Scorched Ice (Fire and Ice #3)(31)

“You okay?” Melissa inquired as she slid into the seat beside Quinn.

Quinn’s fingers curled into his shirt, drawing his attention to her before she released him. “I’m fine,” she replied.

Chris walked over to hand Quinn a package of peanut butter cups and a can of Mountain Dew. “Thought you might like these,” he said to her.

She smiled as she took them from Chris. “It’s like you read my mind.” Quinn popped the top on her soda and took a lengthy swallow before placing the can in her lap. “Now what?”

“Now, we’ll wait for a while. Then, Devon and I will go back in to see if we can discover more information about the two men we encountered tonight,” Julian replied.

“I’m coming with you. They have no idea who I am or what I’m capable of. They only know me as a vampire. They know all of you, and they know what most of you can do. That Hunter told me there’s been a standing kill order on every one of you for two years. They might hesitate to kill me. They won’t hesitate to kill you.”

“Bastards,” Lou said.

“It’s not surprising,” Devon replied from where he sat in the passenger seat with Cassie on his lap.

“You have no idea what they’ll do if they get their hands on you,” Julian said to Quinn.

She lifted her hands and wiggled her fingers. The scars on her palms were stark against her pale skin, but her wounds from tonight had already healed. “I’ll drain the life from them so fast they won’t know what hit them.”

“You didn’t do that with the Hunter,” Julian reminded her.

“That’s because he was one of us. I wanted to make him see reason.”

“There is no reasoning with The Commission or anyone they’ve had under their thumb for too long,” Luther said, drawing Julian’s gaze to where he sat in the driver’s seat. The lines on the Guardian’s face were deeper than normal. The haggard air about him made him appear older than he truly was. “They corrupt all those close to them. Don’t try to make them see reason next time. Just kill them. Otherwise, you’ll be the one who ends up dead.”

“That’s what I told her,” Julian said.

He’d expected Quinn to bristle over his words, but her eyes were full of sadness when they came back to his. “To just give up on someone seems so… hopeless.”

“It’s not giving up on them. It’s recognizing they can’t be saved.”

Methodically, she worked to unwrap a peanut butter cup. “There were probably many who believed you couldn’t be saved.”

He stared down at her, unsure of how to respond. She was such a contradiction—willing to kill when necessary and with a brutality that matched his own, but her heart was one of the biggest he’d ever come across. In many ways, she understood him and accepted him like no other could; she made him stronger, yet she could also weaken him completely when she uttered words like those.

He didn’t want her to be colder toward others. He loved her the way she was. She kept him grounded when the thrill of killing tried to call him back into its alluring depths. However, he couldn’t stand the thought that she might once again try to reason with their enemies because she believed they could be saved, or at least change, as he had.

“I’m sure many didn’t think I was worth trying to save,” he finally replied. “And at the time, they would have been right about me, but I made no secret of who and what I was back then. Maybe I could have tried to be better earlier in my life, but the possibility never crossed my mind, and in all honesty, I didn’t want to. I enjoyed torturing and killing, and I admit it.

“But it also wasn’t ingrained into my head that I had to be a ruthless killer. I’d seen Devon change. When the time came for me to reevaluate myself and my choices, it was not something I believed impossible. The Commission has spent centuries hiding behind a pretense of doing good in the world while torturing humans and vampires in a twisted attempt at playing God. Those men and women are monsters. You cannot reason with a monster, Quinn.”

“Dani got away from them,” she replied.

“I wasn’t born amongst them,” Dani said. “I went in as a child, but I wasn’t raised by them. Even still, they had me following them and believing in them enough that I turned Cassie over to them. It wasn’t until I saw what they were doing beneath that school, and their true nature that I realized I’d chosen poorly. I regret it every day, but someone who is raised with them may never come to see that The Commission is the true evil in this world.”

Quinn picked at the edge of her peanut butter cup before she turned toward Dani. “Would you hesitate to kill one of their Hunters?”

Dani glanced nervously at Julian as her fingers touched upon the missing piece of her ear. “No, I wouldn’t. Not anymore. I’ve seen too much of what they do. I may not want to kill them, but The Commission and their followers can’t be allowed to spread through this world again. You have no idea some of the things they did…” She broke off and her haunted gaze fell on the window across from her. “They have to be stopped.”

“I know they do,” Quinn said.

But she might hesitate again if it was a Hunter she encountered, he knew it. “You’re staying here with everyone else when we go in the hotel,” he said to her.