Page 9 of His Cruel Exception

So I stop playing.

I eat the distance between us in a handful of long strides and close my fingers around the back of his collar, his entire body jerking like I’ve caught him with a hook. A strangled sound escapes him when his momentum is abruptly stolen and he’s pulled back against me. His body twists hard in my grip and his fingers claw at my wrist, trying with astonishing determination to wrench himself loose. He digs his heels into the ground and throws his weight forward despite how heavily he’s breathing.

I tighten my hold to keep him there and lower my mouth to his ear, close enough to feel the heat of his skin against my lips.

“Hello, little stripper,” I whisper.

He goes rigid, and for one suspended moment, he does not even breathe. Then panic seems to ignite through his muscles; he bucks violently against my hold, finger digging uselessly into my arm as he fights for space that I have no intention of giving him.

“You’re coming with me,” I tell him.

His struggling suddenly loses its rhythm. It becomes frantic and disorganized, his chest moving too quickly with shallow little breaths that never seem to reach his lungs. The tension in his body changes from resistance into something uncontrolled, something that has nothing to do with me anymore. His eyes are open, but they are no longer looking at the forest, or me, or anything I can see, and his hands start shaking.

I loosen my grip and turn him to face me, his knees nearly giving beneath him. His fingers curl into the front of my shirt, no longer pushing me away but now holding on to me as he whispers something that sounds like “Logan” repeatedly.

I slide one arm beneath his knees and lift him before he can collapse. He should be at least twenty-five, maybe older, yet he feels almost insubstantial in my arms, all narrow bones and trembling limbs.

Davide emerges from between the trees and he tries to take him from me, but I refuse and shift him closer against my chest. His gaze moves from my face to the man curled against me, and something I am not interested in deciphering flickers across his expression.

The stripper barely seems aware of either of us, but by the time we’re almost at the limo, his breathing has started to even out, although another tremor moves through him every few steps, and somewhere along the way his arms have found their way around my neck, his fingers knotted into the back of my jacket.

I don’t remove them.

When Davide opens the rear door of the limo, I duck inside and lower him onto the leather seat. The moment my arms leave him, his eyes snap open and his hand grabs my sleeve. I look down at his fingers, then at him and he releases me slowly.

I take my phone from my pocket and send a message to the group, telling them Davide will return for them once he drops us off.

Davide pulls away from the curb and the club disappears behind us. The stripper curls deeper into the corner of the seat, drawing in on himself while ribbons of streetlight slide across his face through the windows. He still looks shaken, the color not yet returned to his skin.

I watch him without speaking, one question burning through my mind.

Who the fuck is Logan?

Chapter

Five

ALEX

The first thing I become aware of is the softness beneath my cheek.

Even though I am still somewhere between sleeping and waking, I can instantly tell that the duvet covering me is too heavy to be mine. I lie there, inhaling the unfamiliar scent of something woody while trying to work out what dragged me to consciousness when I am so tired that even thinking requires more effort than I have left.

Then I realize the mattress is also wrong because mine dips in the middle. It has been like that since before I moved into the apartment, and there is even a spring near the bottom that presses into my shin if I turn too far to the left.

But this mattress doesn’t dip anywhere. It is impossibly soft without swallowing me, supporting my weight evenly no matter how I move. Even the pillow under my head is cool and smooth against my cheek where mine is usually warm, flattened beyond recognition, and halfway onto the floor by morning.

I open my eyes and the room is half dark, illuminated only by a thin stream of silver light that slips between the curtains that cover the enormous windows on the other side of the room. I stare at the ceiling, but as I already guessed, it isn’t my ceiling.

This isn’t my room.

I push myself upright too quickly, and the room sways around me briefly while I search for something familiar but find nothing. There’s no jacket thrown over the chair because I was too lazy to hang it up. The stupid poster Dylan gave me because he knows I hate it is nowhere to on the wall. There isn’t even the strip of yellow light beneath my bedroom door that usually means somebody has fallen asleep in the living room with the lamp on again.

I listen harder, almost expecting the familiar sounds to emerge but I don’t hear the train groaning somewhere beyond the windows or pipes knocking inside the ancient walls of our apartment. Nobody is arguing on the sidewalk below, and there is no drunken laughter drifting in from the neighboring house. There is none of the ordinary noises I have learned to sleep through since moving in.

There’s only silence.

Where am I?