Kaige stopped at the sight of me with a frown, folding his massive arms over his chest. “What are you doing wandering around here? Wylder told you to stick to the groupie room.”
I shrugged. “He told me to act like a groupie. Last time I checked, they have free run of this part of the house.”
“Back to snark, are we?” Kaige kept his voice easy, but I could detect the tautness at the back of it.
“I got tired of sitting there,” I said, watching him carefully. “Your girlfriend doesn’t like me.”
Kaige looked at me strangely for a second. As far as I could tell, his confusion was genuine. “Who are you talking about?”
Somehow my heart managed to lift and sink at the same time. I was ridiculously glad he wasn’t serious about any of those girls, but that also meant I’d pegged Gia’s obsession right.
“Gia, of course.”
He snorted. “It’s Wylder she has a crush on, not me. But then most of the women usually go for him, so that’s no surprise. Comes with the territory of being an actual Noble in name as well as loyalty.”
I gave him a wry smile. “Nope, you’re definitely the one she wants. You never indulged her flirtations? She throws herself at you all the time.”
He furrowed his brow as if this was news to him. “That’s because of Wylder. Anyway, I don’t fuck the groupies—any of them. I want nothing to do with that.”
I raised my eyebrows, legitimately surprised. “Don’t tell me you haven’t taken the occasional interest in one or two of them? They’re easy targets.”
Kaige looked me up and down, his gaze leaving a trail of goosebumps. “I don’t need easy targets,” he said, his intention clear in his voice. Then he shook himself and stepped back.
My gaze dropped to his sneakers, the same midnight blue ones I’d seen him in most days. I’d never noticed before that the laces didn’t quite match. The ones on the right shoe were a little thinner and more of a pale gray than white like the ones on the right. Thin and pale gray like the lace in Gia’s magazine.
“Your shoelaces don’t match,” I said in a distant sort of way, the enormity of what I was slowly becoming convinced of nearly overwhelming me.
Kaige glanced down. “Yeah. Some jerk around here thought it was funny to steal the laces out of one of them. Like that was going to stop me from wearing my favorite pair.” He let out a huff and then fixed his dark eyes on me again. “You don’t want Wylder catching you lurking around here, kitten. Scurry on back to your room, or he’ll give you much bigger things to worry about than Gia or my shoes.”
As he marched off, I rubbed the tingle of attraction from my arms as well as I could. I already had bigger things to worry about than the fact that he could somehow still turn me on with just a glance.
And Gia was right in the middle of it. Her little psycho mementos must all tie back to Kaige.
I couldn’t dismiss the suspicions that were crowding my head more by the minute, but I couldn’t do anything else to investigate them right now. But soon… I’d do a little digging and find out whether this crazy idea of mine was actually so crazy after all.