Rogue Descendant (Nikki Glass) - By Jenna Black Page 0,1

I usually don’t have any qualms about defying authority, but Anderson was a different story. Most of the time he seemed like a pretty nice guy, but I knew what lay under the surface, and I didn’t want him angry with me if I could avoid it.

Knowing Anderson’s patience had more than reached its limit, I pulled my clothes on hastily and toweled my hair dry. I had to at least run a brush through it a few times to smooth out the tangles before they dried that way, and I swear I could feel Anderson’s impatience from the other room. I looked at myself in the mirror over the sink and saw a delicate, anxious woman with bedraggled hair and a faded T-shirt.

Don’t you dare let him browbeat you, I told myself as I tried to wipe that anxious look off my face. I stood a much better chance of holding my ground if I at least looked strong and confident.

“Hurry up, Nikki,” Anderson called, and I knew I couldn’t afford to stand there and make faces at myself in the mirror any longer.

“Well, here goes nothing,” I muttered, and left the relative safety of my bedroom to join Anderson in my sitting room.

I gave him a few mental brownie points for having brewed a pot of coffee while he waited. I’d gotten tired of having to go all the way down to the first floor whenever the craving hit me, so I’d brought my own coffeemaker from my condo, which I hadn’t relinquished, despite having taken up residence in the mansion. Anderson was sitting on the armchair beside the couch, and there were two steaming mugs on the coffee table.

“Thanks for making coffee,” I said, picking up my mug and inhaling the steam. I didn’t look at him as I reluctantly lowered myself onto the couch. I harbored a brief hope that he would let me get some coffee into my system before the fun and games began, but I knew better.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him lean forward in his chair. I realized I was holding my breath, and forced myself to let it out and take a sip of coffee. I’d dawdled long enough that it didn’t burn my tongue.

“I would have thought you’d be chomping at the bit to hunt down Konstantin the moment he was forced to step down,” Anderson said. “I don’t understand why you’ve been avoiding it.”

“I’m sure it’s hard for someone whose mother was a goddess of vengeance to understand,” I said, though I knew there were plenty of others who wouldn’t have my moral qualms, either.

“How can you not want his blood after what he did to your sister?”

That made me flinch. Konstantin hadn’t hurt Steph himself, but there was no doubt his late second-in-command had acted with his blessing, if not on his direct orders. If you’d asked me when I first found Steph if I wanted Konstantin dead, I’d have answered with a resounding yes. Even now, I would be happy to dance on his grave. But there was a difference between wanting a man dead and taking it upon yourself to make him that way. If I hunted Konstantin and found him, then Anderson, who had even more of a score to settle than I did, would kill him. I’d seen Anderson kill before, and the screams still echoed in my dreams sometimes. Death at Anderson’s hand was neither quick nor painless.

I fidgeted with my coffee cup and avoided Anderson’s gaze. “I’ve told you before I’m a bleeding heart. I’m not the kind of person who can cold-bloodedly hunt someone down so you can murder him.”

“You had no qualms about hunting Justin Kerner,” he retorted.

But he was wrong about that. I’d had plenty of qualms. Kerner was a serial killer, but he was a victim before that. An ordinary man with an ordinary life who’d been captured by the Olympians and used as a lab rat, forced to take on a seed of immortality that the Olympians suspected might be infected with madness. When Kerner had gone mad, they’d buried him, meaning to leave him in the ground, constantly dying and reviving, till the end of time. He’d been killing civilians. But I’d felt sympathy for him the whole time.

“I hunted Kerner because he had to be stopped before he killed more innocent people,” I said, then again met Anderson’s eyes. “You want me to hunt Konstantin for revenge. That’s an altogether different