Page 44 of You Only Love Twice
But as he watched Ghost quit the room in a fury, while the doctor trembled and cursed under his breath, Obsidian suddenly wondered whether he could trust Ghost either.
Chapter 11
"Tell me about Russia."
Gemma paused with her glass of blud-wein at her lips. She should have known he'd had ulterior motives when he brought the small table into her observatory.
"What precisely were you interested in knowing? It's a lovely place, if one likes snow, vodka, ornate palaces, and bloodthirsty scheming princes."
"No." Obsidian stilled, his silver-tipped lashes fluttering low over his eyes. "You claim my recollection of what occurred in Russia is wrong. Tell me about us. About the first time we met."
Us.
Gemma's smile melted off her face, and she swallowed. "What would you like to know?" she asked carefully, watching the shift of intense emotion flicker across his face.
"You say you loved me. I find it difficult to believe. I was working for the enemy—"
"I wasn’t aware of that," she pointed out, "until it was too late."
"And yet, you were a trained spy, one of Malloryn’s best. Love is a weapon to a woman like you. I find it difficult to believe you fell prey to it."
Gemma set her glass down. "Do you think me entirely immune to the lighter emotions? I spent my entire childhood locking away everything I dared to feel before it could betray me. It didn’t mean I didn’t feel those emotions, it just meant I didn’t dare reveal them. When Malloryn showed me a new world those old habits stayed with me, but sometimes I succumb to certain weaknesses. Sometimes I make mistakes."
Her longing to be accepted and loved had been her downfall more than once.
"So I was a mistake? "
"Clearly," she snapped. "I thought what we shared in Russia was real. And you nearly killed me. Lesson learned. Love is a weakness that shouldn’t exist for people like us."
Vibrating with anger, she turned her face abruptly away, before she could reveal too much. She should have mocked him.Love? Of course, what I felt wasn’t real. It was all a game. But the very concept irritated something within her.
She felt strangely defensive.
"Your childhood?" Obsidian asked softly, setting one of his knives down and reaching for the other. The scent of oil on the rag in his hand was quite overwhelming. "From what Ghost has told me, you were training to be a Falcon before you defected to Malloryn’s side."
"I didn’t defect, so much as I was thrown away."
"Oh."
"It’s a long story—"
"We have the entire night ahead of us."
Gemma sighed. She needed him to start trusting her, but this felt like scratching the scab of an old wound.
"My mother sold me to the Falcons when I was a little girl. There was a school up near the border of Scotland, ostensibly a boarding school. I cried myself to sleep every night for a month, before an older girl woke me one night with a knife to my throat and told me if she caught me sniveling again, she'd silence me forever.
"Then the classes started. Working with a knife; any sort of rifle or pistol; poisons; forgery; dancing; lock-picking; etiquette; flirtation; strangling a man with your bare hands….
"Every year from the age of ten, we faced our year-end tests, where we were given the name of another student in our class and told to either kill them—or be killed. Those that survived graduated the year level. By the time I reached my final year, there were barely twenty of us left in the class, and you didn’t dare make friends." She’d learned that lesson when she was twelve and Lizzie picked her name out of the hat.
"It’s one thing to be trained as a child assassin, but the Falcons take only the best. To ‘graduate’ you're given the name of someone to kill. Succeed and you are one of them. Fail and you are dead. I was the first to be granted a name, and it was Malloryn’s."
Gemma took an unsteady breath. "I knew he was the new head of his house, recently risen to the duchy, but little beyond that. I studied him for weeks. Watched his house, watched his every move. And one night I broke into his bedroom and waited for him. He staggered in around six in the morning, and I put the pistol to his head and... hesitated. One second of uncertainty changed my life forever. It was one thing to kill for survival during our year-end tests, quite another to ruthlessly murder someone. It’s the first time…." Her voice trailed off. "I always struggled with that instinct. Malloryn used the moment to disarm me, and turned my own pistol on me. I was lying on my back on the floor, certain this was the end, when he lowered the pistol. He offered me a chance to work for him, instead."
Gemma would never forget that night.
"You had me,"the duke had said coldly, staring at her along the line of the pistol."Why didn't you pull the trigger?"
