Silver in the Dark
NICO
Every booth in the Crimson Room were occupied. The bar ran three deep with supernatural clientele in expensive clothes pretending to be ordinary people having an ordinary night, which would've been more convincing if half of them didn't have eyes that caught the light wrong.
I stood near the edge of the floor with a drink I was nursing slowly and watched Draco not dance.
The club was his and he stood in the middle of it like a man at the edge of a party he was hosting for reasons that had nothing to do with enjoyment.
People moved around him. People performed for him, subtly, angling their bodies in his direction the way plants angled toward light.
Nobody touched him. Nobody danced with him.
He stood in the pulse of the room he owned and let the room move without him.
It was, objectively, the most unnecessarily dramatic thing I'd ever seen.
“You own a club and you don't dance in it?” I said, coming up beside him. “That's not mysterious. That's just tragic with better shoes.”
He looked at me the way he looked at things he was deciding whether to bother responding to. “I don't dance here.”
“Why not?”
“Because this is a place of business.”
“It's a nightclub.”
“It is not a place where I demonstrate vulnerability to people who are looking for it.”
“Dancing isn't vulnerability.”
“Dancing in front of people who are trying to find your weaknesses is.” He looked back at the floor. “It's a different thing.”
I looked at the room. Then at him. Then I put my hand out.
He looked at my hand for a long second.
“Nico—”
“One dance, Draco. The room's already watching us have this conversation, so you might as well give them something worth watching.” I kept my hand where it was. “Unless you're actually afraid.”
He smirked and took my hand.
The floor made room for us the way rooms made room for Draco. His hand settled at my waist with that careful, deliberate pressure, and I put my hand at his shoulder and we moved.
The floor moved around us and the red light caught the planes of his face and I felt the thing I always felt when Draco let his guard down by a single degree.
His hand spread at my back. I moved closer without deciding to, closing the distance until there wasn't much of it left, and felt him breathe out slowly through his nose.
“The whole room is watching,” he said.
“I know,” I said, which was what he always said to me, and I felt him do the thing that was almost a smile against my temple.
Then the necklace warmed.
Draco's eyes dropped to my collar half a second before the lights flickered.
Then the music stopped and the screaming started.
Three points of the room moved at once. That was the thing I clocked first, even before I clocked the daggers. A coordinated attack from multiple points meant someone with resources and reach had assembled this.
Silver blades. Every one of them, the metal catching the red light with a cold gleam that meant business for everyone in the room who wasn't human.
Mateo and Rowan were already moving before I'd fully processed what I was looking at.
Mateo got in front of me with his arm out, his eyes gone full amber-gold, and Rowan came from the other direction and the two of them formed a wall between me and the nearest group of attackers with the practiced ease of men who'd done exactly this before and were not interested in improvising.
Amara moved through the room like she came out of a nightmare. She was sliding between the panicking patrons and the attackers in a way that looked almost polite until the first attacker went down and you understood it was anything but.
Draco had gone still. He looked at the room and made a series of decisions in the space of a second that I couldn't follow, and then he was moving and the room was trying to keep up with him and failing.
The nearest attacker swung a silver dagger at Mateo's shoulder and missed because Mateo wasn't there anymore. He'd shifted. The dagger went wide and Mateo's hand closed around the attacker's wrist and the sound that followed was not a good sound.
I turned.
The second group was pushing through the crowd from the east side of the room, using the panicking patrons as cover, and one of them broke away and came straight at the gap where Mateo and Rowan had been standing. The gap where I was standing.
I didn't think. My body just moved. I stepped inside the arc of the blade, got my hand on the attacker's forearm, turned the way I'd apparently always known how to turn, and drove my elbow into their throat with a force that surprised me as much as it surprised them. They went down.
Mateo, from three feet away, stared at me.
“Where did that come from?” he said.
“No idea,” I said honestly.
I didn't have time to think about it because another one was coming, I ducked it the dagger and used the momentum to drive the heel of my palm up under their chin. The crack of contact went up my arm. They went sideways into a table.
The floor erupted.
Rowan shifted fully. The transformation took half a second and used all the space it needed. He tore through the east group and cleared the floor around him in approximately the time it took me to breathe twice.
Draco was at the back of the room. I caught him in fragments through the chaos.
A witch in the center of the room got her hands up, pulling a spell that crackled through the air and blew the ward structure around the private booths like fuses.
The lights went red emergency, half the room in shadow.
Amara had the witch by the collar before the spell finished discharging, one hand at the back of the woman's neck, holding her still with the deliberate care of someone who wanted her intact enough to answer questions.
“Keep that one,” I heard Draco say, from somewhere I couldn't see.
The pain arrived before my brain had caught up with the fact that I'd been hit at all. I looked down. The handle of a silver dagger, a thin one, sticking out of the fabric of my jacket near the kidney, and a vampire behind it who had come through the chaos at an angle nobody had covered.
I dropped.
I didn't see what happened to the vampire but I heard it.
Then Draco was on the floor beside me with his hand at my side.
“How deep?” he said.
“Not very.” My voice came out steadier than I expected. “I've had worse.”
He pulled the dagger out with a clean movement that I did not fully appreciate in the moment and pressed his hand flat against the wound and looked at me with those eyes, and I felt the fear in him.
“Amara,” he said, not loudly, and Amara was there.
“I've got it,” she said. “Go.”
Blackthorne opened before we reached the door and Draco took me to his room.
The master bedroom was dark wood and high ceilings and old, controlled elegance — nothing decorative that hadn't earned its place and it smelled like him.
He laid me on the bed.
“Take the jacket off,” he said.
I took the jacket off. He lifted my shirt and looked at the wound.
“It's not deep,” I said.
“Silver slows healing. Even for humans with active blood.”
“I'm not—”
“Your blood is active, Nico.” He was already cutting across his own palm with a small blade from somewhere, quick and without drama. “This will help. It won't be fast, because of the silver, but it will work faster than leaving it alone. It may burn.”
It burned considerably. He pressed his bleeding palm to the wound and I took a breath through my nose and held it and stared at the ceiling, which was painted dark and had crown moulding that was probably two hundred years old and gave me something to focus on that was not the burning.
Draco sat on the edge of the bed beside me and kept his hand pressed to my side and said nothing. The house was quiet around us.
By the half hour mark, I could breathe fully and the lightheadedness had cleared.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You scared me,” he said.
“I know.” I reached up and got my hand against his jaw, the way he got his hand against mine, and he held still for it. “I'm here. Still annoying you. Still breathing.”
I kissed him.
His response was careful, and his hand moved to my uninjured side with deliberate gentleness.
“Nico,” he said, against my mouth. “You're injured.”
“I'm healed enough.”
“You're not healed enough for—”
“Draco.” I pulled back enough to look at him. “I've wanted you for a while now and I'm done waiting for a moment that doesn't have a body in it somewhere.”
He looked at me for a long beat. Then the corner of his mouth moved.
“Wait here,” I said.
He frowned. “You're not—”
I was already off the bed, ignoring the pull at my side, moving through the corridor at a pace that was faster than sensible, back to my room, where Drake opened one eye from the windowsill, judged me, and went back to sleep.
I grabbed the black paper bag from the wardrobe where I'd stashed it and hurried back out.
Draco was sitting on the edge of the bed exactly where I'd left him, which meant he'd decided to let this happen rather than find a reason to stop it, and that decision felt significant.
I held out the bag.
He looked at it. Took it. Looked inside with an expression that moved through several registers and ended somewhere dark and amused and doing things to my nervous system.
“You planned this,” he said.
“I planned for the possibility.”
He set the bag on the bed. Then he reached past me to the wall panel left of the headboard, and a section of the wall opened.
The room beyond was dark until it wasn’t. Dark leather and polished wood and restraints that were clearly old and clearly quality, hung within the walls.
He looked at me from the doorway. “You brought toys to a monster's bedroom, Nico.”
“I didn't know there was already a room,” I said.
“No.” The dark amusement was fully present now. “You didn't.”
I looked at the room and then at him and then at the bag on the bed with my very considered selection of items that now looked charmingly amateur next to an entire private dungeon.
“So,” I said.
“So,” he said.
“I'm going to need a minute.”
“Take your time.”