10. Chapter 10
Maddie
The demonstration continued, and so did I.
My section gathered its breath in pieces—one broken exhale here, one murmured curse there, the clink of crystal finding tabletops while the swing still moved overhead and a vampire and a witch found their pleasure.
I could tell they were nearing the end; at least I prayed they were.
That was the job.
Obsidian’s main floor breathed around me in purple low light and velvet shadow, all controlled appetite and expensive vice with its collar on.
The air smelled like whiskey, skin, arousal, perfume, polished leather, and that faint sweet trace of vampire venom that always seemed to drift after demonstrations involving mouths and throats and too much pleasure done in public.
People sat a little differently in their booths.
A little looser. A little hungrier. Like the whole room had been reminded it owned a body and was considering what to do about it.
I balanced my tray on one hand and kept moving.
That helped. Movement always helped.
Which was almost funny, considering how badly it had betrayed me in the last ten minutes.
My panties were soaked.
There was no gentler way to phrase that to myself, and I was too irritated to try.
Bodhan’s little public-service lecture had been one thing.
I worked at Obsidian. I had seen enough sex, kink, blood, and elaborate supernatural nonsense to stop blushing over the mechanics of pleasure pretty damn early.
But tonight the whole thing had gone wrong in the worst possible way because at some point it had stopped being about a beautiful witch on a swing and started being about the broad-shouldered vampire prince across the room watching me watch him.
That was the sort of problem a woman could not put on an incident report.
I passed beneath one of the low chandeliers and felt the cool drag of air conditioning over the backs of my bare thighs, my short black skirt shifting with each step. My face stayed neutral.
By the time I angled back toward Ironwood’s table, I had my expression under lock again.
Mostly.
Sage sat at the center like he had not moved at all, and yet somehow the entire table still arranged itself around him.
His whiskey glass stood empty near his hand.
I stepped in with my tray tucked at my hip. “Can I get y’all anything else?”
The bearded one asked for another neat pour of something top-shelf that cost more than my first car. One of the women wanted sparkling water this time. The other lifted two fingers for a refill of the red blend they’d been sharing. I nodded, committed it all to memory, and reached for Sage’s glass.
He picked it up at the same moment.
Our fingers met in the handoff.
It should not have mattered. People touched people in service work all the time.
Knuckles brushed, palms grazed, receipts exchanged.
But some touches arrived carrying too much awareness in them.
His fingers were warm and callused where they slid against mine, not rough enough to scrape but rough enough to remind me that all the tailoring in the world did not make him soft.
The contact lasted a beat. Then another, because either he was slow to let go, or I was.
He leaned in slightly as he passed me the glass.
“Another whiskey,” he said.
His voice was deep enough to feel before I fully heard it, an alpha register built low in the chest and thrown with no effort at all.
It brushed my ear in a way that made something primitive in me come alert.
I felt the fine hairs rise along my forearm under the sleeve of my fitted black top.
My spine straightened before my mind caught up, a little involuntary line of steel running through me, and I stepped back half an inch on pure reflex as if distance could keep my body from hearing what it wanted to hear in a man’s tone.
Sage’s eyes flicked over my face.
Not rudely. Just attentively. Like he’d noticed every last bit of that response and would be taking it under advisement.
“Neat,” he added.
“Got it,” I said, and was grateful my voice came out steady.
He let the empty glass go at last.
I turned before I could think too hard about his mouth being that close to my ear again and headed for the bar with the tray balanced against my hip and my pulse behaving like it had never seen a handsome man before.
Which was ridiculous.
I had seen handsome men. I worked in a building full of them. Supernatural species had an unfair advantage in that department. Sage was gorgeous in a clean, dangerous, rich-man way, sure, but that was not what had me off balance.
I reached the bar with an empty tray and stopped for the first time in what felt like ages.
Just a moment.
Just enough to set the tray down on the polished black surface and flex my fingers once.
The demonstration had begun to reach its peak.
It was so beautiful in its completion I was compelled to stop and watch.
And for a split second, even though I’d just been admiring the handsomest wolf I’d ever laid eyes on, I could not help but imagine myself in that swing and a vampire prince’s hands controlling my body.
I was being ridiculous. But there was more.
I knew that I was being watched.
Noticed.
But this time was different.
That thought had barely formed before I made the mistake of glancing across the room.
Nikolay stood near the bar at the edge of the stage light.
He was not glaring. That was what unsettled me most.
Weeks ago, during the St. Andrew’s cross demonstration, rage had sat on him plain as weather—dark, banked, impossible to miss, making his whole body look carved from some harder thing than flesh.
Tonight there was none of that open violence to him.
He stood with a whiskey in one hand, broad shoulders easy under his tailored jacket, face set in that grave composure he wore better than most men wore skin.
I glanced up at his face.
He was looking directly at me.
Something in me gave before pride could stop it.
My tongue moved across my bottom lip.
I did not mean to do it. That was the worst part. It was one of those traitorous little body-things that happened below thought, a response to dry mouth or nerves or too much awareness, except his gaze sharpened the instant it happened and made it feel filthy.
The corner of his mouth ticked up.
Not a smile. Not properly. He was not a man who gave those away freely. But something ghosted there, brief and private and devastating precisely because it was so small.
Then he winked at me.
Slow.
Deliberate.
Unmistakable.
It was not playful. Not exactly. It felt more intimate than that, more old-world and wicked, like a gloved hand tipped under a ballroom table to brush a woman’s inner knee.
And then, because apparently destroying my equilibrium in under two seconds was enough for one evening, he turned for the stairs.
Just like that.
No waiting to see whether I followed. No second look. No hesitation.
He simply left the invitation hanging there between us and walked away as if the answer had already begun.
I called Kyra over. “I need my break.”
Her brows rose a fraction, but she only nodded toward the service corridor. “Go.”
I was already moving.
I did not look back.
The employee corridor hit me like cold truth after the velvet lie of the main floor. Purple light fell away behind me. Music dulled to a pulse in the walls. What remained was white fluorescence, concrete, metal doors, and the ugly, practical spine of Obsidian exposed at last.
I walked faster than I needed to.
Not running. I was not about to give myself that kind of drama in a hallway full of cleaning supplies and employee lockers.
But there was enough urgency in my stride that my boots struck sharper against the concrete than usual, and by the time I reached the locker room door, I had gone from overheated to furious about being overheated, which at least felt a little more like myself.
The staff locker room was spacious, comfortable, and blessedly vacant when I entered.
I yanked my locker open.
Inside sat my usual emergency kit: folded spare shirt, extra tights, a travel pack of tampons, aspirin, lip gloss, little packets of stain remover, and two pairs of underwear because a sexually healthy woman who worked at Obsidian learned demonstrations often led to damp panties.
I grabbed the hot-pink boy shorts because they were clean and soft, and I was too annoyed to care whether the color made me look like a human valentine under my uniform later.
Then I took the pack of cleaning wipes from the shelf, slammed the locker shut with my hip, and headed for the private employee restroom at the end of the hall.
I locked the door behind me and stood there for a second with my eyes shut.
Just breathing.
Just trying to get my skin back under my own authority.
Then I set the wipes and clean panties on the counter, hooked my thumbs into the sides of my underwear, and shoved them down so I could deal with my intimate disaster.
“Well,” I muttered to my reflection. “I really enjoyed that demonstration.”
I cleaned myself methodically because method was a kind of dignity when the alternative was standing in a restroom feeling wrecked by two men for entirely different reasons.
The wipes were cool against overheated skin.
I used one, then another, taking my time because rushing only made me more aware of how sensitive I was.
My thighs twitched once when the chill hit the slickest part of me, and I hissed out a breath through my teeth.
Jesus.
I dropped the ruined boy shorts to my ankles and stepped out of them.
They were black lace. Pretty, impractical, and embarrassingly soaked.
I picked them up between two fingers, folded them smaller on instinct, and set them aside while I tugged the hot-pink pair into place.
The cotton hugged me clean and snug, not sexy in the least, which for some reason made me want to laugh. Or maybe cry. Hard to say.