Page 14 of The Queen (Masterpiece Duet 2)
In the opposite corner I can see a bell-shaped black-iron cage, six feet tall, with a woman dancing inside. Another one, taller, rectangular, has a muscular man wearing a thong and a collar. Their expressions are as blissed-out as the people dancing around them, despite the hands reaching through the bars to touch oiled skin—or maybe because of them.
Something small and pink withers inside me. It seems ludicrous to think that he would have pined after me. That he thought about me at all. I must have seemed like a child to him, whether my body had been grown-up or not—as innocent and foolish as a child.
It makes my crush on him that much more humiliating.
And it makes my presence here ridiculous. What did I think would happen? That I would find him lonely and halfway in love with me? That I would demand answers and he would give them? That he would magically produce Avery and then confess how much he missed me?
Half-naked women aren’t dancing on his lap, but it’s close. They’re near him, showing off bodies in lace and satin and leather. The kind of women you see on TV and magazines, too beautiful to be real. People say that there’s an epidemic of Photoshop in the media, but these women aren’t airbrushed. They’re moving with confidence and glamour and unabashed sexiness.
While I stand in the hallway wearing yoga pants, my hair in a rough ponytail.
I don’t know how long I would have stood there, debating with myself, hating myself, but Damon glances up. His eyes meet mine. For a moment I see a storm inside them—regret, anger. Accusation. It chills me to the bone, wind lashing me from twenty feet away.
Then he stands, and I taste something new. Metallic. Fear.
I don’t know the man walking toward me. My dreams cast him as the savior. My nightmares showed his father as the devil. But those were the imaginings of a little girl, the same as my terrible crush and my private yearning.
The crowd parts for him, some without even looking back. They feel his energy as strongly as I do, pulsing as if the beat emanates from him. Smoke rises up around him, behind him, framing him in such a demonic light that I know I feared the wrong man.
He stops in front of me, casual, expectant.
And I find myself filling the space between us. “I’m looking for my dad. I didn’t realize you were having a party. He wasn’t at home. I can wait until you’re… done.”
That makes him smile. “Will you wait for me?”
What if he waited for you?
My cheeks turn hot. I must be bright red from shame. Can he guess what I dreamed about? Because whether I meant to or not, I have been waiting for him. Living my life in books, in numbers on paper, the smell of wood shavings and chalk in my nose. There haven’t been dates. Not even many friends.
I have been waiting for this man, the illusion of him. Someone who doesn’t exist.
“No,” I tell Damon Scott. “We need to talk. Right now.”
Chapter Nine
The crowd falls quiet, attuned to us in a matter of seconds.
Not because he spoke to me. That earned me resentful glances or mild curiosity. What brings the room to a halt is my disobedience, as if I’ve disrupted the entire flow of the party by fighting back. The beat of the music still thrums around us, heavy vibrations on the taut crowd.
I can hear the jangle of iron chains from someone shackled to the corner, eyelids heavy as they watch me, hips still thrust upward in a gyration never completed. I can hear the slick sound of skin against skin as the tangle on the fallen-over armchair twist to look at me. A cold giggle from one of the girls who’d been dancing near Damon before he came over.
God, even the silence here is hedonistic and cruel.
“I’m listening,” he says, cool and sharp as a blade.
He listens with his whole body, his tall frame relaxed and expectant, his eyes hooded. The rest of the room is listening, too. This is better entertainment than half-naked people dancing in a cage. Than people having sex in a fallen-over leather armchair. This is the show.
“Well,” Damon says in that showman’s voice. As if he’s the ringmaster, the Den his human circus. “If you have something to say, go ahead and say it. We can’t wait to hear.”
Every pair of eyes in the Den swings looks at me. I can smell the sex and the sweat in the air, feel the heavy breathing from all around. “I’d like to talk in private.”
“Would you?” Damon says, circling me. “You don’t look like you have much to bargain with.”
I’m painfully aware of my slouchy travel clothes, my old ballet flats, the frayed carry-on that I found at a thrift store for five dollars. His dark eyes take me in, all of me, from my appearance to my worry, the fear that I’ve lived in since I woke up in Avery’s empty bed days ago.
