Page 89 of The Hunter

He’d trained like this his whole life. Wu Ping had started with sand, building calluses on his knuckles and the outsides of his palms. Then they’d moved to buckets full of pebbles, and wood after that. Finally he’d been punching the walls of the prison, painting the stones with his weakness until his skin was so rough, it no longer broke.

The blood meant he was growing too soft. That he was getting weak. That he could be broken.

Come for me. Say my name.

Christopher… please.

He was no stranger to entreaties, to pulling people beneath him and silencing their pleas. But hers cut through him like a jagged stone. Had she been begging for release, or had she been pleading with him to release her?

He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t remember. Part of him was glad he didn’t see her last night, that the memory of fear or pain on her face wasn’t branded onto his mind’s eye.

Goddammit, it was supposed to have been a dream. With her, it had always been a dream. Words like that didn’t come to him when he was awake. Needs as primal as those didn’t belong in daylight. Men like him didn’t leave a woman wet and writhing.

They didn’t care to.

He. Didn’t.Care.

This time, it was the wood that splintered beneath his fists.

He’d been at this for what felt like an eternity, trading his obsessive mental mortification with the physical kind. Sweat ran down his naked torso in chilly rivulets, blood pulsed, pushing his veins close to the skin. Muscles swelled and burned.

And still he couldn’t forget the softness between her thighs, the bliss of holding her beneath him, of grinding his hips down against hers.

He’d coerced her. Treated a virgin like a common whore, took her from behind like one. Ripped into her like a barbarian, but at leastthenshe’d consented.

And still he’d cringed from what he’d done.

Don’t… stop.

He rummaged through the haze of lust and frenzy, desperately trying to unravel the meaning behind those words. In his dream, she’d been goading him on, encouraging him to take her.

In his nightmare, he’d taken her against her will.

In reality, he’d spilled his seed inside a woman for the first time in his life. What if she was—What if they’d made a—

“Fuck. Fuck.Fuck.” He punctuated each new blow with a bellow of frustration.

“I wouldn’t let Mama hear you say that.” A small voice permeated the echoes of his vulgarity with a gentle reproach. “She doesn’t like that word.”

Wonderful. He’d said it fucking plenty last night, hadn’t he?

Jakub stepped from the doorway and ventured into the room, pausing to study the weapons in the rack beneath the second-story walk from which a climbing rope dangled. His pale fingers closed over the little wooden handle of his garrote with fascination.

Christopher opened his mouth to tell the boy to leave, but what came out was, “Have you seen her?”

“She’s getting dressed.” Jakub caressed a set of throwing daggers next.

“Is she… all right?” Cursing the tinge of anxiety in his voice, Christopher clenched his wounded fist.

“Why wouldn’t she be?”

There was no safe place to go with that question.

“Don’t touch that,” he barked.

Jakub’s hand jerked away from a shiny pistol and seemed to bury itself in the pocket of his little trousers in shame. “Sorry,” the boy mumbled, then brightened. “Did you break that?” He jogged over to the log, settling his hand on the fresh split with reverence before he craned his neck to look up. “Welton said to come down and look for breakfast after I dressed, but then I heard a crash. You did that with your fists?”

From this angle, those blasted spectacles made the child mostly a set of gigantic eyes with a few skinny limbs dangling from them. Christopher had difficulty looking down at him.