If you need me, call. The words were unsaid, but I heard them nonetheless. I nodded, and he winked out of existence.
Hunter’s gaze returned to mine. Her scent—a faint mix of jasmine, bergamot, and sandalwood—was surprisingly pleasant. But it sent a chill down my spine, because nothing about this woman was ever pleasant.
"Why would my mother invite you into her home?" She’d hated Hunter. Hated and feared her. I never really knew why, although maybe it was as simple as sensing that my destiny would be tied to hers.
"Because, technically, she was in my employ, just as you are." Hunter pulled back one of the visitors chairs near the front of the desk and sat down, crossing her legs elegantly. "In fact, your mother and I had many a pleasant discussion in this very room."
Yeah, I believed that about as much as I believed in the Easter bunny. "About what?"
Again that eyebrow winged upward. I suspected amusement, although it was hard to tell given her emotionless demeanor. "About you. About her debt to the Directorate and what she might do to repay it."
"She helped the guardians bring down more than her fair share of criminals."
Hunter picked a piece of lint off her pants with long pink fingernails and flicked it idly away. I had a sudden image of her doing the same to me, and a brief smile touched her lips, then drifted away.
The bitch was reading my thoughts.
"If you wish your thoughts to remain unheard, then kindly keep them to yourself," she commented. "You’ve already asked your friend Stane to acquire some nanowires, have you not?"
Stane was Stane Neale, Tao’s cousin. He wasn’t only a computer whiz, but a major black-market trader. And if she’d overheard me asking Tao to get the wires, then she either had super-hearing or there were bugs in our apartment. "Yes, but I suspect even the strongest wire available won’t be able to stop you."
"Oh, it won’t," she acknowledged. "But they require a little more effort on my part, and therefore would afford you some of your much-relished privacy. It might even stop the reaper from following your thoughts."
Given that the wires were designed to work against those who wore flesh on a permanent basis, I doubted it would affect Azriel. And I wasn’t as worried about him catching my thoughts anyway.
"You could show a little restraint in the meantime," I said.
"I could," she agreed, and flicked away another piece of lint.