Aequitas by Hope Anika (best classic books of all time .txt) 📕

Akachi appeared, his hands laden with plates, and Cian stood to help as he served them. Fresh ahi, boiled potatoes, a crisp green salad. Bread, butter, tiny, tart pickled beets. More wine.

“Eat,” he told Honor as he sat again, and Akachi quietly disappeared.

She only stared at him.

“What?” he asked.

“Finish it,” she ordered.

Which pleased him. Even though he knew she was gathering intel, that it wasn’t necessarily personal. But the way she was watching him…his lass was curious.

“Eat,” he said again. “And I’ll tell you.”

Suspicion crossed her features, but she picked up her fork. With her first bite, she sighed, and a sound of appreciation worked in her throat. It was a sound that froze him, one he wanted to hear under very different circumstances.

“In Ireland, I met a man who changed my life,” he said. “His name was Duncan Blanchard, and he hunted artifacts. Treasure. I was picking pockets in Dublin, and I tried to pick his. Best mistake I ever made. Duncan took me off the streets and taught me his trade. Saved my life.”

“Why?”

Now it was her bitterness that colored the air. Cian sipped his wine. “There are some wonderful people in the world, a rứnsearc. Believe it or not.”

“I know that,” she said defensively and stabbed a beet with her fork. “I just wondered why he helped you.”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I reminded him of someone he’d lost. When I asked, he just said it was his turn to do a good deed, and I was that deed.” Cian shrugged. “I traveled with him for three years. I saw the world; we hunted everywhere. The Sahara, the Amazon. India, China, Africa. I had a knack for finding things, and he knew where to sell them. He died of malaria in the Congo when I was nineteen.”

“You miss him.”

It wasn’t a question, but Cian answered anyway. “Aye.”

“What then?”

Then he’d taken a wrong turn. “I killed.”

She blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“I was a merc, a hired gun. I killed for profit.”

He watched her digest that, the disgust and fear that flickered over her features. He wasn’t proud, and he knew the disclosure would do damage, but he wanted the truth between them.

“No women or children,” he clarified, not that it made it any less damning. “Soldiers, warlords, men who had no problem slaughtering entire villages in their greed. I played one against the other and hunted for treasure along the way. Learned to live off the land, how to read the stars and the sky. I survived. Until I met Akachi. He changed everything.”

Honor sat forward, her food forgotten.

“Eat,” Cian told her again. “Before it gets cold.”

She scowled, but obediently speared a potato. “Then talk.”

He smiled. “If I’d known you were this interested, I would have shared long ago.”

She gave him a dark look. “Liar.”

“No.” He sobered. “I told you: I’ll not lie to you.”

He held her gaze until she flushed and looked away.

“Akachi was a child soldier,” he continued quietly. “When I met him, he was nine, carrying an ancient M16 through the desert. He’d been sent to a village close to where I was staying, and he was on his way to shoot everything that moved. And I do mean everything—every man, woman and child. Even the fucking cows. I take comfort in knowing the men I killed deserved it. What those child soldiers do…what is done to them…that is true evil. Many in the world choose to believe it doesn’t exist, but it is alive and well.”

Honor met his gaze. “Yes.”

“I was bigger, stronger, trained by then to fight, so I stopped him.” Cian shrugged. “I took away his weapon and tied him up. I spent hours talking to him, trying to pierce the veil of the brainwashing, the trauma that had been done to him. He was a just a kid, but he acted like the walking dead. It wasn’t until I started talking about family that I reached him. I found out that the men who took him—those he fought for—had killed his parents, his sisters, his entire village. They’d spared only the young men and boys, and they’d taken them into a camp and trained them to kill. They’d used the threat of further annihilation to ensure obedience—for Akachi it was his younger brother—and they made them into an army.”

“Sick, sadistic fucks,” Honor whispered.

“Aye. I told him he could be free, that I would help. But he wouldn’t go without his brother. And so, late one night, we snuck into their camp to retrieve him.”

Cian fell silent beneath the memory. So bloody stupid. Arrogant and filled with piss and vinegar, and death had followed. That Akachi never held it against him spoke to the man he’d become. But then, Cian had never forgiven himself, and perhaps Akachi knew that was penance enough.

“What happened?” Honor asked, her voice hushed.

“Death,” he replied flatly. “We weren’t careful enough, and his brother died. It was all I could do to get us both out alive. I had to carry Akachi away.” Crying, screaming, cursing Cian’s name. “That we got out was a miracle. That he forgave me afterward…” He shook his head. “He is a better man than I.”

“You were trying to help.”

“I was an arrogant fuck who got his brother killed. I regret it every day.”

For a long moment, Honor said nothing. Then, “We all make mistakes that hurt others.”

“Aye, a rứnsearc. I know.” He smiled at her, warmed by her comfort. “Sadly, that never changes.”

“No,” she agreed softly.

Cian drained his wine and poured more. He took a bite of his ahi.

“What then?” Honor asked, shooting him a look.

“Then I did what Duncan had trained me to do: I hunted. I was good at it, and Akachi was a quick study. Before we left the continent, we’d made enough to disappear forever.”

“But you didn’t. Instead, you built an empire.”

He heard something in those words, but he wasn’t certain what. “Aye. I built a company uniquely designed to protect the treasures of the world from men like me, and to protect against men like I had once been. I had to. Because I’d never forgotten the man who killed my mother, and I knew that—when I was ready for him—I would have to be in a position of power in order to take him.”

“You went after him?”

“I did.” Cian sat back and lifted his wine glass, his gaze intent on her face. “Alas, much to my surprise and, I admit, bitter regret, he was already dead. From what I was able to piece together, he’d been murdered by his own bodyguard after it was brought to light that he was skimming from the collective profits of the organization he was a part of—an organization run by a group of Chechens, one which traded exclusively in women, children and heroin. Not an uncommon occurrence, I suppose, among men such as that.”

Across from him, Honor sat frozen, her fork hovering in the air.

“I was very, very angry at the discovery,” he continued softly. “For years I had dreamt of killing him slowly, crushing every bone, peeling away his skin, layer by layer. And I wanted to know who’d taken that from me. Who’d stolen my revenge. So I began to dig.” Cian smiled, sharp, deadly. “Like you, I’m very good at digging. Do you know what I found?”

She didn’t respond, staring at him, her pulse a wild flutter in the hollow of her throat.

“The man I was hunting, who’d killed my mother, who had the temerity to be fucking dead when I was finally ready to skin him alive, had been exposed by a ghost, a heretofore unknown force that didn’t even have to be on the same continent in order to exterminate him. A mysterious, terrifying power that had pulled every skeleton from his closet and hung them out to dry. A terrible, dangerous apparition known only as Aequitas.”

Honor stood, but Cian’s hand flashed out and wrapped her wrist, halting her there, beside him, and she stared down at him with wild eyes, color ripe in her cheeks. In his hold, her delicate bones trembled.

“You took my vengeance,” he whispered to her. “And I wanted to kill you for that.”

She swallowed; her gaze flickered to the utensils on the table.

“If I could not have him,” Cian continued softly, tightening his hold. “Then I would have you.”

For a long moment, they only stared at one another, the tension sharp and painful. Honor’s chin lifted; her eyes flashed. But beneath his hand, she shook.

“I made it my life’s mission to unmask you. To track you to the ends of the earth and take the revenge I hungered for.” He stroked his thumb across her inner wrist, where her pulse beat erratically. Her skin was like silk. “But you weren’t who I expected you to be. You weren’t a hired gun, as I had once been. You didn’t sell your skills to the highest bidder. You were