5. Chapter 5 #3
The fact should not have mattered beyond logistics.
It mattered. I had told myself it mattered because it meant the floor would proceed with no risk of another confrontation.
Because it afforded me a clean environment in which to regulate myself.
Because one cannot assess a problem accurately while the problem is physically present and wearing leather.
All of that was very reasonable.
None of it was the entire truth.
The truth was that I had looked for her name first.
I pushed back from the desk and stood. The movement sent a small wave of stiffness through my shoulders.
Hunger. Tension. Too many nights with inadequate rest and too much thought.
I crossed to the liquor cabinet, opened it, stared at the array of crystal and dark glass, then shut it again untouched.
A willing donor, I thought. Perhaps something more. Not a booked room. Nothing official. No arrangement requiring follow-up or memory. Just enough blood, enough distraction, enough body and scent and pressure to remind my own treacherous system that it had not been reduced to one impossible woman.
I had done such things before. More than once.
Women of excellent breeding and strategic value.
Women of beauty and intelligence, whose names opened doors or soothed tensions between houses.
Women who understood exactly the boundaries of a liaison and never confused appetite with claim.
Attraction had always been manageable when paired with propriety.
That thought, in its bitter comedy, nearly made me laugh.
Still, logic remained preferable to paralysis.
I could either continue sitting in my office like an austere fool while Obsidian breathed temptation through the walls, or I could prove to myself that blood remained blood, that a beautiful woman remained a beautiful woman, that my body had not become wholly colonized by fate.
I went to the door, then paused and returned only long enough to glance once more at the schedule.
No Maddie.
Good.
I left the office.
The descent from the third floor into the main body of the club always felt a little like entering a current one could observe from shore but not fully understand until submerged.
Warmth increased by degrees. Music pressed closer.
The scent-thick air of Obsidian wrapped itself around me with expert hands.
By the time I reached the main floor, the crowd had already begun its usual subtle accommodation of my presence.
Conversations did not stop, not exactly; they altered.
Paths opened a fraction before me. Gazes dipped or held depending on rank and nerve.
I let my own travel over the room with deliberate purpose.
And found her immediately.
Not Maddie.
The woman stood near the second bar beneath a hanging lamp whose low gold light turned her silk dress almost liquid.
Champagne-colored satin clung to a tall, elegant frame without vulgarity.
Her hair had been drawn into a high, sleek ponytail that laid bare the clean line of her neck and the pale, aristocratic grace of her profile.
She held a coupe glass by the stem with one hand and listened to the man beside her with the exquisite boredom of a person raised too well to interrupt and too honest to feign delight.
Everything about her suggested old houses, old money, old rules obeyed because they had long ago become instinct.
The architectural opposite of Maddie.
No curves arranged by God and Texas appetite. No boots, no rough-edged humor, no warmth spilling past the boundaries of self-protection. This woman was all control, pale composure, a column rather than a flame.
Once, I would have called that ideal.
I crossed the floor toward her. The crowd parted around me with the accustomed fluidity of people who knew precisely who I was and what I represented under this roof.
She saw me coming before I was close enough to speak.
A faint shift altered her expression, interest replacing boredom.
Her gaze dropped to the line of my jacket, rose to my face, and lingered there with an appraisal subtle enough to count as manners.
“Monsieur,” she said when I stopped before her.
French. The accent soft, cultivated, Paris perhaps or near enough that any distinction would have sounded vulgar on my tongue.
“Good evening,” I replied. “You are visiting.”
One corner of her mouth moved. “Is it so obvious?”
“You are being polite to a man whose reputation should encourage caution. That suggests either confidence or unfamiliarity.”
“Perhaps both.” She tipped her glass slightly. “I arrived from France yesterday.”
So I had judged correctly. I felt no satisfaction in it.
“Philadelphia has not yet disappointed you?” I asked.
“Not yet,” she said, and let her eyes travel over me in a way that made plain she did not consider disappointment imminent. “Though I am told one must be shown the correct corners.”
Normally, I might have answered with wit. Tonight I had not come down for conversation.
I stepped closer.
Her pupils widened at once. Her body gave the smallest involuntary adjustment toward mine, like a needle testing north.
Good. Simple. Familiar. She smelled of expensive soap, silk warmed on skin, and beneath it the cool, immaculate richness of vampire blood from an old line.
Clean. Refined. Nothing wild in it. Nothing that reached out with claws.
I touched two fingers lightly to the base of her spine and inclined my head toward one of the half-curtained alcoves along the side wall. She came without hesitation.
The alcove swallowed us into black velvet and lower light.
Not privacy exactly—nothing at Obsidian deserved that word fully—but shadow enough to turn attention inward.
The music became a pressure rather than a sound.
Her coupe glass found a side shelf, abandoned.
Then she turned into me with practiced ease and laid one hand against my lapel, fingers smoothing the cloth as though she appreciated its construction.
“You move quickly,” she murmured.
“I have had a difficult evening.”
“Ah.” Her lashes lowered. “Then perhaps I should be very kind.”
The line should have stirred me more than it did.
I bent my head to her neck.
There was no preamble to it, no formal request. Among our kind, in a place like this, body language and scent often concluded negotiations faster than language ever could. My mouth hovered at the curve where jaw became throat, and I breathed her in fully.
Rich. Clean. Noble blood. Fine.
Sufficient, I told myself.
Her pulse fluttered once, perceptible even in one of our own species, and I let my lips brush the sensitive skin just below her ear.
She exhaled against my collar, one hand sliding higher to curl at the back of my neck.
I kept a hand on her waist. Controlled. Impersonal, if one ignored the shape of it.
My thumb traced one measured arc through the silk at her side.
This was what I had intended. The body answering an opportunity. Blood answering need. Nothing metaphysical. Nothing humiliating.
I took her ponytail in my other hand and drew it aside, baring the full pale column of her throat. Her head tipped obligingly, exposing more. The tendon there stood out in a delicate line. I lowered my mouth and dragged my tongue slowly upward along her skin toward her ear.
She shivered.
And still, even then, the wrong absence struck me first.
No cedar. No vanilla heat. No wolf. No warm human thread braided through shifter wildness. No maddening undertone of leather and open road and female skin that made my own blood behave like a creature called.
My hunger sharpened with disappointment rather than relief.
I tightened my hand fractionally in her hair, not enough to hurt, only enough to recover sensation through control. Her breath caught again. One of her knees brushed my thigh. Somewhere just beyond the curtain, laughter rose and broke.
Then I heard it.
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.