Page 71 of Beautiful Prey

A slow, wolfish grin spreads across his face as he pushes back from the desk and rises to his full height. “You didn’t really think I’d stop looking for you, did you?”

His voice hasn’t changed. Neither has its effect on me.

“I...” My mouth feels strangely disconnected from the rest of me. “This is Vasco’s office.”

“It was.” He leans back against Vasco’s desk like he grew there. “I bought the company yesterday. The housing came with it, along with the water contracts. Every debt attached to the workers. He even left me his office.”

Onyx. The apartment. The oxygen. The medicine. Every part of the life I’ve been holding together.

I think of the snow globe in the shop window when I was small, the little figures frozen mid-street as a giant hand turned it over, making it storm. I used to wonder if they knew. Now I know exactly how they felt, because I’m standing in one, and the hand that owns the glass is smiling at me across a desk that stopped being Vasco’s yesterday.

“You...” The room seems to shift beneath my feet. “...you crossed the Reach... for this?”

“No, prey.” He closes the distance between us. “For you.”

I stare at him. “For... for— you’ve lost your mind.”

The corner of his mouth lifts by another fraction. “Probably.”

“No. You’re lying. You don’t get to...” I shake my head, gesturing helplessly around the office. “You don’t get to buy people’s lives.”

“But I didn’t, did I?” He holds my gaze. “I bought a mining company. And everyone inside it came with the paperwork, which could be considered a pretty good deal.”

The other man lets out an approving sound.

“You can’t possibly mean you came all the way to Calder for me.” I force myself to hold his gaze. “There’s nothing else on this planet you could possibly want.”

He drifts a hand up and tilts my chin with a single finger. “Oh. You’re very wrong about that, stormbird.”

A shiver runs down my spine. Something about being named by him frightens me more than his hand around my throat ever did.

“Aw, did you miss me?”

“You’re unbelievable.”

I didn’t miss him. All that tossing and turning, all that thinking about one specific arrogant asshole, wasn’t that, was it?

He watches me not answer. “That’s not a no.” His gaze slips to the man lounging by the window. “By the way, have you met my cousin, Ryven? He came all the way from Tempest to enjoy our reunion. He’s a mean fucker like that.”

Ryven pushes himself to his feet and gives me a lazy nod. “Don’t listen to him. I came for the entertainment.”

“Well, you’re not getting any,” I scoff.

“Shame.” His grin widens. “You’re all I’ve been hearing about since Tempest. Nice to see what all the poor decisions are about.”

“Ryven.”

“Right, right.” He lifts both hands in surrender. “I’ll leave you lovebirds to it.”

“Get out.”

“See?” Ryven says on his way to the door. “Mean fucker.”

The door closes behind him. Asher waits until the latch clicks, then the smile disappears, and those impossible eyes settle on mine again.

He gestures to the chair. “Right. Now that we have the formalities out of the way, tell me what happened.”

“What are you talking about?”