Page 15 of Prey

Then I feel it—a pinch at the side of my neck. So fast I almost convinced myself it didn’t happen.

Almost.

“No.” My voice comes out wrecked. “No?—”

I wrench forward, and his arm tightens, and I fight it, I fight it hard, fingernails into his forearm, feet scrabbling for purchase on the floor. The room doesn’t spin. Not yet. But the edges of it go soft, like the world is exhaling.

“Don’t.” His voice through the mask is low, slightly muffled, every consonant clipped into shape. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

There’s heat underneath the professionalism. Thin as a wire, but I hear it.

The floor tilts.

I look at the door. At the deadbolt, I almost reached.

I should have left two months ago.

The white mask is the last thing I see clearly—blank and patient above me as my knees go—and then my apartment dissolves into something warm and very dark, and I can’t find the edges of myself anymore.

Then nothing.

6

NIKOLAI

The weight of her across my shoulder is warm. One hundred and five pounds of unconscious woman, one arm hooked behind her knees, the other at the small of her back.

That’s all it should be.

I’ve carried bodies before. I’ve carried people who were alive and people who weren’t, and my body has never once made it personal. Eleven days of surveillance and then sixty seconds of contact, and now I can’t stop noticing the press of her against my shoulder, the way her hair falls forward over my arm, the particular warmth radiating through her jacket where my hand brackets her waist.

I’ve been hard since I grabbed her. Before that, if I’m being honest with myself.

I adjust her weight and move through the entry corridor, jaw set. The elevator opens and I step inside, and the forty-five-second ride down I spend staring at the wall, her breath slow and even against the back of my neck from the sedative, her body completely slack against mine.

I have never in eleven years of taking acquisitions had this problem.

The elevator opens into the communal level.

The sounds hit me before the door finishes sliding open.

Wet, rhythmic, the low grunt of effort and the higher pitch of someone’s pleasure cresting. I don’t need to look to know what I’m walking into. I look anyway.

Dominic has some guy bent over the arm of the sectional, fucking into him with the unhurried pace that says he’s been at this a while and intends to be at it a while longer. The same guy has Marcus in his mouth, one hand gripping Marcus’s thigh, Marcus’s head tipped back against the cushions with his fingers loose in the man’s hair.

Across the room, a woman rides Ezra’s lap with her back to his chest while Theon stands at the edge of the couch, one hand braced on the wall. She has him in her mouth. Ezra’s eyes are closed, his expression unguarded. Theon watches her swallow his dick.

Lucien sits in the chair nearest the window, ankle crossed over his knee, watching all of it with the calm of a man at a museum.

Darius hasn’t looked up from whatever he’s reading, legs folded under him on the loveseat, unbothered.

Raphael has his arm over his eyes on the far couch, dozing. Or was. One eye opens as I pass.

“You weren’t on tonight.” His voice is rough from sleep. He pushes up onto one elbow, his gaze finding the weight over my shoulder. “We didn’t have anything.”

“We didn’t.” I shift her weight and keep walking.

He’s sitting up now, fully awake. “Then whose is she?”