He seemed to bring me to life.
My feet still refused to move, but I forced myself to relax, to take a deep breath and drop my shoulders. Crushes came and went in this place as often as guests. And that was all this was. Dangerous infatuation that would die as quickly as one of his marks.
Except, as forbidden as it was for me to feel this way, there was something addicting about it. About him. Sometimes I wondered if it was because his temperature ran much cooler than mine, and in comparison, I felt warm.
If I felt dead, he’d been in the tomb much longer than me.
Somehow, that made me feel connected to him in a way that was difficult to put into words. It was a secret thing, something safe, something that staved off the loneliness that only I knew about. He’d probably snuff me out if he even had an idea of the thoughts running wild in my head.
As if one of the stronger thoughts had reached out and grabbed him by the coat, he stopped directly in front of me, giving me his profile.
As if the entire place could hear my heart beating faster than normal, my eyes swept the room, worried that my secrets were bleeding out for everyone to see.
I’d been so caught up in my own little dark daydream that the entire world could have been crashing around me and I wouldn’t have had a fucking clue. If anyone in this room was able to translate whatever the hell was going on with me, I’d just risked my life to basically watch him walk past me.
He didn’t move past me, though. He stood there for a second, the profile of his face as sharp and as cold as the ice running through his veins. Then he turned to me and met my eyes.
His eyes were a warm brown compared to my cold blue ones, and I wondered if life had somehow gotten it wrong. Given him a color that came alive against his tan skin when he was the one who was as chilling as frost. After meeting his stare, though, I realized that it wasn’t the color that sent a chill up my spine. It was the empty voids under what seemed like perpetually hooded lids, sucking me in, that froze me even harder to the floor.
I knew that void without having to be introduced. We met on a daily basis. Mine was in my mind, where all my missing memories had gone. He wore his on his face.
That face? It made women stare more times than I could count. If there was beauty to be found in brutality, it could be found in AnielloAssanti.
He was lean, his face perfectly angular, but his bone structure was bold, and so were his features. His lips were always set in a way that warned he wasn’t to be fucked with. Firm, but the bottom seemed a little softer than the upper.
He was always clean-cut, shaven, his strong jaw on display. His hair was dark brown, probably black when it was wet. The style of it was a combination of a side part and a fade, and it was slicked back on top. It was real dapper but didn’t disguise his sharp edges.
Against his tan skin, the color of his eyes became an exotic shade of brown, but they were so hard to penetrate, to figure out his thoughts, because they kept the rest of the world on the surface of them.
His eyes were what I called bedroom eyes. They were deep-set and hooded. Maybe some would even call them heavy-lidded.
If life had made him not a killer but something else, something more…civil, his eyes would have still been the death of many hearts. He was the kind of man who’d become either art or a part of history in a black and white photo.
He was in black and white, and on the borders, a deadly red outlined his life.
A breath that should have come out as a gasp silently slipped from my lips as he bent down in front of me. I backed up a pace when he got too close, finally able to unroot myself from floor. When he moved again, I moved, putting a little space between us when he stood to his full height.
He was tall but not too tall. Sculpted in all the right places but not overly bulky. Everything about him was so well proportioned physically that I knew his personality was his imbalance.
I blinked as something gold was held in front of my face. Fuck. I was staring hard at him again. So hard, that it took me a second to bring the key he held up into focus.
“You lose your key—” he kept his deep, smooth voice down, but loud enough that I heard him without straining “—then whatever’s in your locker belongs to me, Midnight Rose.”
I wanted to say, “Promise to explain all the things you find?” Instead, I lifted the key in silent thanks and then stuck it in my pocket. I didn’t want him to hear my voice, in case there was something there he could detect—like the fact that sometimes I imagined him naked in my bed, doing things to me that would make the neighbors think he was killing me.
As if that thought reached out and slapped him across the face, his eyes narrowed against mine, but I didn’t wilt under his intense gaze. Even before the accident, I’d been somewhat faulty. My survival instincts had always been broken. It was the reason why I didn’t hesitate to stay, to take an oath worth my life, when I could’ve been mingling with a part of society that had a much higher survival rate than this one.
After a few seconds, he straightened and looked down at me. “Get back to work,” he said, the frigid cold of his indifference clashing with the warmth that still sizzled in my veins from his arrival. “I’m not paying you to stand around.”
I nodded and turned, almost on autopilot as I worked my way toward where I needed to be. I stopped before I went to another area of Club D, looking over my shoulder once, just to see if he had taken a second glance at me.
He was already seated at his table with the men, and instead of finding total indifference on his face, I saw the thrill of the hunt.
* * *
For a time after the accident,my head would sometimes go fuzzy. After Aniello arrived, my head did the same thing.
Instead of going away not long after, though, it made me feel flighty. Like my head was stuck in the clouds but my body hadn’t gotten the memo.
