Adrianos, The Greek Devil (Vicious Kings #2)

1. Elena

Elena

The third whiskey arrives without my asking, and that’s how I know the bartender has worked out my rhythm.

I drink half of it on my feet. It scrapes going down, the only thing all day that’s felt like the truth, because the priest dealt in words I stopped hearing by the second sentence, and the rain dealt in cold, and the hole in the ground at St. Michael’s dealt in a fact so large I couldn’t get my arms around it.

I stood at the edge of it this morning with both hands closed because opening them seemed unsafe.

No tears. Everyone kept orbiting me, the cousins and the firm’s grief envoy and my mother in her good black coat, all of them braced for the woman who found the body to come apart, and I just ran hotter.

That’s the trick nobody tells you about grief, that it can run on the same line as rage if you wire it wrong, and I’ve spent nine days wiring it wrong on purpose.

She’d have laughed at me here. Lux, a Friday, the black dress she bullied me into buying two years ago that I never once wore because it stops four inches short of decent and holds onto every part of me that I have the good sense to bury under wool.

Drinking alone at the bar like a woman in the last reel of a film about a woman who learned nothing.

Kalliopi believed a body was the one instrument a spreadsheet couldn’t replicate, and she dragged me to this exact bar every second Friday to prove it, and every second Friday I came as a tourist, declined whoever she’d found for me, went home, and chased dirty money through three Cayman shells until the windows went gray.

You’ll die having never let one thing happen to you, she told me in the cab, more than once.

She’s the one who died. So I came to mourn her in the only way she’d want to be mourned, even if it’s just once, because the only honest thing I could think to do with the day was to hand it to her.

I’m angling for the bartender to make a fourth happen, because three isn’t enough to do what I came here to do, which is find a man Kalliopi would have pointed at across the room.

She had a type she chose for me and a type she chose for herself, and they never overlapped.

The ones she chose for me were always wrong on paper and right in the way she could see but I couldn’t.

I need one more drink to quiet the part of my brain that disqualifies every man in the room before he’s done crossing it.

I need to be the version of myself she kept trying to introduce me to.

I’m reaching for that fourth when the door opens up.

That’s the detail I’d circle if I circled things.

Bodies in a room like this don’t yield; they shove, absorb, and close again like a tide.

But a clean lane splits the middle of the floor, and a man walks down it without grazing a single shoulder.

The crowd seals behind him like water over a dropped stone.

He’s older than this room by a generous fifteen years.

Dark hair gone to silver at the temples, olive skin, a suit worn like a second skin while the rest of us just have clothes on.

Everything in the building is moving except him, and he manages that even while crossing it, which is a contradiction my brain reaches for but can’t get a grip on.

He stops at the bar beside me. He stands facing the floor, not me, his shoulder an inch from mine.

“You drink as if the glass were an insult to you,” he says.

“The glass and I have an arrangement.” I keep my eyes forward. “It stays full, I empty it. We call it even.”

A breath that might be a laugh. The accent surfaces beneath the vowels, somewhere on the Mediterranean, worn down by a long time spent in a place with worse weather. “Who insulted you first?”

“That’s a paywalled story.”

“I have money.”

“Not that kind.” I finally turn my head, and that’s the mistake, because the front of him is worse than the side.

The eyes are the issue. They’re dark to the point of black under the blue light, lit from somewhere behind them like a fire seen through a window from the street, and there’s a wickedness banked in them that hasn’t moved yet, the look of a man who finds the whole room amusing and has decided not to share the joke.

They settle on me like I’m the one open file in a room full of closed ones, and no man has ever aimed that at me, the attention fixed on the brain like the brain is the draw instead of the cover charge you pay to reach the rest.

“Let me buy the next one,” he says. It’s not a question, and I’m starting to suspect nothing he says ever is.

“I don’t usually take drinks from strangers.”

“But we’re not strangers anymore, are we?” Two fingers lift, and another bartender, who had ignored me for ten minutes between rounds, appears as if conjured. “You already know the two things that matter. I’m the most interesting man in this room, and I’m the only one who isn’t boring you.”

I look at him then, at the silver, the suit, and the wicked banked thing in his eyes, and I hear Kalliopi as clearly as if she were on the next stool.

Him. That one. She’d already have had her hand around my wrist. He’s exactly the wrong-on-paper she kept trying to introduce me to, the kind I rule out before he’s even crossed the floor, except this one came straight at me and didn’t leave me time to. So I take the drink.

The honest thing is out of my mouth before the part of me that edits can stop it, which is most things most days. Tonight, the whiskey’s taken even that delay away.

“I buried my best friend this morning.”

He doesn’t flinch. None of the moves people make, the soft tilt of the head, the dropped voice, the hand reaching for mine like sympathy is a thing you apply topically.

He looks at me for a beat, something behind his eyes going quiet in a language I can’t parse, and then he lifts his own glass and touches it to mine where it sits on the bar, once, before he drinks.

“Then tonight isn’t just hers,” he says. “It belongs to the part of you that wants to celebrate her. Drink.”

I drink. He’s correct, which grates because correctness is the structural pillar of my personality, and I’m not engineered to be on the receiving end of it.

“You hand out grief instructions to everyone? Or am I special?”

“Only the ones who drink standing up despite the pain.” He turns to face me now, full on, and the banked thing in his eyes has caught fire, all of it aimed at me. “And I can tell you’ve got spine.”

“That’s a tall stack of conclusions from a man who’s known me four minutes.”

“I’m good at conclusions.”

“So am I. First to one in every room I’ve ever stood in.” I lift the glass a half inch at him. “People call it exhausting to be polite. What they mean is they can’t stand it, and the fact that I can tell what they mean is the part they can’t stand most.”

“I find it useful.” His mouth does the small thing again, the partial curve he holds back like a man rationing the full one for emergencies. “The people who grate are the ones who see what everyone else walks past. I’d rather be told the thing I missed than be comfortable.”

“You don’t know a single thing I’d be right about.”

“I know you’re aware of every place we’re touching.

” He leans in to say it over the music, and the lean is the proof, his mouth at the edge of my ear, his shoulder pressed full against mine.

“Your breathing changed when I sat down. It hasn’t gone back.

You’ve been counting the inches between my mouth and yours since I leaned in the first time. ”

A beat, then the partial curve breaks into something close to a real one.

“Or I’m describing myself, and you’re about to tell me I’m wrong.”

“You’re not wrong,” I say. “My breathing changed, the inches are correct, and you’ve clearly done this enough times to have a script.

The problem is I’m too smart to find a script attractive, which means it isn’t the script working on me, it’s you, and that’s worse, because a script I could rule out. ”

Kalliopi would adore him. The thought arrives fully built, and it cuts clean, the surgical kind, no ragged edge.

She’d take one look at the suit and the lane the crowd opened and put her mouth to my ear and say, " Go, " in the voice she used when she’d already decided for both of us, which was most voices she had. She decided things for me because her read on people ran as true as my read on money, and now the one person alive who was right about the half of life I get wrong is in the ground at St. Michael’s under fresh dirt and a wreath I picked because she’d have hated lilies, and I couldn’t bear to give her flowers she’d hate.

He sets his glass down and tips his chin at the dance floor. “Up.”

“I don’t dance.”

“You won’t be dancing.”

I go even though I knew the size of the mistake and walked into it at full speed, because tonight that’s the whole assignment.

The bass takes me before he does. He sets a hand at the small of my back and turns me into him, the front of him to the back of me, none of the polite distance-testing the men my age do, no question folded into it anywhere.

He decides where I am, and that’s where I am, and his palm spreads over my stomach through the thin black fabric to keep me there, and we move.

I’ve danced. Not like this. There’s a roll to him that starts low and climbs through everywhere we touch, and my body answers before I’ve cleared it, my spine curving, my hips picking up his timing like they’ve been keeping notes in a hand I don’t recognize as mine.

I get my hands on him because I want to, twisting one back to grip his thigh, dragging the other up his forearm where the sleeve’s pushed back, and the man is carved, no give anywhere, all of it earned and not for show.

His mouth comes down by my ear, not speaking, just present, his breath against the side of my neck, and a current runs through me I’d file under cold if there were a degree of cold anywhere in this building.

His cock is hard against the curve of my ass.

I can feel the whole length of it through two layers of cloth, the weight, and it throws a jolt straight down between my legs, a clench, a wet heat so fast and so total that I make a sound I never approved.

He hears it. His hand presses flatter against my belly, drags me back into him, rolls up slow, so I learn exactly how hard and exactly how much there is, and my whole nervous system throws every breaker at once.

“You’re thinking again,” he says against my ear. “I can feel it land in your shoulders.”

“You cannot feel me think. That’s not a sense humans have.”

“Yours go up an inch every time the brain starts. They’re up an inch now.” His hand slides to my hip and presses me in. “Put them down.”

“That’s not how thinking functions, you can’t just issue a directive to a—”

He rolls up into me, and the rest of the sentence dies in my throat and exits as breath, and I feel him go still against my back for half a second, like he’s saving the sound to take out later.

“You were saying,” he murmurs.

“Your cock is big.”

He laughs. “It sure is.”

I turn in his arms, because if I’m going to lose an argument I’ll lose it to a man’s face, and that’s the second error, because his face this near in the blue light beats the back of him, the dark eyes and the silver and the mouth still holding most of its smile in reserve.

I plant a hand flat on his chest to buy distance, then just leave it there, feeling his heart run at half my rate, which I find personally insulting.

The distance is a fiction anyway. Even turned around with a hand braced between us, he’s hard against my stomach, too much of him for the gap I made to mean anything.

“You’re unhinged,” I tell him, because it’s a finding and I deliver my findings. “You walked up to me and decided you were doing this before you’d heard me speak. You were right, which is the deranged part, because nobody’s that sure of a stranger unless something’s wrong with them.”

“I prefer the term wickedly charming.”

“That is not the boast you think it is.”

“Tonight it’s exactly the boast I think it is.

” He brings a hand up and pushes a curl off my face, his thumb dragging along my jaw, and I feel that small drag everywhere, down into my back teeth.

“I knew I wanted you from the door. The dress is doing you no favors, by the way. It’s doing them for me. ”

We’ve stopped pretending it’s dancing. We’re pressed together using the music as a cover story, his thigh between mine, and every small movement drags the seam of the dress against my clit through fabric I’ve ruined, until I’m working myself against his leg in front of a hundred strangers and can’t find the part of me that’s supposed to be ashamed.

Both his hands are on my ass now, holding me down against his thigh, moving me, his mouth at my throat, and I’ve got two fingers fisted in his jacket.

“You’re a bad idea,” I tell him, because it’s true and I say the true thing. “You’re also exactly the bad idea I came here for, so I’d rather not waste it standing up.”

He grins, the full one finally, the one he’d been rationing all night. “Then tell me where.”

“There’s a bathroom,” I say. “Past the end of the bar.”

“Then walk.”

He takes my hand. The crowd parts for him a second time and tows me along in the wake of it, through the heat and the blue dark into the corridor where the bass drops to a heartbeat behind the door.

He pushes one open, glances in out of a habit I’d circle if I were circling anything tonight, finds it empty, draws me in, and turns the lock.

The light in here is vicious after the floor.

He doesn’t grant me a second to adjust. He backs me into the wall, both hands rising up the outsides of my thighs, taking the hem with them, and I lift onto my toes to help, which tells the whole story of how far past deciding I went somewhere around the second song.

The fabric gathers at my waist. He pulls back just enough to put his eyes on mine, leaving me half a second to call this off if calling it off is in me anywhere.

“Last chance to be the smartest person in the room,” he says.

“The title’s overrated.” I fist my hand in his lapel and pull him back in, and for once in my life I don’t hear a single number.