Page 82 of Honey Cut
“You’re scaring people,” I say, taking a sip of my drink. “It’s not very subtle.”
“They’re not very subtle,” he grumbles, trying to shield my body from view of the crowd. Not that it matters—no one is looking as much as he thinks they are. Yes, my dress is short and tight, but it’s hardly the shortest or tightest dress here, and there is eye candy everywhere. It’s the kind of club where pretty people come to display themselves, and I discreetly watch over Tristan’s shoulder as two eyelinered men in their twenties are approached by someone in a black suit and then shown to a staircase up to the second floor. Among the flashing LED lights and flickering shadows, I catch glimpses of balconies higher up. VIP booths. Maybe separate rooms.
That’s where Drobny would be.
Lox had been right when she’d assumed there were safe houses within a short trip of the Adriatic—but she’d been wrong about where Drobny was staying. As the Scales learned from listening in on the Serbian banker at my wedding reception, he’s been using his yacht as a decoy, as bait, while he jumps from one safe house to the other, from Budva to Belgrade to Bratislava and then back again.
But he seems to have a fondness for Belgrade, and it seems to be mostly because of this club.
It doesn’t take me long to discern why. Within forty-five minutes of our arrival, the mood has shifted from the usual, if infectious, European club vibe to something markedly more carnal. People are kissing openly now, both in the low booths at the far end of the space and on the dance floor itself. Laps are being ridden, people are kneeling in front of spread legs. I see the suited man circulating a few times and picking the most adventurous or lissome partiers to follow him upstairs.
It is no Lyonesse—despite the flashy jewelry and designer clothes and accessories, the level of ambient wealth and influence is nowhere near the same. And the lack of etiquette, of elegance even, is jarring.
But itisaffecting. In front of me, Tristan’s cheeks are stained, and his hands keep finding my waist and chafing down my hips.
I finish my drink and set it down on the tall table next to me.
“Let’s dance,” I say, and he doesn’t fight me. Lets me lead him to the floor where the crowd pushes us together, where the music thrums through our bodies.
I never did this in school. There wasn’t time between studying, training, or praying for anything like this. Clubs. Parties. Nights out in short dresses with the thrill of the unknown on me like a second skin.
But strangely, after I became a saint, I frequently found myself in places like this club. Perhaps not the evil priests, but the evil businesspeople and mercenaries and politicians? They loved spots like this, where the sex was as easy to get as the liquor, where they could sit behind a velvet rope and feel—for however short a time—special. Exclusive. Powerful.
Never, though, have I actually found myself on the dance floor. It’s a little giddying to be here with the lights and the music and then Tristan’s hands on my waist. All around us, people are grinding, kissing. Hands are between legs.
Tristan’s hands move to my backside and start kneading. Reflexively. Mindlessly. Like he can’t help himself.
I ache under this short dress, and the cure for it is right in front of me. Kind and earnest and just as turned on. As we dance, I find his stiff organ through his clothes and squeeze. His eyes flutter as he pulls the bottom of my dress up, exposing the lower part of my ass.
It’s so crowded though, so chaotic. We are anonymous, nothing, just two more bodies in a sea of them.
When Tristan’s fingers glide over my pussy, I spread my legs apart to give him access. When he spins me around to grind against me, I grind back, shivering as his fingers find my clit and rub it perfectly. And when the inevitable happens and I feel the blunt head of him pushing at my slit, I welcome it with quivering fervor.
He fucks me like that, from behind, with a hand on my breast and his hips moving in slow, short thrusts.
“Why can’t I stop when it comes to you?” he asks into my ear. “You feel so good, so fucking good, and I just can’tstop?—”
We screw to the music, to the pulsing, heady beat, and it’s urgent and dirty and animal, with people doing the same around us, with shoulders jostling against our own, with barely enough room to make it work.
He fondles my breast as the hand at my front coaxes a quick, sharp orgasm out of me, and then I feel when he follows me over. Swelling pulses between my legs, the drop of his head on my shoulder.
“Fuck,” he whispers in my ear. He sounds completely wrung out. “Fuck.”
I know the feeling.
We put ourselves back together, not bothering to be too discreet given the amount of indecency around us, and then I force myself to think like a professional, to use the opportunity at hand.
“I’m going to use the restroom,” I tell Tristan over the music. I know he’ll try to watch me the whole way there, but the view from the dance floor is terrible, and he’s half-drunk on oxytocin and shame.
I mean, so am I, but at least I know what I plan to do.
I kiss his cheek and then move away before he can protest or try to follow, for once grateful for being so short. It makes it easier to dodge the other guests, to push between them and dart into open spaces, and I know that Tristan’s lost sight of me by the time I’m off the floor.
I double-check, of course, before I move to the staircase, and not finding his face in the crush, I turn to the security guard.
“Mr. Kulov sent for me,” I say in French. If boarding school was good for nothing else, it was good for this. “He says I’m to meet him upstairs.”
The guard gives me a bored look. “No more whores,” he says in heavily accented English.
