She remembered seeing a few men gathered around, drunkenly arguing over what counted as hustling when she took her seat. The light was brighter then, and the glow of a branded neon sign had illuminated the far wall. At some point in the ten minutes she’d been there, it had been extinguished.
Petra’s gaze flickered across the bar again, searching for vaguely familiar faces.
The men were gone. No one sat at the high tables closest to the pool table’s dim alcove.
Petra’s fingers curled reflexively around the stem of her wine glass. The knot of unease hardened into a stone, a heaviness in the pit of her stomach, as the sensation of being watched hardened into the certainty that she was being hunted.
She knew that feeling well, too.
Carefully — oh-so-carefully — Petra turned her attention back to the alcove. It didn’t matter how hard she strained to see into the shadows. She couldn’t make out anything beyond the center of the pool table, lit with jaundiced light.
It flickered once. Twice.
It went out.
Fight or flight instincts surged. The sound of the drunken crowd, the tinny blues music, the clank of glasses on the tables — all of it was muffled as every survival instinct strained to find the predator in the dark.
A pair of amber eyes flickered into being, twin flames struck into existence in the time between heartbeats. They peered back at her.
Petra didn’t jump. Not exactly. Rather, she stiffened all at once, each muscle seizing until she was completely frozen there in the tacky booth, her fingers locked around her wine glass.
She couldn’t look away. She knew those were eyes, but she struggled to accept it. In the darkness, they appeared to glow with an unnatural light — liquid metal heated to such a degree that they had their own luminescence. A light that was both beautiful and a warning not to touch.
The smoky air forced Petra to blink. When she opened her eyes again, not even a second later, the neon sign glowed faintly on the alcove’s wall once more. It cast the alcove, and the man lounging in the far corner, into shades of candied violet.
The faintest rim of golden light from the rest of the bar kissed tousled curls, broad shoulders, and spread legs. It gilded his horns, too, just enough to see their wicked shape in the dark. They arched back, slightly to the side of his brow and curled, almost completely, until the sharp tips brushed his hair.
One hand held a whiskey glass to his lips. The other lifted, two fingers curling, to beckon her into the dark.
“Are you sure?”Rasmus had asked her again when she’d arrived at the bar. The man didn’t owe her anything, but he tried to look out for her in his own gruff way.“You know how dangerous that demon is, right?”
Yes, she knew. Even though she’d been more or less out of the criminal world since it made her an orphan, she knew people.
And every one of those people feared Shade.
Petra forced her fingers to relax, to let go of the wine glass. They cramped. The rest of her did, too, as she consciously tried to ease the tension in her shoulders, her thighs, even in her face.
You’re dealing with bigger predators than him,she thought, flattening her palms on the tabletop.Buck up, buttercup.
She stood up and shimmied, as gracefully as she could, out of the booth. Each step felt heavier than the last, but she worked hard to keep her expression neutral, her gait even, as she rounded an empty table. Her gaze remained locked on the demon, who casually sipped from his glass. There was barely enough light to see his face, but she got the sense that he was smiling.
Everything in her, every lesson she’d learned on the streets and animal instinct, balked as she crossed into that alcove.
But Petra didn’t stop. She kept walking, measured and steady, around the abandoned pool table, toward him.
He’d commandeered the only table in the alcove — a small, square thing barely big enough for a couple of drinks. It was framed by two chairs on either side, turned to face the pool table but angled just enough so one could have a conversation with the person in the opposite seat.
Petra eyed the set-up, assessing possible escape routes and the distance between the chairs. Perhaps he’d chosen the chairs for the same reason she’d requested a booth from Rasmus: whendealing with a predator, it was always best practice to keep one’s back to a wall.
Unfortunately,she’dchosen the booth because it was private but also easily viewable by the rest of the bar.Hischoice was tucked completely out of sight. If no one wandered by — and she doubted they would — then they might as well have been in their own private room.
Cold sweat dewed on the back of her neck, beneath her fall of glamoured hair.Shit.
The demon dwarfed both the seat and the table. Even his glass looked small in his clawed hand. He wasn’t even in his shadow form and she was certain he could kill her with one strike. She got the peculiar sense that she was seeing an illusion, and that therealdemon was bigger, more monstrous than the man before her. All that wild energy was compressed, a spring ready to release at any moment and reveal the true face of the monster.
That was a good thing, she reassured herself as she sat in the empty chair. Petra needed someone deadly. The gods knew her enemies were.
The demon rested his drink on his thigh. The large ice cube in the center clinked against the glass as he assessed her with those amber-on-black eyes.
