Addict (Hunter #2)(22)

“I wouldn’t say that,” Trent muttered. His eyes softened marginally. “Are you okay? You know, after what happened today?”

“You mean after you and the big boss threatened to lock me up again? Somehow I’ll survive. I don’t think it’s the last time you’ll try to kick me in the gnads.”

The big guy managed to look offended. “We didn’t do that. It was only a test. You know how dangerous you are.”

“Terrifically dangerous to a vampire king.” Donovan was kind of the most powerful supernatural creature on the planet. I was supposed to believe he was afraid of little old me?

He stared at me for a moment. “Marcus hasn’t told you, has he? You haven’t read the histories.”

Yeah, when I read it’s usually a nice juicy thriller or a romance. “Nope. Not my style.”

“I’m talking about the histories written by academics concerning Hunters. Your boyfriend wrote several of them. It seems academics like to keep records, and god knows the Council does. Donovan found them when he had the libraries moved from Paris to here.”

“Records about other Hunters?” I was interested in that. As far as I knew I was the only Hunter in the world.

“Yeah, I can get them for you. Maybe then you’ll understand why Donovan’s been so hard on you and why he’s going to let up from now on. You did great today. He was impressed.”

“Donovan is hard on me because he’s an *.”

Trent shook his head. “He’s hard on you because the last Hunter who was found and trained past the age of twenty killed over three hundred people before they were able to put her down. She killed her entire family and moved on to slaughtering whole villages in South America.”

“What are you talking about?” Marcus hadn’t said a thing to me about that. Actually, now that I thought about it, he hadn’t talked much about other Hunters. I knew he’d trained a couple, but he never talked about them. I thought maybe it was a little like ex-girlfriends. It’s not in trainer etiquette to talk about your ex-Hunters or something.

What if he had different reasons? Even earlier today, Hugo had mentioned something about a girl he’d tried to train being too old when they’d reached her. He’d said it was heartbreaking.

Had that woman been the one who tore apart villages?

Trent leaned against the wall, sighing. “I was worried you didn’t know. You seem so level-headed that when you pulled all that guilt trip shit, I was worried. The king’s a good guy. Now that he knows the training will take, he’ll back off.”

“So I was too old.” There was still so much I didn’t know. If there was one good thing about being forced to live in the Council headquarters, it was the fact that I might have a chance to learn more about myself, about this thing I was becoming.

Trent stood back and shrugged. “There’s a reason the Council tried to find them young. I think having a family helped you. I think who your dad was made a difference, too. Your real dad, that is.”

“I didn’t know him.” Lee Owens. I thought about him a lot. I think I dream about him.

“He’s a legend in my community. I’ve only met two loners, and Owens was so different from the other one. Lone wolves, well, they have that name for a reason. They drift and keep drifting. Your dad stayed. Your dad was different, and I think that’s why you’re different. He had a strong heart. You do, too.”

Thinking about my real dad made me emotional. I’d grown up with a complete * for a father figure, but maybe my real dad had left me something important. Maybe he’d managed to leave me a piece of his soul. If I didn’t watch it, Trent was going to see me cry like a baby.

“I want to read those histories.” There was a whole book out there describing other women like me? Yeah, I wanted to read it.

Trent nodded. “I’ll get them to you. Maybe then you can find it in your vengeful she-wolf heart to think about not hating the king. He was only trying to protect the world. He reads a lot of comic books so he thinks he can do that.”

“I’m not vengeful. Well, maybe a little.” Something about the way Trent called me a she-wolf made me want to smile. But I was still pissed at him so I didn’t. “So everyone knows about the whole elderly Hunter goes cray cray and kills everyone thing?”

“Not everyone. Donovan studied it carefully after he found out about you. You were supposed to be brought in a decade ago.”

I’d been told this part of my history back when I first met the king and his Council. The king’s coup a decade before had saved me from being kidnapped and brought to the old Council for training. I often wondered about what would have happened if I’d been brought to Paris. I wonder what my life would have been like had I met Marcus at the age of sixteen. “Did the queen know? Why would she encourage her son to talk to me if she thought I might go bat shit?”

Trent’s lips curled up in a smile. “Yeah, she knew all about it. I think the king gave her a hearty lecture on the subject, but Zoey Donovan-Quinn doesn’t play by anyone’s book but her own. She’s an ‘innocent until proven to be a stone-cold killer’ kind of girl.”

“You like her.” Somehow it made me feel better that one person hadn’t thought me capable of destroying whole towns.