He couldn’t stand the look of pure, knee-wobbling relief on her face when he’d walked into the apartment. He’d come right back here after he’d finished because he thought she’d be asleep and he could wash off the blood without having to go back to the Comitium barracks first, but she’d been just standing in the living room. Waiting for him.

And as he’d stepped into the apartment and she’d seen and smelled the blood …

He couldn’t stand the horror and pain on her face, either.

You see what this life has done to me? he wanted to ask. But he had been beyond words. There had been only screaming until now. From the three males he’d spent hours ending, all of it done to Micah’s specifications.

Hunt strode for the bathroom and turned the shower up to scalding. He removed the helmet, the bright lights stinging his eyes without the visor’s cooling tones. Then he removed his gloves.

She had looked so horrified. It was no surprise. She couldn’t have really understood what he was, who he was, until now. Why people shied away from him. Didn’t meet his eyes.

Hunt peeled his suit off, his bruised skin already healing. The drug lords he’d ended tonight had gotten in a few blows before he’d subdued them. Before he’d pinned them to the ground, impaled on his blades.

And left them there, shrieking in pain, for hours.

Naked, he stepped into the shower, the white tiles already sweating with steam.

The scalding water blasted his skin like acid.

He swallowed his scream, his sob, his whimper, and didn’t balk from the boiling torrent.

Didn’t do anything as he let it burn everything away.

Micah had sent him on a mission. Had ordered Hunt to kill someone. Several people, from the different scents on him. Did each one of those lives count toward his hideous debt?

It was his job, his path to freedom, what he did for the Governor, and yet … And yet Bryce had never really considered it. What it did to him. What the consequences were.

It wasn’t a path to freedom. It was a path to Hel.

Bryce lingered in the living room, waiting for him to finish showering. The water kept running. Twenty minutes. Thirty. Forty.

When the clock crept up on an hour, she found herself knocking on his door. “Hunt?”

No answer. The water continued.

She cracked the door, peering into the dim bedroom. The bathroom door stood open, steam wafting out. So much steam that the bedroom had turned muggy.

“Hunt?” She pushed forward, craning her neck to see into the bright bathroom. No sign of him in the shower—

A hint of a soaked gray wing rose from behind the shower glass.

She moved, not thinking. Not caring.