CHAPTER EIGHT
SERAFINA
The bass was alive.
It pulsed through the polished floor beneath my feet, crawling up my legs and settling deep inside my ribs, each beat vibrating through bone and flesh.
The club was a cathedral of darkness and sin, drenched in crimson light and caged with black walls. In the middle of the dance floor, bodies swayed and drifted together like something between a fervent prayer and subtle predation.
I had chosen this place deliberately, the kind of place where faces dissolved into shifting shadows, and names were lost beneath the deafening music. It was a relentless assault that buried conversations and drowned out guilty consciences.
Gooseflesh peppered my skin, and my lower spine tingled.
Thud.
I felt him before I saw him.
I always did.
The thing about Adrian Salvatore was that he announced himself in a very particular way. Dangerous and silent.
The air around me changed, growing dense and crackling with tension.
Some people carried their presence like a scent.
He carried it like an approaching storm—inevitable, relentless, and impossible to ignore.
Blood roared between my ears, and my heart thudded again, loud and hard against my rib cage.
I didn’t turn around.
I stopped turning around three weeks ago when I learned that no matter where I looked… my eyes never found him.
Yet…
He was always watching.
I knew it. I felt it—his unwavering gaze.
But I never knew where he stood, where he watched from.
He was always carefully hidden in the shadows, letting the darkness swallow him.
Fine. Let him look. Let him watch. Let him do what he’d been doing across four countries and a dozen cities—hover menacingly at the periphery, close enough to remind me I was being hunted, but far enough to deny me the satisfaction of confrontation.
I was tired of letting him win.
So tonight, I danced.
A woman’s body had its own language, every movement a sentence, every breath a confession. And I had learned to speak it fluently.
My body knew exactly what to say and how to make sure no one ever forgot hearing it.
The music shifted to something slower, darker… the beat pulling like a tide. I closed my eyes and let my hips find the rhythm, allowing my shoulder to drop. I tilted my chin back, arching my neck. My hair came loose from the bun, falling down to my lower back.
The fabric of my black dress clung to my body like a second skin, and I moved with the kind of slow sensuality that I knew. That I had been taught to use to my advantage.
After a minute, I opened my eyes. My lips twitched when a man moved toward me with the particular confidence of someone who had never been told ‘no’ in a way that mattered.
He was young, closer to my age. Dark strands of hair fell across his forehead, and his lips curved with a smile that was equal parts invitation and assumption.
Come here, pretty boy.
He was effortlessly handsome, too good-looking for his own good. I almost felt bad for him. Knowing that his pretty face would likely be ruined by the end of the night.
But oh well…
Pretty Boy didn’t ask. He simply moved into my orbit as I continued dancing, his arm sliding around my waist with the easy entitlement of someone who believed the dance floor meant he had access to my body. His hand settled at the small of my back, palm flat and warm through the thin fabric.
He tugged me closer.
I could have stepped away.
I could have turned my shoulder, created distance, and maintained the careful perimeter I usually kept around my body in rooms full of strangers.
I had done it a thousand times… the polite extraction, the closed smile, the subtle shift of weight that screamed they were not welcome near me without ever saying it aloud.
Instead… I leaned into him.
I felt his surprise—a slight tightening of his arm, the quickening of his breath against my temple.
So freaking cute.
I pressed my body against his. Intentional. Slow. Intimate.
My hips moved against his in slow, rolling circles, my heaving breasts pressed to his chest, my mouth close enough to his neck that he could feel the heat of my breath.
I let my hand drift up his arm, over the ridge of his shoulder, and into the hair at the nape of his neck.
My fingers curled around the strands, holding him, anchoring him to my body.
Heat spread through me, and my spine tingled again.
Not because of the man dancing with me.
I felt the change in his gaze, almost like it was a physical thing, a hand that wasn’t touching me. Yet, I felt it on my skin. Sliding over me. Warm. Possessive. Lethal.
Pretty Boy whispered something in my ear. German, I thought, or maybe English—the music swallowed the consonants. It didn’t matter.
I smiled against his neck.
My hand slid down from his hair to the back of his shirt, fingers splaying across his muscles over the fabric of his shirt.
The song built toward its crescendo, and the way our bodies moved against each other was almost obscene. I was making love to this stranger on a dance floor in Berlin, and every move was deliberate for one man only—the man who had followed me across a continent without ever closing the distance.
When the song ended, I stepped back. My dance partner’s hand lingered at my waist, his eyes dark and wanting. I gave him a smile, one that promised him nothing. A cold, empty smile.
I turned and walked away, leaving him alone on the dance floor. It was becoming a habit of mine. Leaving clueless men behind, confused with bruised egos and unanswered questions.
The corridor was dim. It was a narrow passage between the main floor and the bathrooms, lit by a single amber bulb that cast more shadow than light.
The music was muffled here, reduced to a thrumming bass that vibrated in my teeth.
My heels clicked against the concrete floor, and the sound was small and precise in the narrow space.
I had only taken four steps when I felt it.
His presence materialized behind me, foreboding.
There was no sound, not a single footstep. No warning. He moved so quietly, the silent confidence of a predator that I almost missed it. I would have if I hadn’t been expecting him.
The musky air of the club shifted.
My heart slowed.
Thud.
A hand clamped over my mouth, muffling my startled scream before the other wrapped around my throat. His fingers tightened, just once. A small, deliberate squeeze.
I hit the wall, not hard, not violently. Just a forceful push to remind me that the man holding me was a lot stronger than I was.
His body caged around me, broad shoulders and solid muscles pressing against my back until there wasn’t an inch of space left between us.
His mouth found my ear. God, he was so close. So impossibly close the familiar scent of him filled my senses, his heat spreading through my body, covering me like a second layer of cloth.
His warm, controlled breath feathered against the shell of my ear, his lips barely touching my skin.
Finally, I won. The realization sent a rush of triumph surging through my veins, hot and intoxicating. Every ounce of victory pulsed through me, alive and utterly satisfying.
I broke him