“Perhaps in his sealed probation file,” she snapped. “You speak of these things as though they do not matter. Because you are a creature without knowledge of death, life does not matter to you!” Her body trembled, with rage or fear or both, he couldn’t tell.

Whether she was afraid or not, her accusation made him angry. He stood, fighting the urge to favor his left leg, which was engulfed in an unpleasant prickling sensation. “Listen, I know plenty about death.” Marcus’s face flashed through his memory, knifing pain through his chest. “I don’t kill anymore.”

“But you did. At one time, you did.” It wasn’t an indictment, just a simple statement of fact.

One he couldn’t argue with. “Almost all of us have, at one time or another. And you’re an assassin. You kill vampires. What’s the difference?”

She sat up straighter, if that were possible, righteousness radiating around her like hellfire. “Because I kill those who prey upon the weak. I kill out of necessity for order and peace.”

“Right, and indulging your animal instinct is just a perk.” This was rapidly becoming an argument. One he didn’t feel like having. They’d been so peaceful for a few hours.

“I do not enjoy the killing.” She said it through clenched teeth. “Those of us who appreciate the meaning of our true nature do not seek to become one of those murdering lupins.”

To his amazement, she crossed herself and spit daintily after she said the name. He cleared his throat. “Yeah. Okay. Your true nature. Mind cluing me in?”

She reached for the zipper at the top of her high collar and tugged it down. Beneath her ever-present long-sleeved, black leather jacket, she wore only a bra. The horny department of his brain noted it matched the panties he’d glimpsed the day before, though she didn’t wear them now. They were hanging over the shower rod in the bathroom.

He didn’t have time to dwell on the thought of her naked body beneath the jeans she’d borrowed from Carrie. As Bella shrugged the jacket off her shoulders, he became more interested in the dark lines of text wrapping her upper arms.

She held one arm away from her body so he could read it. Some was Latin, some Hebrew, some a strange language he couldn’t identify, and some Italian. The words all followed their native course, up and down, right to left, left to right. He picked out a single strand of Latin and translated it easily. “‘A debt owing to the death of the God-Man, Yeshua, Joshua, Jesus the Christ of Nazareth, never to be repaid.’”