His leather boots were loud on the polished black stone floor that reflected warm torchlight up at him, a clunk and a scrape as he trudged along the broad arched corridor of the main entrance of the guild, heading towards the first reception room. He adjusted his grip on the black pack slung over his good shoulder and stifled another grimace as he dragged his injured left leg in line with his right and braved another step. Fiery pain bolted up the limb from a point just above his ankle, shooting through his entire body.

Harbin growled under his breath, grinding his teeth together as he bore the pain and forced himself to keep moving. He could rest soon. He could sleep for days and forget his injuries and the fight that had brought him dancing too close to death.

Again.

But, fuck, it had been a good fight. It had been worth it. The pain. The taste of blood on his tongue. The sharp crack of bones breaking beneath his fists and the metallic tang flooding the air as his claws rendered flesh. A judder went through him, a brief flare of pleasure that wracked his tired and battered body. It had been worth it, for that momentary and elusive sense of calm and belonging, of retribution and release, and the one thing he craved above all others. The one thing that fuelled him, drove him to keep striding forwards, stopping him from looking back, and that he did his best to pretend didn’t exist inside him like an eternal bloody flame.

Penance.

Penitence.

Harbin pushed away from those two words. They had no place inside him. They were impossible for him to achieve, the one thing beyond his grasp, forever just out of reach. His sins were too great. Atonement was nothing more than a dream.

Or maybe a nightmare.

One that haunted him despite his best efforts to escape it.

Voices rang along the black walled corridor towards him and he ignored them, not interested in the idle banter of the rest of the guild males as they took a welcomed breather from their profession in the safety of their home. He was only interested in taking a breather himself. A long one. Maybe those days might roll into a week of sleep.

He sighed at the thought.

His broken body probably needed that much rest in order to recuperate swiftly, and gods knew his mind needed that amount of time to pull itself back together. Unlike some members of the guild, he didn’t have the advantage of being able to accelerate his healing process. The elves were lucky sons of bitches.

Although, you couldn’t pay Harbin enough to make him switch places with Fuery. The male’s eyes were verging on black now, only a sliver of violet remaining around his pupils like a dying corona of the light in him. How long before Fuery lost himself to the darkness?

Hartt, the chief and founder of their guild, often wore a look when he was watching Fuery, one that told Harbin that the elf knew their comrade was circling the drain and it was only a matter of time before the darkness consumed the last of him and transformed him into something straight out of a nightmare.

Harbin dragged his bad leg up and managed another step, quickly shifting his right before his fractured tibia gave out under his weight. It was times like these, when he was fresh from what had felt like more of a war than a fight, but had emerged the victor against all odds, that he couldn’t help wondering just what colour his eyes would be if the darkness that lived within him could show in them just as it could with the elves.

Would they be darker than midnight?

Was he as close to falling into the abyss as Fuery was?

On days like today, he felt as if he was. Every inch of him hurt now as it sank in that he was home and his mission was done, but it wasn’t a physical pain. He could no longer feel the hot burn of his wounds. He could only feel the cold burn of the hollow inside of him, the scraped out chasm where his heart used to be.

Harbin idly rubbed his chest with his free hand, not feeling the pain as his left shoulder blazed, his healing skin rupturing again beneath his tight black t-shirt. Warm wetness bloomed there, soaking into the cloth before trickling down his biceps.

“You look like hell,” someone muttered as they passed him, heading towards the doors.

Harbin ignored them and kept moving forwards, determined to reach the sanctuary of his quarters and lock himself away for a week of uninterrupted sleep.

He finally stepped into the first reception room, an equally black affair that had always looked as cold and imposing to him as he supposed it was meant to be. Hartt had done a good job of creating the perfect image for their guild, building a black fortress in the middle of what had once been little more than a wasteland in the free realm of Hell. An entire town had sprung up around the guild, catering to those who were drawn to it, either as a client.

Or an assassin.

Harbin had visited other assassin guilds in Hell and none had the nightmarish quality of their home. He put half of their business down to pure aesthetics. People saw the guild and it matched the image in their head of what an assassin’s home should look like—cold, dark and dangerous—and they gave it their business. Hartt had been a clever son of a bitch when he had started the guild all those centuries ago. The elf certainly had a head for business.

One that matched his head for killing.

“Hartt’s seeing people about it now.”

Harbin glanced across at two young males where they lounged in the horseshoe of black velvet couches near the unlit monstrosity of a marble fireplace to his left. They were both new recruits as far as the other guild members were concerned, having only completed a few easy jobs for little pay.

The blond raked his fingers through his short hair and cracked a wide grin. “I might go for it.”

Harbin snorted at that at the same time as the young wolf male reclining near the blond.

“I’d pay double to see you go up against a shifter… and a cat no less. At least that Harbin guy isn’t around to hear about it.”

That stopped Harbin in his tracks and he frowned across at the two males, studying the brunet wolf to see if he was speaking the truth. A cat shifter?

He had turned towards them before he had even contemplated moving and was at the back of the couch where the wolf shifter lounged before he had even realised he had moved. He stared down at the pup and the male slowly lifted golden eyes to him, his expression falling slack and lips parting as he took him in.

Harbin couldn’t blame the kid for looking shocked at the sight of him. He rarely interacted with the other assassins, definitely never with the rookies, and he probably looked as if he had been dragged through the darkest reaches of Hell.

Which he had.

“Cat shifter?” he said and the male nodded dumbly. “Hartt has a job requiring the elimination of a cat shifter?”

The wolf gathered his wits and shot him a cocky smile, one that irritated Harbin because it said what the wolf wouldn’t. It asked whether he was hard of hearing or just plain crazy. He hadn’t lost his mind. Not yet anyway. He just wanted to be sure that he had heard things right, because in the close to twenty years that he had worked with Hartt as an assassin, there had never been a job involving a cat shifter.

The blond kid got off the other couch and quickly crossed to his friend, hunkering down beside him and bringing his mouth close to the wolf’s ear.

“What the hell are you doing? That’s Harbin… Hartt said not to mention it around him,” the blond whispered so low he practically mouthed the words, but Harbin’s sensitive ears picked them up.

Harbin narrowed his silver eyes on both males, his lips compressing into a thin line as he contemplated the only reason why Hartt would want to hand out the job before Harbin could hear about it.

The cat shifter was a snow leopard.

He growled, flashing short fangs at the males, and shoved away from the couches, limping quickly across the black floor towards the door in the corner of the room to his left that would lead him to Hartt’s office. He shoved it open, the slam of it hitting the black wall on the other side echoing around the room at his back and the corridor in front of him, and snarled as he picked up his pace. His left leg trembled under the strain but he gritted his teeth and pushed onwards, the fire burning up his blood keeping him going.

Someone had put a contract on a snow leopard shifter, one of his kind, and he wanted the details.

He wanted to know why Hartt wouldn’t give the job to him.

Silvery fur rippled over his forearms before he could stop it, a brief flash of his other form brought out by his agitation. He sucked down a breath and controlled it, his skin cooling as the fur disappeared.

It wasn’t as if he held any allegiance to his kin anymore. He had burned that bridge twenty years ago and there was no way in Hell of reconstructing the charred remains of it. The thought that Hartt believed he was incapable of dealing with a snow leopard shifter mark was insulting. He could be as methodical and removed from the situation as he always was. The rage that had consumed him in the aftermath of the event that had driven him from his pride had made sure of that. It had killed all of his softer emotions and only a hunger for bloodshed and death remained.

He passed several doors to other offices, his own included, his gaze locked on the black door at the end of the corridor ahead of him. If Hartt was in an interview, the assassin in question was about to get a rude interruption and shown the door in a not too friendly fashion.

Harbin slammed the flat of his left palm into the door and it flew open.