Page 19 of Thirst
I smiled like we were sharing a private joke. “Did you think I was giving you a choice?”
Her breath hitched. “I see.” She set the cognac snifter down with a soft clink. “Look, I—please just drop this. If you care for me at all… let it go.”
I eyed her. Something in her voice—thin, frayed—bothered me. She wasn’t teasing anymore. She was anxious, maybe even afraid.
Or maybe that was what she wanted me to think. Maybe this was just another layer of the act.
A smart man would let her go. We were through, weren’t we? She’d made it clear that she was Nazaire’s creature.
But I had the feeling that if I backed off now, let her walk away, I’d never get her alone again.
Something hollow and icy opened up in me. Something that swallowed my common sense. I couldn’t let this end here. I wouldn’t.
“Figure it out,” I said in a hard voice as I slid a keycard into her palm. “Or I’ll go straight to Brien and Talon. Room three-oh-three.”
I left without looking back.
She’d come. I’d bet a case of my favorite single malt on it—and not because I’d threatened to tell my friends.
Nyx didn’t want this thing between us anymore than I did. If her bodyguards caught us, we’d be neck-deep in shit. I’d be tortured, staked. And if I knew Nazaire, Nyx would be hustled back to Quebec and kept under lock and key for the next couple of decades.
So yeah, we both had everything to lose by meeting like this.
But like me, she wouldn’t be able to stay away.
6
Nyx
Back in my suite, I waited while Manny swept through the rooms, checking for anything out of the ordinary. When he finally left for the night, I locked the door behind him and sank onto the velvet couch. The keycard Cain had slipped me lay in my palm, small and innocuous—yet it felt heavier than anything I’d carried all day.
I stared at it, unsure whether to laugh, curse, or hurl it across the room.
I didn’t have to meet him. When it came down to it, his only evidence was a painting by an anonymous artist. It was only damning if you’d been there that night.
Which Brien and Talon had been.
I briefly closed my eyes. The last thing I needed was a pair of alpha vampires out for revenge breathing down my neck.
Even worse, Cain knew. Knew I was The Haunt. He could ruin everything with a few words in the right ears.
He wouldn’t. Not to me.
At least, that’s what I told myself. But I didn’t know for sure.
Cain was a vampire to the marrow—ruthless, cold, a man who’d clawed his way to stand just one step below his primus in barely two decades. And my father had pushed him and his friends to the brink.
Why had I put that painting in the show?
I’d known Cain might crash the opening night party—hell, I’d hoped he would. But I’d felt safe; no one had yet connected it-girl Nyx Nazaire to The Haunt.
And maybe, deep down, I’d wanted him to piece it together. To see this part of me my father never had. My paintings were my soul, unbared.
I grimaced. That had gone well, hadn’t it?
And I was wasting time.
I pushed back to my feet. In the bedroom, I exchanged my heels for a pair of short leather boots, then cracked open a window. The rain had ended, but a patchy fog had rolled in. On the sidewalk below, streetlights rose out of the mist like wrought-iron stems tipped with golden glass buds. Across the street, the Seine was a dark ribbon flowing through the white wisps.
