Unseen

Chapter 22

Yvette looked dead. She looked like a target after Violet had finished a mission. Only Violet had never treated any of her targets so cruelly. She never lingered over them, the way it looked like Yvette's torturers had lingered over her.

But the pallor of her skin was the pallor of a corpse. And her dull eyes looked more dead than alive.

Yvette pushed herself the rest of the way to her feet. She visibly tried to suppress a wince of pain. She couldn't quite hold back an animal sound of agony.

Violet flinched at the sound. She took a deep breath—and gagged. The room smelled like blood. Petric's blood, but also Yvette's. No two people's blood smelled quite the same. That was one of the things she had learned on her many missions.

"Focus," Yvette ordered, her voice sharp. "We've got two dozen of their cronies, minimum, headed straight for us as soon as they raise the alarm."

Her voice was rough. Violet knew that roughness. It was the sound of someone who had spent too long screaming. She didn't know that sound from her missions—she never gave her targets time to scream. She knew it from her training. The punishments for failure could be brutal.

"Stop looking at me like that." Yvette wrapped her arms around her bare breasts. "Where are my clothes?"

Violet scanned the room for them. It was easier than looking at Yvette. She found a discarded pile of bloody fabric in the corner, and handed the clothes to Yvette. Yvette snatched them away with the irritable gestures of someone who didn't want to need help, let alone accept it.

"I thought you were dead," Yvette said as she pulled her clothes on. "I thought they killed you."

Violet shook her head. "I got away." Her cheeks burned. "I ran away."

Her full belly felt as heavy as a condemnation. Yvette had been in this room, being tortured, and Violet had been stuffing her face and savoring the sound of laughter.

But she had come back.

For the moment, at least, Yvette was safe because of her.

It felt... good. Warm. Like sitting on the couch with Yvette, but with an added extra zing to it that only her missions had ever given her.

She shot Yvette a shy smile.

Yvette didn't return the smile. "You shouldn't have come back. You got away. You should have stayed gone, and been grateful."

"Do you wish I hadn't?" Violet asked, voice hesitant, heart suddenly troubled.

Yvette shook her head. "You saved my life," she said, her voice more vulnerable than Violet had ever heard it—except for that one day when she had come to Violet to ask about her purpose. "Thank you."

Violet's cheeks burned hotter. Rather than figure out how to answer, she opened the door a crack. Immediately, the sound of distant voices and footsteps reached her ears.

"They're coming," she reported.

Yvette tugged her shirt back into place. She tossed her head back and wiped blood away from her eyes. "You still shouldn't have come back," she said. "Now there's a good chance we'll both die here."

"Not if I can help it." Violet held up the knife she had taken from one of the dead guards on her way back inside.

"You and me both," Yvette grimly agreed. She reached down and grabbed a heavy-looking black pistol from next to the man's still body. It was covered in blood.

She wiped it off carefully on his shirt. "Hope this thing will still work after the bath it got."

She wasn't holding the gun the way Violet had been taught to hold a pistol in training. "Do you know how to use that?"