I blinked into the slipstream, graceful as a gazelle, hungry as a lion. I know every inch of this club like the back of my hand.
My percentages had shifted. I was one measly percent glad he was back. Ninety-nine percent committed to kicking his insufferable ass.
How could you leave me when I needed to possess you, I hated you
I SLAMMED INTO RYODAN AT top speed, a grenade with the pin out, fists flying. I hit him so hard we hurtled into a marble column that shuddered satisfyingly from the impact. Then I grabbed him, hurling him away from it, and heaved him into a wall.
He wasn’t hitting me back, he wasn’t even resisting, and that pissed me off even more.
I launched myself at him again, peeled him off the wall and flung him across the room. He blasted into a pallet of lumber with such force wood exploded and went flying in all directions.
Dimly, I registered the stunned faces of the workers. Dimly, I registered that I was behaving alarmingly like I had in my youth.
I didn’t care.
“Kick up into the slipstream,” I snarled at him. He wasn’t even joining me. Just hanging down there in slow-mo Joe world where everyone could see him, letting me beat on him. It must have looked to them as if he was being hurled about the room by an irascible Tasmanian devil.
He stood, dusting off his crisp, well-tailored clothing, crossed his arms over his chest and cut me a hard, warning look. Good to see you, too, Dani.
He wasn’t even bleeding anywhere. What was I—innocuous?
I thudded down from the slipstream with thunder in my boots and snarled, “I didn’t say it was good to see you, and I don’t think it. You bastard. Kick. Up. Fight with me.”
Why would I do that?
“And don’t talk to me without talking to me. You don’t have the right. Stay out of my head.”
His eyes narrowed. Might makes—
I bulleted into the slipstream again, cutting him off. That was it, I was not listening to a single word of his condescending “might makes right” or “possession is nine-tenths of the law” crap, or any of his other immortal philosophy. Sometimes there’s only one way to resolve things: get down and dirty and brawl. And, by God, he was going to brawl with me and I was going to vent my outrage on his unbreakable body over the many things he’d done to prick and offend me.
I exploded into him again, hitting him so hard we erupted into the air, carrying him backward with my body to lam him into another column with such intensity the pillar cracked from ceiling to floor. We slid down it together, me gripping his collar with both hands.
He’d left me for two years. Never once texted me. Never called. Left Lor here, hidden from me, beyond my reach. It didn’t appease me at all to think Lor might have kept him apprised of my well-being. That didn’t count in my book.
Then he’d come back, let me save his life, and stalked off without a word.
Called me kid.
As I was about to slam my fist into his face and drive his head back into the column to see if I could collapse it with my next blow—the column not his face—Ryodan yanked me out of the slipstream, plucked me by a sleeve and smoothly dragged me down into the real world with real world consequences where the painful things are and forced me to stay still, one big hand manacled around my wrist.
“What,” he said very softly, “is your problem, Dani?”
My problem? I wasn’t the one with problems. I glared at him. Our faces were so close I could see the tiny crimson sparks glittering in his ice-gray eyes. Ancient, inhuman eyes, clear and cool.
He wasn’t even breathing hard.
I was panting.
I drew my free hand back to smash my fist into his infuriatingly composed face but my clearly possessed hand grabbed a fistful of his short dark hair instead and yanked his face to mine while my clearly insane mouth ground itself against his.
A frenzy of lust exploded inside me. Years of loneliness, years of frustrated hunger, years of missing him.
I kissed him like he was the battlefield I was born to wage all my wars on. I kissed him like he was the only king this Amazon warrior might ever take her army into combat for. I kissed him like we were primal, lethal beasts, fearlessly stalking those violent, killing no-man’s-lands where angels feared to tread, and I kissed him with a hunger that’s never once been slaked, as I unleashed all the fire and fury and savagery in my soul—and there is one fuck of a lot of it.
He groaned roughly, hands slipping to my ass, yanking me closer, if closer were even possible when I was already plastered to him like a second skin. Then my kiss changed and I kissed him with every ounce of raw, aching loneliness in my all-too-human flesh and bones, every haunted, painfully bared shred of me that was tired of reaching with the intensity and intent of life and touching nothing because I can’t fuck normal men, they don’t get me any more than I get them and I walk away, colder and lonelier than before. I kissed him with the rainbow-colored shattered hopes and dreams of a child betrayed in ways too damaging and numerous to count, and I kissed him with the yearning to be the one making joy blaze from his eyes.
I ground my body against his and kissed him like he was the only man I deemed complex, brilliant, and strong enough to be worth kissing, and I kissed him as if he were made of bone china, a man who’d known little tenderness in his life because he always had to be strong, like me, because he could, like me, and the world needed him, like me, and that’s what you do when you fit the bill.