Marked by an Assassin by Felicity Heaton Page A

surgical scar on his thigh where his implant sat deep beneath the skin. Escape. That instinct rode him now, strengthened by the conversation he’d had with the dragon shifter.
    It was within his reach.
    He had been set on escape and revenge until he had passed the cell of the female snow leopard and had seen it was empty. A pressing need to see her again had welled up inside him, startling him with its intensity. Curiosity drove questions through his mind, a hunger to know where she was and what Archangel was doing with her.
    That hunger filled him with a dangerous need, one that had little to do with his mission and everything to do with his need to atone.
    He couldn’t leave without her.
    He needed to see her and see she was safe, and know that she would be in her cell when the time came to escape this Hell. Whether that escape came at the hands of Hartt and Fuery, or the dragon.
    He wasn’t leaving without her.
    His fingers itched with another need as he cursed himself, a desire to plough them through his wild silver hair. What the fuck was wrong with him? What had happened to the cool and collected killer?
    He growled a curse out loud this time.
    He had been unravelling from the moment he had set eyes on her.
    He had bottled up everything, every softer feeling or painful memory, and now it wanted to come out.
    It couldn’t have worse fucking timing.
    He needed to be on his A game right now, at peak strength, with his wits about him. He didn’t need to be mooning over a damned female just because his hormones were out of whack and the need to mate was strong. The urges he had been suppressing for the past few years rose to overwhelm him whenever he thought about her, riding him harder than ever.
    Ninety-nine years old.
    It taunted him.
    Crossing paths with the female couldn’t have come at a worse time.
    He hadn’t believed his teachers or his family when they had told him that as a male he would hit sexual maturity at a century old. He had thought it bullshit, a rough estimation of the time he would awaken as a fully matured snow leopard adult, able to breed. He had never thought it possible that they were right and it would hit him at dead on a hundred.
    It certainly felt as if it was going to, and if the rollercoaster ride he had been on the past few years was anything to go by, it wasn’t going to be much fun.
    He had been keeping his urges under control, never straying close to women when they were at their strongest, trying to rule him, but now they were owning him, pushing back whenever he attempted to wrestle them under his command. His instincts were too powerful, and gods only knew it was because of the presence of the female.
    How the ever-living fuck was he going to escape with her when his condition was worsening, degrading to a point where whenever he thought about her lush curves and feeling her flesh cushioning his fingers he got a raging hard on?
    He looked down at the front of his black trunks and grunted. It wasn’t as if he could hide the damned thing with his current clothing shortage either.
    Maybe it was better he let Hartt and Fuery handle her, but that meant handing over control to them. It would place her in danger. Hartt and Fuery would want to carry out their mission.
    He snarled at the thought and bared his lengthening fangs. No fucking way. He wanted nothing to do with females, especially not a snow leopard, but he couldn’t let them take her from him. He couldn’t sign her death warrant.
    He had to handle her himself.
    The hunters shoved him into a room, pushing him right out of his thoughts and back to the present. The moment he realised his wrists were unbound, he turned back to lash out at the mortals, but a solid steel door slammed in his face. Great. Another cell.
    He turned around and dread slithered over his skin as his eyes took in the new room. What the hell were they up to now?
    Everything in the large rectangular room with him looked rather unthreatening. Blue plastic