Page 167 of Hunters and Prey

Looking over my shoulder, I watched his breakfast drip down the stone-tiled wall. The cascading lines created a thick, weirdly-gruesome pattern from the octopus-like shape it made on impact.

I wasn’t afraid Black would throw anything at me.

I was never afraid of that with Black.

Some of that is probably that I’m a seer too, so I could feel his light.

Hurting me never crossed his mind.

Finding some way to expel the intensity of light accumulating around him, to deal with his heightened seer emotions, to make as much fucking noise as he possibly could…those were the things that went through his head.

Not hurting me.

If anything, that part of him wanted to run away from me.

I could feel the layers of grief, frustration and hurt behind that harder wall of rage as he glared out over the city. I could also feel how this was about what Nick had done to me––even more than my drugging him, or my meeting with Brick behind his back.

Seers tended to be hyper-emotional compared to humans.

I’d grown used to that, especially with him––especially with us.

Black was looking for an outlet. Preferably some way to convey his anger that didn’t force him to leave my presence altogether.

Hell, I’d been in the exact same place with him, not all that long ago.

Like him, I’d screamed at him. Broken things.

Threatened him with everything from divorce to infidelity.

While I’d ranted at him, smashing vases and glass baubles by chucking them at the wall of an expensive hotel room on Fifth Avenue in New York, he’d mostly just sat there through all of it, letting me work through my feelings, letting me calm down.

Which was pretty much exactly what I was doing with him now.

But unlike in New York, we were bonded now.

We were fully bonded, as in life-bonded.

Because of that, a lot of the threats I’d lobbed at him were pretty much off the table.

Well… I hoped they were, anyway.

Of course, there were still a million and one other ways we could make life hell for one another. In some ways, the bond only made that more true, not less. But divorce, infidelity, ending the relationship altogether… those really weren’t happening at this point, and both of us knew it. We could threaten those things, sure, but those threats would be pretty empty.

Well… again… hopefully.

To Black’s credit, he hadn’t even gone there.

As for me, I just sat there, my head pounding so hard it felt like someone was smacking it with a sharpened mallet. I clasped my hands between my knees as I watched him pace in front of me. In the back of my mind, I wondered if I should try talking anyway, even though nothing clear or coherent came to mind, not even a semi-decent apology.

I could feel Black wanted me to answer him.

I could feel on some level, he almost didn’t care what I said––whether it was to tell him he was wrong, or that I was sorry, or that I wasn’t sorry.

My silence was driving him fucking insane.

“If I’d woken up, I would have thought that fucker took you again!” he snarled, his chest heaving as he paused in his pacing to stare at me. “I would have thought he fucking took you, Miriam… and I wouldn’t have even known where to start looking. I would’ve thought he had you somewhere, that he was draining you dry…”

His jaw hardened, his eyes growing shockingly bright.

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