A Prettier Mask #2
I believed her. Phoenixes were annoyingly hard to kill and even harder to kill permanently, and Evie had the eyes of a woman who had made this promise before and had followed through on it with great thoroughness.
“Are you done?” I said.
“Almost.” She smiled again, warmer. “He chose you, you know. I could see it burning.” She stepped back, adjusting her mask. “Don't waste it.” Then she walked back into the crowd.
I turned back toward the room, collected myself, and moved to the center of the floor.
The orchestra quieted and the room followed.
“Houses, packs, covens, courts. Old blood and new alliances, honored creditors and cherished debts.”
The chandeliers threw their light across a hundred masks.
“This house has stood for two centuries on a single principle: that hospitality is the oldest law. Older than your titles. Older than your grievances. Older, I would venture, than several of you.” A murmur of polite amusement moved through the room.
I smiled and let it. “You are fed here. You are seen here. Whatever you carry through these doors tonight you carry it as my guest. And Blackthorne does not forget its guests.”
I turned, slowly, letting my eyes move across the room.
“It also does not forget those who forget themselves under its roof. Blood spilled without consent on this floor will be answered.” I raised my glass. “So drink well. Dance well. And let tonight be what it was always meant to be. A reminder that we are, all of us, still here.”
Crystal rang across the room.
“Welcome to Blackthorne.”
The orchestra lifted its bow, and the ballroom began its civilized version of what it actually was — a room full of old predators performing peace.
Nico was near the east wall, away from the main current of the crowd, with his glass in his hand and his mask doing the work his face was too expressive to do on its own.
He did not see me moving toward him until I was close. He straightened almost imperceptibly. His chin came up, the reflex so ingrained he probably did not know he did it.
I stopped in front of him and held out my hand. He looked at it then he put his hand in mine.
The bloodstone found me immediately. The resonance hit me and ran down my spine.
I tightened my grip to keep the rest of me from doing what it wanted to do, which was pull him in by the lapels and put my mouth on him in front of every political alliance in the room and let them make of it whatever they needed to.
I led him onto the floor instead.
My hand settled at the small of his back and his settled on my shoulder. I brought us into the hold close enough that the distance between us required a decision to maintain.
I turned him through the first sequence and he followed with better instinct than I had expected and his body moved with mine flawlessly.
I pulled him in until his chest was against mine and his hips against my hips.
His neck was right there and he was warm and the scent of him was doing structural damage to my discipline and I wanted to bite him with a ferocity that had nothing to do with feeding and everything to do with the particular hunger that lived below hunger.
I pulled back enough to look at his face. His mask made his eyes very bright and his mouth very present, and both were making demands his expression was too proud to articulate.
The orchestra shifted and I drew him back in without asking. My hand spread wider at his back and his chest settled against mine and stayed there.
“People are staring,” he said, quieter.
“Good,” I said.
He tipped his head back enough to look at my face, and the look he gave me through the mask was the one I had been cataloguing every time he looked at me. The bloodstone pulsed between us, moving through him and back into me like a current finding its circuit.
I turned him through a slow measure and let the turn bring his hips flush to mine and engineered no distance afterward.
The breath he took was audible enough for me to catch below the music.
He was hard and the knowledge of it went through me like a key turning.
I was already hard, had been since he walked through the ballroom doors in that suit, and the pretense of a civilized dance had expired approximately ninety seconds ago.
He felt it. Of course he felt it.
The grind of him against me was unhurried and devastating. My hand at his back pressed him closer, tighter, until there was no ambiguity left between us.
The room had receded. I was dimly aware of it and I found I had genuinely stopped caring.
I had hosted this ballroom for eighty years.
I had moved through every version of this room with perfect control.
I had never once stood on this floor and let a man grind against me with the full knowledge of the room and done nothing about it but hold him closer.
Nico's forehead dropped to mine. His mask pressed against mine, the edges catching, and his breath was against my mouth and the bloodstone was burning through both of us, and his cock was hard against my hip and mine was hard against his and the music kept moving and we kept moving with it and I had never felt anything as ruinous as this.
The grind built, his hips rolling against mine in time with the music. His hand had tightened in mine, his other hand a fist in my lapel, and I could feel him bracing.
I pressed my mouth to his temple.
I moved with him, and the ballroom dissolved entirely, and there was only the music and his breath and the slow catastrophic build of two people who had been circling each other for weeks finally closing the distance. When he came I felt it through every point where our bodies met.
It took me apart three seconds behind him.
I held him through it. The music carried us and the masks did their work.
Then the orchestra resolved into silence.
“When this is over,” I said, against his temple, low enough that only he could hear it, “I am going to need to have a conversation with you.”
He was quiet for a beat. “I know.”
“I have been putting it off.”
“I know that too.”
The orchestra moved into the final measure and I turned him through it, his hand still in mine, and I kept my mouth away from his throat for the remainder of the dance by the thinnest margin of will I had employed in this century.
The room watched us. Every house, every pack, every coven and court watched us and drew their conclusions, and I let them draw them because the conclusions they were drawing were not wrong, and pretending otherwise had stopped being a strategy two days ago somewhere between an alley in midtown and an iron fitting in my study wall.
When the music ended, I brought his hand to my mouth and pressed my lips to his knuckles, and held his eyes over them, and felt the bloodstone pulse between us like a very old heart remembering how to beat.
“Enjoy the ball, Nico,” I said.
He looked at me with those eyes for a long, scorching moment.
“You're still an arrogant bastard,” he said.
“Yes. But I'm the arrogant bastard who kept you alive.”
His mouth pulled at the corner and he took his hand back and turned back toward the crowd.