“Right,” the guy sighed. “Like a lamb to the slaughter.” He pushed the door and held it open for her.
Inside, Colleen’s eyes took a minute to adjust to the dimly lit room. At first, white light cut cones out of the darkness, and then she saw the center spotlight was occupied by a man sitting on an oversized wooden chair, his knees spread and his hands resting upon them.
The door clunked shut behind her.
The man wore dark suit trousers and a white shirt open at the collar, but a dark vest cinched his waist like he’d been wearing a three-piece suit and taken off the jacket. The vest fit smoothly against his athletic body, and the darkness of the fabric seemed to cut his waist in even farther than it was. Considering his narrow waist and broad shoulders, those clothes must have been tailored for him.
His sleeves were rolled up. Green and blue tattoos coiled over his corded forearms.
Damn, she’d seen right the other night. Wow.
Okay, Anjali was right. Tattooed people were just hotter.
The spotlight shining from the high ceiling glinted on the watch encircling the light tan skin of his right wrist and the bright silver mask he wore.
The mask itself was an inverted pentagon, a flat line across his forehead and along the sides of his face near his ears. The lower edges met in a point in front of his chin. The metal was filigreed with paisleys and petals, almost delicate in design but masculine in appearance. The front rounded over his face, concealing him from ear to ear and from his hairline to his chin like a knight’s visor.
Above the mask, his hair was dark brown, almost black, but mahogany streaks shone in the falling light.
The mask tilted down. “Sailor Moon. Your costume is Sailor Moon. If my thirteen-year-old self could see me now, he would die of jealousy.”
Quick, think of something funny, she told herself. “But if you’d died then, you wouldn’t be here now.”
“Excellent point, and I am very glad I’m here now.” His voice had dropped further to a bass rumble. “And I’m glad you’re here too, QueenMod.”
Same voice, she thought. The same throaty growl of a voice with a crisp British accent. Everything said in a British accent was either charming or menacing. The Devil himself must have a British accent because a proper Englishman could make handing over your immortal soul seem like a smashing idea. “It’s very nice to meet you in meatspace, TwistyTrader.”
So lame. She wasn’t having high tea with the Queen. This was a—
Colleen wasn’t quite ready to admit to herself that she’d arrived at a kink club for a one-night stand. She hung her small purse on a hook beside the door.
He said, “So, you’re an aficionado of anime, then, QueenMod.”
“It’s just an old convention costume.”
“Do you attend gaming conventions, QueenMod?”
“I used to. Do you?”
“Perhaps that’s why you’re so protective of GameShack’s stock. Is it? Because you’re a gamer?”
“GameShack isn’t even a real company. The stores lose money hand over fist. The only part of the company that’s making money is the streaming division, where gamers stream their gaming to other gamers who like to watch gamers game for a share in the advertising dollars. Well, not dollars, CurieCoin. Everything in the streaming division is paid for in the cryptocurrency CurieCoin. I—GameShack? How did we end up talking about GameShack?”
The man wrapped his huge hands around the arms of the throne and pushed himself up.
It must have taken a lot of energy to get all his mass moving. Muscle weighed more than fat, she remembered, and jeez, with that inverted-triangle torso and hulky arms, he must have a very high density.
As soon as he was standing, she could tell he was very tall. He prowled toward her, taking up more and more of the air in the room and blotting out the walls and ceiling as her head tilted back to see him, and he loomed over her. “Call me Twist.”
“Okay,” she squeaked. Her knees quivered in her thigh-high boots, and she pressed her thighs against each other to steady herself, which increased pressure on a certain spot that was becoming sensitive. “Okay, Twist.”
This was going very badly.
Colleen was too dumb to do this right and was just going to screw everything up, and it was all going to go to hell, just like always. Gray mist stole around her mind, dampening her thoughts and deepening the shadows beyond the descending cones of light. She asked, “What are we even doing here?”
Twist ran his fingers under her jaw and lifted her chin to look him in the eyes. “I rather saw this as an extension of our conversation on the video chat, if that’s what you want to happen.”
The way he said rah-thur sounded so very British.
