“Depends,” she answered with what she hoped sounded like false bravado.
“Screen off,” he ordered, and smiled again. “Better?”
“Yeah. It’s better with it off.”
“That’s the signal.” Feeney nodded to Roarke. “All units, move in. Move in. She’s playing him,” he said to Roarke. “She’ll walk him right into it.”
“Or he’s playing her.” With Eve’s voice in his ear, Roarke rushed into the dark.
Into the terrible things.
“Hold it.” There was the slightest hesitation in her order as she slapped a hand against Dorian’s chest and shoved. “I have obligations. I have loyalties.”
“None of which fill your needs.”
“You don’t know my needs.”
“Give me five minutes to do as I like with you, and you’ll know differently. You came to me.” He trailed his fingers over her cheek. “You came to me alone. You want to know what I can give you.”
She shook her head, stepped away. “I came because I need to understand. I can’t settle, I can’t focus. I feel like something’s trying to crawl out of my skin.”
“I can help you with that.”
She glanced over her shoulder at him. “Yeah, I bet you could. But I’m not like Tiara Kent. I’m not looking for cheap thrills. And I’m not like Allesseria Carter. I don’t need your goodwill. I’m not afraid of you.”
“Aren’t you? Aren’t you afraid of what I could make you?”
She looked at the portrait. “Like that?” Her voice was just a little breathless. “I’m not that gullible.”
He lifted one of the wineglasses, drank deeply. “There’s more in the world that slips in and out of what’s deemed reality.”
“Such as?”
He drank again, and his eyes went even darker. “Such as powers, and hungers beyond the human. I’ll take you there. I can show you a glimpse without causing you harm. You should drink. Relax. Nothing will happen to you here. It’s not my way.”
“No, you go to them. Kent practically spread rose petals on a path to her bed for you.”
“Hypothetically, invitations are required.”
“In an occupied building,” Eve agreed. “Not in an abandoned one. Like the one where you dragged Allesseria, where you killed her.”
“Does it excite you to think so, to look at me and see her death?”
“Maybe it does.”
“You seek death.” He laid his fingertips under hers, lifted her hand. “Surround yourself with it. Isn’t that what I sensed, what I saw, in you that first moment our eyes met? It connects us, this…fondness for death in a way the man you give yourself to can never understand. He can’t reach that dark bloom inside you. I can.”
She let her fingers curl to his for an instant, then eased back again. “I don’t know what connects us, but I felt something when I heard your voice come in on Allesseria’s ’link message to me. It was a mistake to say anything, Dorian, a mistake not to make certain the ’link was down and the transmission broken before you spoke to her. We’ll have your voiceprint match by morning.”
He lowered the glass he’d lifted to his lips. “That’s not possible.”
“Would I be here now otherwise? Risking all this so I could see you tonight? This goes down tomorrow, and my part in it’s over. I need answers for me. Why would I tell you we have evidence building that could take you down, give you time to poof? I have to know. For me.”
“I have an alibi,” he insisted.
“Kendra Lake? Another spoiled rich girl running on hormones, vanity, and chemicals. She won’t help you. She’ll crack, we both know it. She’s on the juice, she’s your lover. It won’t hold.”
“You’re lying.” He gulped down the rest of the liquid in the glass, heaved the glass aside. “You’re lying. You bitch.”