Page 36 of Hunter's Game
Their eyes met across the room, electricity crackling between them. For a moment, he saw past her carefully constructed walls to the woman beneath—fierce and broken and beautiful in her determination.
“After doesn’t matter.” She looked away first. “All that matters is the next four days. We get Katherine out, we expose Romano’s operation, and we try not to die in the process. Simple.”
“Nothing about this is simple.” Hunter moved closer, backing her against her desk. “Including whatever this is between us.”
“Hunter.” His name was a warning on her lips.
“No more lies.” He trapped her there, one hand braced on either side of her. “No more games. Whatever play we’re making against Romano, I need to know you’re not playing me too.”
She met his eyes, and for once he saw nothing but raw honesty there. “I’ve lied about a lot of things. But not this. Not us.”
He shouldn’t believe her. Everything in his training, his experience, screamed that she was too good at deception, too skilled at manipulation. But when she reached up to trace his jaw, her fingers trembling slightly, he found himself leaning into her touch.
“Prove it,” he challenged softly.
She kissed him like a drowning woman coming up for air. Every calculated wall she’d built since finding her mother’s body seemed to crumble in that moment. For years, she’d maintained perfect control—over her emotions, her expressions, her responses. Now, with Hunter, that control was slipping. It terrified her almost as much as it exhilarated her.
Her hands fisted in his shirt as he pressed her harder against the desk, pouring three days of doubt and desire and desperate need into the kiss. He tasted blood—hers or his, he wasn’t sure—and something darker, more dangerous.
Truth, maybe. Or just another perfect lie.
King cleared his throat loudly. They broke apart, both breathing heavily, but Hunter didn’t step back.
“If you two are done...” Darkness’s voice held dry amusement. “We’ve got a museum heist to plan. And Eden, darlin’?”
She raised an eyebrow, her lips still swollen from Hunter’s kiss.
“If you’re playing us?” Darkness’s smile was all teeth. “They’ll never find your body.”
The alpha in Hunter bristled at the threat, but Eden was unshaken. “Noted.” She turned back to her computers, but Hunter felt her lean slightly into him, seeking contact. “Now, about that heist...”
They spent the next hours planning, plotting, preparing for war. Hunter watched Eden work, seeing both the skilled operative and the woundedwoman beneath. He still wasn’t sure he trusted her completely.
But watching her piece together their strategy, seeing the fierce determination in every line of her body, he knew one thing with absolute certainty: whatever game she was playing, whatever secrets she still held, he was already too far gone to walk away.
The next four days would either save them or destroy them completely. And Hunter found he didn’t care which outcome they were hurtling toward, as long as they faced it together.
Even if “together” turned out to be just another beautiful lie.
The thing about priceless artifacts is that they’re really just expensive paperweights until someone decides they’re worth killing for. Eden adjusted her evening gown—midnight blue, designed to hide bloodstains—and watched society’s elite mill around the museum’s new Ancient Civilizations wing. Every glittering jewel, every perfectly tailored suit represented a potential threat. Any one of these smiling patrons could be working for Romano.
“Security team three, check in.” Hunter’s voice was low in her earpiece, his tone pure professional despite everything that had passed between them in the last four days.
“Clear on the east side,” she murmured, pretending to examine a particularly ugly vase. “Though I’m starting to think some of these artifacts deserve to be stolen. Who pays millions for ceramic waterfowl?”
“Focus, darlin’.” But she heard the smile in his voice. “Dr. Chen’s speech starts in ten minutes. Everything has to be in position before then.”
The endearment caught her off-guard, as it always did—professional in context but intimate intone. During their preparations for tonight, they’d developed a rhythm that transcended standard operational parameters, anticipating each other’s movements and decisions with uncanny accuracy.
She found herself automatically scanning the room for him, locating Hunter by the bar where he maintained perfect sightlines to both her position and the main exits. Even across the crowded gallery, she recognized the alertness in his stance that contrasted with his relaxed expression.
Eden scanned the room while mentally reviewing what made Katherine Chen such a puzzling figure. Unlike most museum curators Eden had encountered during her career, Chen’s documentation revealed an almost forensic approach—highlighting manufacturing anomalies, documenting chain-of-custody irregularities, and establishing patterns that only someone looking for criminal connections would notice.
During their limited interactions at museum events, Eden had observed how Chen commanded rooms without appearing to do so—a rare skill typically developed in intelligence circles, not academic ones. The curator maintained peripheral awareness while appearing completely absorbed in artifacts, calculated sight lines without obvious scanning, and somehow always positioned herself to monitor key figures while appearing coincidentally placed.
Most curiously, Chen sometimes documented pieces in ways that created perfect evidence chainswhen compiled correctly, yet appeared inconsequential in isolation. It wasn’t just professional thoroughness—it was calculated strategy disguised as academic diligence.
Eden did another casual sweep of the room, cataloging faces. The Blind Jacks were scattered throughout the crowd, clean-shaven and uncomfortable in rented tuxedos. King held court near the bar, playing the wealthy donor with surprising skill. And somewhere in the maze of galleries, Romano’s private security teams were waiting to spring their own trap.
