken.

  The shifter was quick to back off and issue an apologetic look that wasn’t necessary as he scrubbed the back of his neck and then rubbed blood from his lip.

  Hartt shook off the blow and pushed away from the wall, closed the distance between him and Fuery and clutched his friend’s shoulder through his black tunic jacket.

  “I love you, Fuery. You are my brother. It doesn’t matter that we weren’t born into the same family. You are my brother and if I had to go through moments a thousand times worse than what I’ve experienced because of our bond, I would gladly do so to keep you with me, to keep us together.” He tightened his grip on Fuery’s shoulder as tears welled in his eyes, as the black began to lose ground against the violet. “I cannot bear the thought of losing you.”

  Before Fuery could say anything, Hartt pulled him into a tight hug, held him close and whispered in his ear.

  “Never think that I would want rid of you or that I could ever regret this bond we share.”

  Fuery wrapped his arms around him and held him so tightly it hurt.

  Hartt’s thoughts drifted to Mackenzie and regret welled inside him, swift to fill him and drag his mood down to a new low, one where he ached as he never had before, felt as if he might die if he didn’t see her again.

  It struck him that he had been a fool to let her go.

  He should have seized hold of her and held her close instead, should have done whatever it took to make her believe that he didn’t view her as a weak female.

  And that she was wrong about his heart.

  Because as he stood aching from a fight and hurting in his soul, he realised something else.

  He didn’t love Iolanthe.

  He had only been convincing himself that he did.

  When she had left him centuries ago, he had been hurt, and he had been angry, but those two feelings had been mere shadows of the hurt and anger he felt right now. He had gotten over the pain of Iolanthe leaving him, had moved on and had pursued other females, and had lived his life without feeling a need to find her.

  He wasn’t sure he could do that where Mackenzie was concerned.

  He wasn’t sure he would ever get over her leaving him.

  He was sure of something though.

  He couldn’t function without her, was going out of his mind with worry about her already, was crazy with a need to see her again and make things right between them.

  Because he couldn’t lose her.

  Fuery released him and Hartt just stood there, mind racing and running through a million thoughts about Mackenzie, about how things had been left between them, and how he could possibly make her believe that she was wrong about him.

  Harbin huffed as he stepped towards him and Fuery. “You want to talk about this witch now?”

  “No,” Hartt snapped, the leash on his temper close to breaking as the shifter interrupted his thoughts of Mackenzie and he lost his train of thought, had to go back to the argument they’d had in that alley and replay it again to seek an answer to the question that burned brightest inside him.

  Did she have feelings for him too?


  “Man, what has you acting like a male who can’t find his mate?”

  Hartt slowly turned his head towards Harbin. “What did you just say?”

  Harbin rolled his thickly hewn shoulders beneath his torn black T-shirt. “I said, you’re acting like a male who can’t find his mate. Frantic. Angry. Scared… and desperate. Lashing out at everyone. Well, everyone except Fuery, apparently. Fine, lashing out at just me.”

  Hartt wasn’t sure what to say. He just stared at the shifter as his entire world seemed to rearrange itself before his eyes, as everything he had been thinking about Mackenzie suddenly felt like a lie, a hollow fabrication.

  The product of a possible bond and his instincts as a male to claim her as his mate.

  He looked at Fuery, needing to hear him say that the shifter was wrong.

  “Harbin has a point.” Fuery offered an apologetic look when Hartt glared at him. “You are acting like an elf who has lost sight of his ki’ara.”

  Hartt couldn’t believe it, even when all the markers were there—the need to be near her, the urge to protect her, the hunger to decapitate any male who so much as looked at her, the desperate desire to please her.

  Mackenzie was his fated mate.

  Chapter 19

  Hartt wanted answers and the only way he was going to get them was by tracking Mackenzie down and talking to her. The thought that his growing feelings for her might be the product of her being his fated female and not real weighed him down and had him pacing his bedroom.

  Seeking answers he knew wouldn’t come.

  Because the answer he wanted was one the universe didn’t want to give him.

  For a moment, a brief and close to wonderful one, he had thought his feelings for Mackenzie had been real, but the more he analysed every moment that had happened since he had met her, the more he feared he had been blind to the truth.

  Mackenzie was his ki’ara.

  That was the only reason he felt something for her. That was the only reason he felt compelled to go to her right now and see her again. It wasn’t love. It was mate lust. It was an instinct, not an emotion he felt.

  What if this instinct was blinding him to other things? What if his initial thought about his feelings for Iolanthe had been wrong, twisted and deformed into a lie whispered by his instincts because they wanted him to choose Mackenzie over her?

  He would never choose his ki’ara over true love.

  He wasn’t interested in tying himself to one female forever through an unbreakable bond just because some biological connection had pushed her onto him. He didn’t want a mate. He wanted love.

  Odd for an assassin in his position of power, with his bloody and ruthless history, to want that, he knew, but want it he did. Maybe it was a hang-up from Iolanthe leaving him on the day of their ceremony, when she should have become his. He had loved her, and she had left him, and those feelings had persisted. He was sure of it. When he had seen her again in Underworld that first time after centuries apart, he had felt that same spark, that same need bloom inside him. He had been mistaken. His feelings for Iolanthe hadn’t gone anywhere.

  The thought that they had was just another deception courtesy of his instincts. Those instincts had attempted to remove a hurdle between him and claiming his mate, had made him believe what he felt for Iolanthe had died all those centuries ago.

  But what he felt for Mackenzie was more potent than his feelings for Iolanthe had ever been. It was intoxicating and controlling. Intense and consuming. It drove him wild.

  He pivoted to pace back along the length of his bedroom and worried his lower lip with his thumb, toying with a cut in it.

  So his feelings for Mackenzie couldn’t be real.

  They were too powerful to be love.

  It was just a biological, programmed response to his fated one. He was sure of that. It wasn’t real love.

  He stilled as he sensed Fuery moving past his door, as he felt his friend enter his own room and sensed the one who waited for him there. Shaia.

  Hartt stared at the black wall. Could he be wrong about his feelings for Mackenzie being a lie? Caught up in a desperate need to deny them in case they were a fabrication caused by the fact she was his ki’ara all in the hope of sparing himself the pain of realising the love he had thought was blooming inside him wasn’t real?

  Shaia and Fuery were proof that it was possible to have real love with a fated mate. Prince Vail and Rosalind were too. Both of those couples loved each other deeply, had shown feelings for each other that Hartt couldn’t deny were real.

  Fuery and Shaia in particular.

  They had spent centuries believing each other dead and yet they had remained faithful to each other. Their love had endured.

  Gods. He dragged a hand down his face and turned on his heel to pace away from his door. Maybe that was his problem. He had witnessed how Fuery’s love for Shaia, and her love for Fuery, had refused to die, had remained as strong as it had been before they had believed each other dead, and it had coloured his expectations. He wanted that sort of love for himself. Not the sort produced by a possible bond or the sort of love that soon died.

  Or ended up broken.

  What if he could have that kind of love with Mackenzie and he convinced himself to believe it was a lie created by the possible bond and let it go? What if she was his one shot at a forever kind of love?

  The sort of love he wanted for himself, craved like a madman and would do anything to have.

  He wasn’t sure he would be able to carry on living in this world knowing he had turned his back on that kind of love, hadn’t even tried to see if what he felt for Mackenzie was real and had just let her slip through his fingers. He didn’t want to be swayed by the bond by going to see her, but he couldn’t just give up on them either.

  He would regret it if he did.

  It would be his greatest mistake.

  He needed to see her.

  Hartt strode across his room, stripping off his top as he went, tossing it onto the floor. He stopped at his dresser, scooped water from the large bowl on it and washed his face and neck, clearing the blood away. He ran his hands through his hair, dampening and tousling the blue-black strands, and straightened.

  His gaze dropped to the twin black and silver metal bands around his wrist, armour he was liable to need when Mackenzie saw him. She had told him she never wanted to see him again. The sensible course of action would be giving her more than just a scant few hours before he showed up on her doorstep, time in which her temper might mellow and she might not attack him on sight.

  He couldn’t though.

  He needed to see her. He needed to know if he really was falling in love with her.

  He pulled a clean black tunic from his wardrobe and slipped his arms into it, fastened the silver buttons as he paced to work off some energy and form a plan. When every avenue he explored ended with Mackenzie attacking him, he gave up. If she lashed out at him, he would take whatever blows she needed to deliver to unleash her anger, to release the rage he had felt in her back in the alley.

  When she had accused him of being in love with another and, like an idiot, he hadn’t denied it.

  In his defence, he had honestly believed his feelings for Iolanthe had remained constant, when in reality they had slowly died, had never been strong enough to survive the centuries they had been apart.

  He had the feeling that if his growing love for Mackenzie was real, it was the sort that endured. Gods, he was going to need it to be that kind of love, the sort he wanted, because it was probably going to take decades, if not centuries, to convince her that his love for her was true. Constant. Unwavering.

  He finished buttoning his tunic, ran his hand through his hair again to neaten it, and focused.

  Faint light shimmered over his body and then darkness embraced him. When it receded, he was stood in the square of a small town in the far north of the free realm, surrounded by black stone and dark wooden buildings that all towered two storeys tall,
with a third level set into their pitched tiled roofs.

  It had been a long time since he had visited this town and he hoped it was home to the guild where Mackenzie lived. Every other guild he could think of refused to employ females or only employed females from particular species, like witches or dragon shifters. One guild even preferred to employ succubi, using them to target unwitting males who were then killed while in the throes of passion.

  Hartt made his way along the main street that made up the bulk of the town, nodding to a few of the people coming and going along it. Beyond the buildings that lined it, smaller homes stood. They numbered less than fifty.

  He turned down an alley between a tavern and a store selling colourful fabric.

  Growled when someone slammed the flat of their hand into his chest and drove him backwards, forcing him to take steps back into a square. Whoever they were, they were strong, and angry. The sharp scent of fury laced the air as they shoved him in the chest hard enough that he felt sure it would leave a bruise.

  He bared his fangs and lifted his gaze, pinning it on the one who had dared to block his path.

  A female demon stood before him, her huge black leathery wings obscuring his view of the alley and the small building at the other end of it. She casually fluffed her silver-streaked black hair, twisted a few of the shorter lengths around crimson-tipped fingers, making them stick out even more. Her black horns gleamed in the lamplight as she advanced on him, her amber eyes glowing with sparks of fire as those horns grew, curled around her pointed ears to flare past her lobes.

  “You stay the fuck away from Mac,” she growled, small fangs flashing between her scarlet lips as she scowled at him.

  He frowned right back at her. Mac. Mackenzie. The demoness knew her, which meant this was the right place. It also meant that this was probably the demoness who had come to the bastion of the First Legion and had given Grave the impression she wanted to remove Hartt’s intestines.