Hit List(92)

“I don’t know what you mean by the whole ‘not yet’ comment, but I do know we are not wasting time having a pissing contest.”

“Bernardo’s new,” Lisandro said. “You haven’t told Nicky that he can’t fight him for real, and Nicky’s been spoiling for a real fight for a while.”

“I don’t know what you mean by a real fight. Nicky spars with the rest of the guards.”

“Sparring isn’t real,” Lisandro said.

I turned and looked at Nicky. “What have I missed?”

“Don’t know what you mean,” Nicky said.

“Why would you want to fight Bernardo for real?”

Nicky just looked at me.

“Answer my question, Nicky.”

He frowned, sighed, and answered, because he had to; if I made it a direct question he had no choice but to answer me. “I don’t hurt people now because no one’s paying me to do it, and you’ve told me I’m not allowed to kill anyone who belongs to you even if they start the fight. You’ve got some very tough people working for you. I could kill them, but if I can’t kill them, they could hurt me, badly, so I don’t fight.”

“You spar,” I said.

He looked out past the cars, as if he were counting to ten. “It’s not the same thing, Anita. It’s so not the same thing.”

“Are you saying that you want to fight Bernardo so you can hurt or kill him?”

“I want to hurt someone, yeah.” His big hands folded into fists and a tightness ran across his shoulders and upper body like a coiled spring waiting for the switch to release all that pent-up power.

“Why?” I asked.

Nicky gave me a look that wasn’t friendly. It was the look you see sometimes in the zoo from the beasts behind the bars. No matter how much land they have to run in, how many toys they have to play with, there’s always one big cat that seems to remember running free, and knows no matter how big the cage is, it’s still a cage, and he wants out. Nicky’s lion filled his one good eye with amber, and then he blinked and it was back to his human color, but I knew it had been there, his lion peeking out from the cage that I’d forged for it; a cage that it, and Nicky, resented. How had I not seen it? I hadn’t wanted to see it, hadn’t wanted to understand that no matter how tame he seemed, Nicky was still the sociopath that I’d met a year ago. I hadn’t changed him; I’d just broken him to my will. Crap.

Nicky hung his head enough that the long triangle of bangs spilled forward from his face, so that the scars over the other eye socket showed stark in the sunlight. He didn’t actually like to show the scars much, so I knew he was just too upset to care. His entire body posture had changed, no longer belligerent, no longer violence waiting to happen, but something softer.

“You feel bad now, and I can feel it. You’re a little sad. I know you feel bad for what you did to me, Anita. I don’t want you to feel bad.” He raised his face and looked at me. There was something of pain in his face, a frowning effort to understand what he was feeling.

I reached out to him, and he moved closer so I could touch his face. He nestled his cheek against my small hand, and he let out a breath; something hard and unpleasant went out of him. He was my Nicky again, or what I’d begun to think of as mine. He pressed his hand against mine, pressing it closer against his face. “God,” he whispered.

“That was creepy,” Bernardo said.

“You have tamed him like a pet cat,” Olaf said.

Nicky and I both turned to him, and the tension was just back in Nicky. His beast vibrated like heat down my hand and arm. He kept my hand pressed to his face as he glared at Olaf. It’s hard to be tough when you’re cuddling, but it didn’t seem to occur to Nicky to let go of me, or maybe the desire to be near me was stronger than his desire to look tough?

“I heard you had reformed Nick, a good woman reforming a bad man, but it’s not that at all. Nick had to make you feel better. He could not abide you being even a little sad.” Olaf looked at me, and there was something I’d never seen on his face before, a soft horror.

“Do the two of you know each other?” I asked again.

Nicky moved my hand from his face and held it. I wondered, had it bothered him that I hadn’t touched him more when he first got to town? He was looking at Olaf; even as he began to rub his thumb across my knuckles, he was staring at the other man.

“Of each other, yes,” Nicky said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means,” Olaf said, “that we know each other’s work. Jacob’s pride of werelions had a reputation in some circles for handling things that other mercenaries would not attempt. They were as good as their reputation until they came up against you, Anita.”