Free Marked by an Assassin by Felicity Heaton Page B

grimaced, clenching his teeth against the pain ripping him apart. Still raw. Still killing him slowly twenty years on.
    The blood of his kin. The cries of those who had survived the brutal attack on the pride. The look in his older brother’s eyes as he lifted them from their dead mother and sister and set them on him across the frigid square.
    Gods, Cavanaugh had known it had been his fault.
    Harbin had seen it then. He had seen the disappointment and disgust. The anger. The pain.
    He had done the only thing he could. He had gone after Archangel, mad with a need to make them pay. He remembered little of what had happened in the aftermath of the attack. Only the taste of blood, the feel of bones breaking and skin rupturing beneath his claws, and the overwhelming urge to keep fighting.
    Until all were dead.
    That urge still lived within him.
    It still took him whenever he crossed paths with an Archangel hunter, and he still lost his mind when he killed them, remembering only fragments of what happened, engulfed by his rage and his pain.
    Harbin growled and fought the dark need as it rose inside him, threatening to drive him insane. He could smell the Archangel hunters, could sense their presence around him, but he couldn’t reach them. If he succumbed to his urges, he would only lose his mind, unable to satisfy his deep craving to spill their blood. He had to retain control.
    Voices blurred around him, a female and the dragon’s. The huntress had come to him, but Harbin was too deep in the grip of his memories to make out what they were saying to each other. He breathed deep and clawed back control, focusing on his need to hear what was being said, because it might end the attack ravaging his mind and body.
    If he could only hear she hadn’t betrayed him.
    He needed to hear.
    A different male voice joined the blur and he caught the words ‘study’ and ‘shift’. He twisted his hair in his fingers and focused on those two words. They wanted to study the dragon. They wanted to see him shift.
    It wasn’t possible.
    No dragon could shift in this realm. The curse placed on them millennia ago made it impossible. It also made the male’s time limited. If he didn’t escape, he would die here. Not because of Archangel’s experiments, but because this realm would kill him.
    “I’m sorry.” A soft female voice rang through the glass and Harbin heard the hurt in it, pain that spoke to him and softened the harder parts of him for a heartbeat before he closed himself off again.
    A female could easily sway a male with a few sweet and well-chosen words. It meant nothing.
    Harbin only hoped the dragon could see through them too.
    “I am sorry too.” Those four words, spoken by the shifter, carried a weight of bitterness, hurt and hatred, and Harbin breathed easily at last.
    The male was wiser than Harbin had hoped.
    He wasn’t sorry the bitch had betrayed him. He was sorry he had ever met her.
    The huntress who had used and betrayed Harbin wouldn’t receive such a simple ending. His closure needed blood and death, and he wouldn’t be sorry about it.
    Harbin closed his eyes. “Escape… the mission… and then revenge. He’s coming. He’s coming. He’s coming. Escape… the mission… and then revenge.”
    He lost himself as he chanted those words, so focused on them that they filled his mind and left no room for any other thoughts. They consumed him, drove him, and no matter how much he tried, he couldn’t stop saying them. A passing guard looked in on him and Harbin lifted his head, bared his fangs and kept chanting. The hunter gave him a look that said he had gone mad.
    Mad. Yes. Definitely mad.
    But not insane.
    Driven. Obsessed. A madness that kept him walking forwards, forever onwards in search of the one elusive female, the one death that would free him of the compelling urge to butcher Archangel hunters and make them pay for their sins that was beginning to consume him again.
    He had lost sight of his true