I sat up straight on the barstool, preparing to come up with some excuse for continuing our conversation. He wasn’t finished, though.
“—and I don’t usually do this kind of thing, but... would you like to come up to my room for a nightcap?”
Oh.
I blinked.
That had certainly been a lot easier than I’d expected.
“Only if you promise to tell me more about import and export taxation,” I said, striking a vixen-ish pose and fluttering my eyelashes at him.
He laughed. I hated the fact that it was a reallynicelaugh.
“No promises.”
I laughed as well, trying to make it sound as natural and seductive as possible. Grabbing my little black clutch with its incredibly important contents, I let him usher me toward the elevators with a hand hovering a few inches away from my lower back. The fact that the almost-contact didn’t make my skin crawl was freaking me out a bit, if I were being honest.
I’m locked in an enclosed metal box with a predator,I thought as the doors shut us both inside.Why don’t I feel like I’m in danger?
Mr. Sex Trafficker kept up an easy flow of conversation as the elevator went up... andup.
“Wow,” I said, as the counter went all the way to the top floor and gave a cheerful ding. “Penthouse suite?”
He shrugged. His key card slid smoothly through the slot in the nearest door, and the lock clicked. “After you.”
I’d never been in a penthouse suite before, needless to say. Making a concerted effort not to gape openly at the elegant décorand clean, airy surroundings that were so utterly different to what I was used to, I whistled in appreciation.
“Not bad,” I said, and then promptly zeroed in on the most useful thing in the room. “Ooh, a mini-bar! What can I get you?”
He loosened his tie and tossed his suit jacket over the back of a velvet-upholstered chair. “A bourbon on the rocks would be good. And help yourself to whatever.”
This was perfect. For one thing, it saved me from having to faff around with convincing him to get us room service.
“One bourbon on the rocks, coming up,” I replied, keeping a peripheral eye on him to make sure he wasn’t watching as I snuck a couple of pills out of my clutch and dropped them into his drink.
Acepromazine in the dosage I’d scored was an industrial-strength horse tranquilizer that wasn’t too difficult to get from a veterinarian—if you had horses. Which I obviously didn’t. But you could get just about anything on the street if you knew the right people... which I obviouslydid.
The thing about acepromazine was that it packed a kick, but it also cleared out of the bloodstream really fast. And, even more importantly, it wasn’t approved for human use. Therefore, it wasn’t something that was tested for in a typical tox screening after, for instance, a suspicious death.
It also dissolved really nicely in liquid, which was handy.
“Here you go.” I handed the cut-crystal tumbler to him, then turned around again to focus on making myself a Midori sour. When it was ready, I lifted it toward him in a toast. “To boring business conventions, and the things that make themlessboring.”
“I’ll drink to that,” he said, and suited action to word.
I hid my grim smile and lifted my own glass, taking the tiniest of sips.
The first time I’d killed a man, it had been an act of desperation carried out with a dozen of my fellow omega prisoners, when the driver of the semi that had been smuggling us south from Canada into America had stopped for fuel. He’d made the mistake of opening the trailer door to make sure none of us had frozen to death, and we’d jumped him without any sort of a plan beyond survival.
I’d been thirteen at the time.
The second time I’d killed a man, it had been... not an accident, exactly. But not planned, by any stretch. I’d walked in on some middle-aged asshole about to rape my closest friend, grabbed the nearest heavy object, and used it to cave in the fucker’s skull.
Then, in a fit of combined panic and PTSD, I’d fled, leaving that friend alone with a dead body that had clearly been murdered. Needless to say, we weren’t friends anymore. At least, I was pretty sure we weren’t, since that had been more than a year ago, and I’d disappeared from his life without a trace rather than face the shame of having abandoned him to the tender mercies of the police.
God... I really hoped he hadn’t ended up in jail.
I’d been too afraid to try and find out.
