quarry.”
“Tell me what you saw.”
Niamh remained stubbornly silent. She didn’t know why this new flood of information in her vision included Kiyo, but she knew she didn’t trust him enough to confide in him. About any of it.
“Are you kidding?” His voice was worryingly calm and low.
Glancing at him, their eyes met as he took his off the road to glower at her. She wondered what his smile was like.
“Seriously? You want me to haul my ass back to a city I haven’t been to—” He cut off abruptly.
Interesting. “You haven’t been to …?”
“You tell me nothing, I tell you nothing.”
“Can you really blame me?” Her tone was conciliatory. Niamh wasn’t the type to be at loggerheads with someone. It wasn’t in her nature. And it seemed she was stuck with the werewolf for a while. “Think about it from my perspective. You kidnapped me using the only weapon on earth I’m vulnerable to. For a start, not many folks know what I am or what can hurt me, so you’re immediately in my ‘be wary of’ category.
“Plus, when I came out of my vision, there were dead bodies everywhere, hearts ripped out, and one of them was decapitated. When you appeared in all your naked glory, you had no sword in hand—actual sword, I mean.” Her cheeks bloomed hot and she cursed the nonsense blushing this man incited in her. She’d rarely ever blushed in her life before. Damn him. “So, one can only conclude that you ripped a man’s head off with your bare hands.”
The werewolf didn’t respond. Instead he gestured to a gas station. “We can change here.”
Niamh rolled her eyes at his evasiveness. “Fionn wouldn’t hire just anyone to watch out for me. He’d hire the strongest supernatural he knew that he could trust.”
Kiyo flicked her a considering look as he glided the car into a parking spot.
“He trusts you, but that doesn’t mean I do. I only started to trust him a few months ago, for goodness’ sake.” She sighed. “It’s going to take a lot more than a bloody fight in the snow to assure us of one another’s intentions. I can’t tell you about the vision. Not yet. If ever. But I promise you that we absolutely should go to Tokyo. I feel it in my gut. And my instincts about these visions have never let me down. I’m the reason Rose and Fionn are together. Did they tell you that?”
“They’re together because they’ve become Fate’s bitch. True mates.”
Niamh raised an eyebrow. “You have a low opinion of the bond?”
“I have a low opinion of anything that tries to control me.”
“That’s a funny way to look at love.”
Apparently done with the conversation, Kiyo moved to get out of the car.
Niamh grabbed his arm to stop him, and he cut her a bored, questioning look.
Feeling a strange tingling sensation running up her arms from her fingertips, she released her grip. “I just need you to know I’m not messing you about, taking you somewhere you don’t want to go for the hell of it. I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.”
His beautiful upper lip curled into that irritating sneer of his. “I don’t get upset.”
She grinned, mostly just to annoy him. “Well, you do a wonderful impersonation of it, then.”
The wolf’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly on her smile. “Please tell me you’re not one of those ‘I can make sunshine and roses out of piles of shit and pools of blood’ kind of people?”
Niamh chuckled and pushed open the passenger-side door but she didn’t answer him.
Her lack of response to his curtness seemed to perturb him. He grabbed their bags out of the back and handed over hers. His eyes scoured her face, as if he couldn’t quite figure her out.
They separated inside the twenty-four-hour gas station to their respective restrooms. Despite lingering weariness, Niamh’s mind turned over and over at the recent developments. Kiyo’s anger at returning to Tokyo only validated the vision. And he was angry. He was good at hiding how much, but Niamh sensed it. It pulsed beneath his skin. There was something important there, though not just to the werewolf but to her, and possibly others. It was maybe even about the bigger picture. The rest of the vision certainly had been.
For weeks she’d wanted her visions to have a coherent direction and mission. Like the visions before when she was trying to save the other fae-borne.
Well, wish granted. The visions had returned to the fae-borne.
And now Niamh bloody