Page 29 of Nikolay

A sharp, involuntary gasp from somewhere to my left.

Not my companion’s. Too startled. Too nakedly struck.

Every muscle in my body went still, except my eyes.

I cut my gaze sideways without moving the rest of me.

Madelyn stood three feet away in the half-dark of the club floor.

She still had her jacket on. No tray in her hands. No practiced server’s smile arranged into place. She looked as though she had only just come in through the employee corridor and turned the corner at precisely the wrong moment to find me with another woman’s throat bared under my mouth.

Her whiskey-colored eyes were wide.

Shock moved across her face first with brutal clarity, stripping every defense from it in a single exposed instant. Then something in her shut. Not gradually. Not messily. It closed like a shutter slammed over glass.

And because fate is a vulgar beast with a taste for precision, it happened just as my mouth still hovered at another woman’s neck, my hand still fisted in pale hair, my body arranged in a tableau I had constructed expressly to prove she did not own any part of me.

The lie of it hung there between us before either of us spoke.

Chapter 6

Maddie

Iwalked into the service corridor like a woman carrying something breakable and dangerous in both hands, the thing threatening to shatter was somewhere under my ribs. Fluorescent light flattened everything it touched—bare concrete walls, black scuffs on the rubber floor, the industrial metal shelving shoved against one side—and still I could see only purple light on champagne silk, his hand in another woman’s hair, and the slow drag of his mouth up a throat that had never once had to ask whether it belonged in his world.

I did not run.

That mattered to me for reasons I couldn’t have explained without sounding pathetic. But it mattered. My pace remained even. My chin stayed level.

Behind the walls, Obsidian went on breathing. Bass seeped through concrete in a low pulse. Somebody laughed somewhere farther back near the prep station. Ice clattered in a service sink. The ordinary sounds of shift work kept happening with a kind of insult built into them, as if the whole building had looked straight at my private humiliation and shrugged.

Fine.

I could shrug too.

Only my body had not yet gotten the memo. My lungs felt too tight. My face felt hot and cold in turns. Every few steps the image came back with fresh precision, refusing to blur the way decent memories of ugly things ought to. The woman had been elegant in that bloodless, expensive way certain women managed—tall, silk-sheathed, neck long as a swan’s, hair pulled into that sleek blonde ponytail he’d wrapped his fist around like he had every right in the world. French, probably. I didn’t know why my brain landed there except that everything about her had said old money, old manners, old Europe. The sort of woman a man like Nikolay would not have to explain to his bloodline.

The sort of woman no one would ever look at and think mechanic. Waitress. Texas.

The sort of woman a prince would choose when no one was forcing his hand.

That part should not have hurt. Not after the way he had treated me. Not after every cool look and every sharpened word and every single second he had spent acting like wanting me would be a personal failure of taste. I ought to have felt vindicated. There, Maddie, see? You were right. He didn’t want you. He wanted sleek and aristocratic and vampire-pale and draped in silk under club lights.

Instead, what I felt was worse.

I felt stupid.

Stupid because after he came to my room—after he stood there among my books like maybe some crack had finally opened in all that polished contempt—I had let one dangerous little thought live in me for a few hours. Maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe he wasn’t only what he’d shown me. Maybe he had actually seen me.

Well.

There was my answer, with his mouth on another woman’s throat.

His footsteps hit the corridor behind me before I reached the next turn.

Nobody else in this building moved like that. Obsidian was full of predators, but Nikolay carried his size differently from the others. Controlled. Heavy in a way that never stomped and never hurried, and still made the floor seem to acknowledge him. I knew that stride already. God help me, I knew it too well.

I stopped.