Chapter 1

Before

The knife wasn't a threat.

It could have been. It probably should have been.

But it wasn't.

Shrugging out of his cloak, Hiei eyed the girl's grip beneath scornfully lowered brows, noting the too-tight clench of her fingers and the awkward fit of the hilt against her palm. Unpracticed. Clumsy. Non-threatening to the point of embarrassment.

"We're closed," she declared.

"The unlocked door says otherwise."

"The door doesn't get a say."

Kicking the slab of dark oak shut with a muddy boot, Hiei tossed his cloak at her, but it fluttered through her useless fingers, pooling at her feet, rainwater running in rivulets across the poorly sealed floorboards. What a dull, doddering fool. Sneering, he said flatly, "Serve me dinner, grant me lodging, and I won't feel compelled to demonstrate the proper way to hold that blade." His hand fell to the katana at his hip, palm curving over the pommel, and as the girl's hazel eyes—as mottled as the wet grime staining his cloak—widened, he added, "Quickly."

She remained rooted in place long enough that he freed his katana with a clink, the first inch of the gleaming blade emerging from its battered sheath, but then thunder boomed outside, and the girl startled, whipping around and bolting for the bar at the far end of the tavern. She disappeared through a darkened doorway, squeaky hinges announcing her arrival to whoever waited for her out of his sight.

Hn. Idiot.

Irritated and far too aware of the hunger gnawing at his gut, Hiei surveyed the tables clustered in the dimly lit room. All were deserted. (Unsurprising. No bar worth its salt would close its doors against a willing patron. The owners of this disaster must be a whole family of idiots.) But there was a strangely haphazard chaos to the emptiness, and it was that—rather than the quiet or the girl's poorly aimed knife—that at last unsettled him.

Grip still firm on the pommel of his sword, he stalked to the closest high top, lofting himself onto the barstool with the swagger of a demon twice his size. He waited in the stillness, trying to work out what was wrong in this place—why the air was so heavy and the silence so loaded.

Then the door behind the bar shrieked open again, and a new girl appeared. Older and taller than her original counterpart.

And better armed to boot.

Like the younger girl, she was of Demon World's generally lesser ilk, her features a little too reptilian, the planes of her cheeks too sharp, the line of her nose too thin. In the pub's dingy light, her skin was tawny, as if she spent hours beneath the sun, and her hair—though darkened now by rain—seemed a near identical shade. Yet the pert curve of her chin, rounded and ever-so-slightly upturned, was soft and feminine despite her lean muscle. In the gloom, her pupils were wide and dilated.

As for her hand, long-fingered and taloned?

It held a dagger the proper way—the way that led to spilled blood and fresh graves.

"Do you not understand the common tongue?" she demanded, the piss-poor lighting above the bar bronzing her cheeks as she stepped past it. "Sueko told you we're closed. Get gone."

Hiei rubbed a thumb over his jaw, dried sweat flaking away beneath the pressure. Even by his standards, he was in need of a bath. He spread his other hand wide. "Is this or is this not an inn?"

"Right now—and as far as the rest of your miserable life is concerned—it's not."

He snorted. "Get me a drink. Shochu, preferably."

Quickly—faster than he ever would've given her credit for—she closed on him. Her knife found his throat, the edge pricking his flesh, hot blood welling up and dripping into his wet shirt. He tracked every second of her attack, catching every ripple of her muscles, every dilation of her eyes. If he'd wanted to, he could've moved. If he'd wanted to, he could've cut her down where she stood.

But he didn't. Want to kill her, that is.

Up this close, he drank in details he'd missed from afar. Three dark freckles across the bridge of her narrow nose. The slight elongation of her pupils, their tops and bottoms tapering in faint approximation of a snake's. Drying tears still reddening the whites around her hazel irises.

Her eyes were brighter than the other girl's (her sister's?), more green and gold than brown. In them, he spotted no fear, no respect for his katana or the energy he allowed to crackle across his skin. Nor did he find anger or hatred. All that glared back from their depths was a dull, steady refusal to back down.

Well that, and a sadness that made his skin crawl.

"Get the fuck out."

She couldn't be much older than him. Demon ancestry was so varied that judging age was rarely better than a guessing game, but if she was more than a year off from his own eighteen, he'd be surprised. She didn't carry herself like she was his age, though. She didn't grandstand, didn't throw her weight around. She was merely calm, prepared to deal with whatever bullshit he threw her way and entirely unruffled by his bluster.

There was something disconcerting—something captivating—about that sort of confidence.

His tongue flitted out to wet his lips. "I've got coin," he said without meaning to. "I'd pay you for your troubles." A sneer followed his words, though he hadn't meant that either.

Why couldn't he stop staring at those three damn freckles?

Her knife shifted upward, peeling back flesh as it went. More blood flowed down his neck. "Don't want your stolen coin."

He arched a brow.

Her turn for derision. "Sueko recognized you. Just because your bandit brethren aren't here doesn't change that you run with them. What is it you call yourselves?" she asked, but answered herself before he could, "The Bloodied Swords, is it? Well, fuck off. We're closed, so keep your blood money, and get out."

Hn.

That he'd been recognized (even if she had gotten his gang wrong) startled him.

He hadn't expected to be remembered. After all, he hadn't remembered this place until he'd reached the deserted crossroads where it nestled. This part of Demon World was common ground to him, but the dreary inn was little more than a blip on his register, a tiny speck upon the demon plane's vast canvas.

To the north, the Riverlands stretched for days, endless miles of fields and thrushes and streams winding off seemingly forever. To the south, the Woods of Wayward Wanderers beckoned him. His clan (the Black Brotherhood, not the Bloodied Swords the girl spoke of) waited somewhere within those darkened branches. He was already a day late in rejoining them. If he didn't catch up by tomorrow's eve, he'd miss their next mark—and the share of gold participating in its capture would earn him.

His blood money, as she put it.

But stopping here hadn't been a decision so much as a necessity. Weeks away from the Brotherhood had worn him thin, and close though he may be, if he didn't rest tonight, he'd be in no shape to slip back within their folds. The worst of them would tear him apart—would kill him the moment his guard weakened, just as they'd tried to do for years.

If he were too exhausted to sleep with one eye open, he was a dead demon.

So here he sat.

And damn it, he didn't plan on leaving.

"No food, then," he amended, changing tact. Forcing his gaze up to hers—away from the freckles arranged like a three-point constellation across her nose—he wrapped a hand around her wrist and pushed away her knife, the gesture effortless, her strength nothing next to his. "Just a bed."

"Don't have any."

"Liar."

The bar door whined again, the first girl—Sueko—poking her head through the crack. She didn't look at Hiei as she said, "Come on. They're starting."

The girl with the knife wavered, her gaze darting to her sister before returning to Hiei. "We don't have any open rooms. You need to go." Her tone had shifted, anger giving way to resignation, and he knew, even before he refused, that it would take only one more push to get his way.

"A room," he said, "and access to your bathhouse."

Sueko tossed her head, the movement sharp in the corner of his eye, but the freckled girl only sighed. Shoving her knife through her belt, she gestured for him to follow and broke for the stairs, stopping on the way to scoop up his discarded cloak. To her sister, she said, "Ask them to hold for five minutes. I'll be down in a second."

Unable to stamp out a self-satisfied grin, Hiei pursued her up the rickety stairs, the wooden planks creaking beneath his muddy boots. He watched the sway of her hips before his gaze drifted lower. She wore leather moccasins, their laces drawn tight. Rainwater had leached into the fabric, and now left wet footprints behind.

On the second floor, she led him down a narrow hall, and at its far end, she paused to pull a leather cord from around her neck, then fit a key dangling on its end into a locked door.

Her face a tight-drawn mask, she motioned him inside.

The space within was barely broader than the hall. A window in the opposite wall peered out at the rain-lashed night, and the ceiling slanted downward on the left, the eaves eating up extra space. A trio of maps pinned to the slant made for shoddy decoration. Still, there was a bed—and that was all he needed.

"Bathhouse is down those," she said, pointing to a second staircase tucked in an alcove off the hall. "Don't lock the door when you're out of the room. I'm not giving you the key." True to her word, she slipped the leather cord back around her neck, the key disappearing beneath the tunic that hid whatever modest curves she might possess. (Not that he'd spared a moment to think about the slope of her hips or the silky warmth of her skin. Definitely not.) "We'll settle the room's cost in the morning."

"Hn."

A faint frown puckered her lips, and for a second, he was aware of how intensely pink they were against her sun-browned cheeks and chin, but then she shoved his cloak into his hands and turned away, leaving him alone, the constellation of her freckles still caught in his mind's eye.

The bathhouse was lit as poorly as the rest of the inn, but the shadows didn't bother Hiei nearly as much as the water's tepid warmth, and as soon as he'd waded in up to his shoulders, he raised his body temperature, holding it elevated until he'd brought the water nearly to a boil. As steam coiled upward and escaped into the night through cracks in the thin walls, he slumped back against the basin's stone exterior, his neck resting against the edge. Outside, he sensed demon energy rising and falling in strange, rhythmic patterns he could make no sense of, but he didn't concern himself with it for long.

Only once his skin began to prune did he set about scrubbing himself clean. Mud and sweat and dried blood (not his) turned the water a particularly vile shade of brown. He'd known better than to think a single bath would purge so many weeks' worth of filth, but this was a low even for him.

Nonetheless, when he pulled himself from the tub nearly forty minutes after he'd clambered in, he was cleaner than he'd been in weeks, his skin lightly perfumed thanks to the wedge of soap the inn provided. The scent wasn't frilly, merely fresh in the way that clean things were fresh, and it made him think of the freckled girl with her bright eyes and well-pressed clothes. (Was it his imagination, or had she been more put together than her sister? More put together than anything else in this place?)

Shaking his head to banish her away, he pulled his dirty pants back on and shoved his feet into his boots. He didn't don his tattered shirt, instead looping it over his arm before sauntering brazenly back to his room.

In minutes, he'd flicked the lock into place, shed his boots, tossed his shirt into the corner, and fumbled beneath the bed's thin coverlet. Curling onto his side, he slipped an arm beneath the pillow and let his eyes fall shut, content to be warm and cozy and surrounded by a softness more welcoming than anything he'd felt in ages, the scent of sandalwood in the blankets swallowing him up.

Sleep claimed him quick—and he didn't fight it.

The clink of a tumbling lock woke Hiei.

Instantly alert, he rose onto one elbow, watching as the doorknob twisted in the moonlight. Before the door could so much as crack open, he was on his feet and at the threshold, a palm splayed against the wood, keeping it closed with nothing more than his weight.

On the opposite side of the paneling, someone sighed.

No. Not someone. Her.

He recognized her energy signature, weak though it was, and despite himself, he eased up on the door, allowing her to push it open. "What?" he asked as her features swam into view. His voice emerged rough, coarse with sleep and a dream he decidedly should not revisit with her on his doorstep.

In the grayscale light, her tan was washed away to ash. (Or was that him tricking himself, pretending it was a nasty play of light rendering her eyes swollen and tired?)

"That was my bed," she said softly, "before it was yours."

Cobwebbed with sleep though his mind might be, Hiei's exhaustion wasn't the reason he couldn't decipher her meaning. In light of her vagueness, he defaulted to a retort he knew to be tried and true. "Hn. So?"

Her gaze flitted past him into the gloom. "Never mind. I just need something from the dresser."

The pieces came together. He'd stolen her bedroom.

Her haunted gaze returned to his, but not before it raked down his bare chest, drifting all the way to the pants hanging loose around his hips, belts undone. Heat smoked to life within him.

He stepped back, and she slipped inside.

Crossing his arms, he tilted his head. "No empty beds?"

"Not a one."

He grinned. "Then stay."

For a beat, she was silent, her back to him as she reached for the dresser. Then she turned back, soaking him in again. "Okay."

The door closed.

He'd never know who made first contact. Her, grazing careful talons across his exposed ribs? Him, bunching a fist in her tunic, tugging it up until his other palm could hook beneath and pull her flush against him? What he did know was that his pants went first, but her tunic followed fast, and he'd been right—about all of it. The curve of her hips. The swell of her breasts. How silken her skin was against his.

The bed—her bed—issued not so much as a tentative whine as they fell atop it, and he spared only a cursory thought to how often visitors might have graced its silent springs with their heat and sweat and fervent grasping hands before her lips found the underside of his jaw and he forgot about anything but her—anything but the press of her chest to his, the softness of her breathing, the sandalwood smell of her.

And then, as her pants joined his on the floor and she rose above him, her hips straddling his, he stopped thinking entirely.

When he woke next, she lay curled against him, her arm across his chest, her cheek pressed to his shoulder. As the fog of sleep cleared, he took stock of her, his hand ghosting across the small of her back. Her skin was deceptive, soft like he'd imagined it to be, yet with slight ridges that caught against the grooves of his fingerprints—as if it were composed of scales rather than mere flesh. He swept his thumb across her back again, pulling her more firmly into his side—and then processed what had woken him.

Liquid running down his bicep.

Tears.

From her.

He held still, not even his lungs expanding, and tried to work out what she was playing at by feigning sleep. Only, it didn't seem to be an act. Without his own breathing to distract him, it was easy to tell hers was too steady, too even for wakefulness.

The tears, then, were involuntary. Subconscious.

The sight of her hours before, standing at the door of her bedroom, lit only by the moon, came back to him. Her eyes had been swollen. Whatever ritual she'd attended outside the inn before she'd joined him must've been responsible.

What did that make him, exactly? A distraction? A coping mechanism?

He nearly snorted, but stifled the sound. And then, there in the dark, where no one could see him, he dragged a knuckle along her cheek, catching a new tear before it could fall. In answer, she shifted, her face turning into his palm, her breath warm against his wrist.

He froze, expecting her eyes to open, a defensive barb already rising on his tongue, but she went still, and his hackles fell back to restfulness.

Soon, he'd drifted off again, too.

Cold steel kissed Hiei's ribs. He cracked an eye open blearily, his bearings escaping him. He couldn't remember meeting up with the Brotherhood, couldn't remember anything but the scent of sandalwood. Still, it was only with his gang that knives served as morning alarms, wasn't it?

Frowning, he opened his other eye, and a dark swathe of slanted ceiling swam into view. At once, reality came back to him, and he realized the blade threatening to gut him didn't belong to a bandit; it belonged to the girl.

A smirk tugged at his lips. "Forget I was here?" he drawled into the dark.

The knife withdrew slightly. Her faint laugh gusted along his collarbone. "Yes."

He reached down without looking, his fingers closing over hers even as he rolled onto his side and dipped his head, teeth nipping at her ear. She released the knife without protest, and he banished it with a flick of his wrist. The thunk of the blade embedding itself between the maps pinned on the wall nearly drowned out her moan.

(Nearly. But not quite.)

This time he took the lead, rising above her and settling between her thighs. Their next moments passed in ragged tandem, uneven breathing and clutching hands mingling in the darkness.

When they were done and he'd rolled off of her, she said softly, "I don't know your name."

"So? I don't know yours."

"Right."

Right.

And that was the end of it.

(Right?)