Nix. (Den of Mercenaries Book 3)(28)

Kit let out a string of curses as he dried his hands with his napkin, then went about cleaning up the broken glass. “That night, did he …”

He didn’t finish, and from his expression, she thought that he didn’t want to ask the question—as though he were the one that didn’t want the answer.

“Not that night, no.”

He had made it a week.

A week of mentally torturing her and physically bruising her before he robbed her of her virginity and stripped her of her dignity.

“I’m sorry,” Kit said, with such conviction that Luna was blinking at him.

For a man that hadn’t seemed to feel anything moments before, he now seemed affected by what she had just shared.

She wondered if someone close to him had suffered this way, or whether she had been the first.

“You don’t have to apologize,” she said softly. It wasn’t as though it had been him to hurt her.

Before he could ask her anything else, she bit a slice of toast, not really tasting the food as she tried to give herself a moment to center herself and banish thoughts of Lawrence again.

But Kit wasn’t done, and even if he looked uncomfortable, he still looked to her and asked, “If you want to continue, I’m listening. If you want to wait, I understand.”

She thought on her answer long and hard, and despite wanting to drop the subject, she decided it would be better to just finish now.

Get it over with.

It would be better to rip the band-aid off in one go as opposed to gradually peeling it off.

As she began to speak, she couldn’t tell who was more upset about what she was saying—her or Kit.





Chapter Seven





Luna was beginning to realize that time at the chateau passed remarkably slowly, or perhaps it was because she was ready to get on with the mysterious training that she couldn't think of anything else.

Two weeks had finally passed, and in that time, she hadn't seen very much of Kit outside of their new daily routine of eating together. At first, she had thought it out of necessity, that he wanted to speak with her more about what she was going to be doing, and her time with Lawrence.

Though he hadn’t reacted well to their first conversation, he had kept himself in careful check through all the others.

And despite her original assumption, she did feel better talking about it—purging it, as Kit said.

But after a while, they no longer spoke of training, Uilleam, or Lawrence, rather he asked about her life before that, when she was just a girl with dreams of something more than the little town she grew up in.

“What did you want to be?” Kit had asked, voice gone soft as he asked.

She now wondered if he did it on purpose, changing his tone in a way that made her want to answer whatever he asked—she found she could listen to him talk for hours. There was never any doubt in her mind that he was actually listening.

“I don’t know,” Luna had answered, “I just know I wanted to be something more than I was.”

She couldn’t think of any one thing she had wanted to do for the rest of her life. Maybe an artist? But Luna had always dreamed of different lives that she could lead.

She wanted to be a dreamer, but now, she wasn’t quite sure what she would become.

But she never used her family’s names—those details she wanted to keep to herself for now.

Kit didn’t pry, accepting whatever she freely gave. Luna soon looked forward to their meals, enjoying their conversations, but very soon, she had grown bored outside of the time they spent together.

With nothing to do, Luna started venturing around the chateau on her own. The guards rarely spoke a word to her, and the Wild Bunch were always in and out, so she was left unbothered.

And it was in her search that she found Kit’s library.

A library.

Books as far as her eyes could see, the masculine tones of the space prominent in the mahogany wood fitted to the walls, shelves, and stuffed armchairs.

Venturing further into the room, her fingers had danced over the spines of several books, reading them as she went.

There were all sorts, like the classics such as Dorian Grey and a few by Jane Austen, but there were also rows of encyclopedias and tome-like books with lettering she couldn't read.

And these were all just by the door—she had yet to make it around the entire room.

Grabbing one of the first she saw, she thumbed through the pages, gaze drifting over words she didn’t understand. But she was fascinated by the scrawling letters and symbols.

It wasn’t long before she was losing herself in that room and within the pages of books, escaping her own reality to sink into another.

It was here that Kit found her, but this time she wasn’t curled in a chair reading one of the many books that lined the walls, rather she was studying a shadowbox that hung on a wall and the two instruments inside it.

To her, they just looked like … sticks. Just plain ordinary sticks that didn’t seem special in any way. But they had to be, she thought, since he had gone through the trouble of hanging them there.

“They belonged to my father.”

Luna had gotten used to Kit moving silently and showing up when she least expected it, so for once, she didn’t jump at his sudden appearance behind her. She held up the instruments, familiarizing herself with the weight of them.