Page 28 of Nikolay

French. The accent soft, cultivated, Paris perhaps or near enough that any distinction would have sounded vulgar on my tongue.

“Good evening,” I replied. “You are visiting.”

One corner of her mouth moved. “Is it so obvious?”

“You are being polite to a man whose reputation should encourage caution. That suggests either confidence or unfamiliarity.”

“Perhaps both.” She tipped her glass slightly. “I arrived from France yesterday.”

So I had judged correctly. I felt no satisfaction in it.

“Philadelphia has not yet disappointed you?” I asked.

“Not yet,” she said, and let her eyes travel over me in a way that made plain she did not consider disappointment imminent. “Though I am told one must be shown the correct corners.”

Normally, I might have answered with wit. Tonight I had not come down for conversation.

I stepped closer.

Her pupils widened at once. Her body gave the smallest involuntary adjustment toward mine, like a needle testing north. Good. Simple. Familiar. She smelled of expensive soap, silk warmed on skin, and beneath it the cool, immaculate richness of vampire blood from an old line. Clean. Refined. Nothing wild in it. Nothing that reached out with claws.

I touched two fingers lightly to the base of her spine and inclined my head toward one of the half-curtained alcoves along the side wall. She came without hesitation.

The alcove swallowed us into black velvet and lower light. Not privacy exactly—nothing at Obsidian deserved that word fully—but shadow enough to turn attention inward. The music became a pressure rather than a sound. Her coupe glass found a side shelf, abandoned. Then she turned into me with practiced ease and laid one hand against my lapel, fingers smoothing the cloth as though she appreciated its construction.

“You move quickly,” she murmured.

“I have had a difficult evening.”

“Ah.” Her lashes lowered. “Then perhaps I should be very kind.”

The line should have stirred me more than it did.

I bent my head to her neck.

There was no preamble to it, no formal request. Among our kind, in a place like this, body language and scent often concluded negotiations faster than language ever could. My mouth hovered at the curve where jaw became throat, and I breathed her in fully.

Rich. Clean. Noble blood. Fine.

Sufficient, I told myself.

Her pulse fluttered once, perceptible even in one of our own species, and I let my lips brush the sensitive skin just below her ear. She exhaled against my collar, one hand sliding higher to curl at the back of my neck. I kept a hand on her waist. Controlled. Impersonal, if one ignored the shape of it. My thumb traced one measured arc through the silk at her side.

This was what I had intended. The body answering an opportunity. Blood answering need. Nothing metaphysical. Nothing humiliating.

I took her ponytail in my other hand and drew it aside, baring the full pale column of her throat. Her head tipped obligingly, exposing more. The tendon there stood out in a delicate line. I lowered my mouth and dragged my tongue slowly upward along her skin toward her ear.

She shivered.

And still, even then, the wrong absence struck me first.

No cedar. No vanilla heat. No wolf. No warm human thread braided through shifter wildness. No maddening undertone of leather and open road and female skin that made my own blood behave like a creature called.

My hunger sharpened with disappointment rather than relief.

I tightened my hand fractionally in her hair, not enough to hurt, only enough to recover sensation through control. Her breath caught again. One of her knees brushed my thigh. Somewhere just beyond the curtain, laughter rose and broke.

Then I heard it.