I should have called this off days ago.
She should have done it the moment she discovered him in her room, his shoulders draped in her nightgown. Maybe even as soon as she met him.
She couldn’t control this man. No one could. And now that he’d been unleashed on her life, she worried that he was becoming an even bigger problem than the one she’d sought to solve.
Shade was quiet for a moment as they joined the flow of traffic toward the Marin side of the bay. She held her breath, waiting for an explosion, or a threat, or even violence as he processed her ultimatum.
But he surprised her.
His drawl was calm,almostpatient, when he ordered, “Drink, little goddess. You’re gonna need the caffeine.”
Chapter Eleven
Even disguisedby the glamour she wore, Petra looked a little shellshocked as she nibbled on a crispy eggroll and drank her tea. The expression in her eyes, illuminated in pale blue-green from the controls on his modified dashboard, was lost.
Good.
It was always best to keep wily opponents wrong-footed, and Petra Zaskodna was, if nothing else, wily.
“Where are you taking me?”
Silas brushed the backs of his claws against her kneecap again. He hadn’t quite been able to stop himself from finding reasons to touch her and didn’t care to besides. He didn’t like her glamour, impressive though it was. He wanted to seeher,but since he was driving, he couldn’t find where she’d placed the sigil to anchor it in place.
Smelling her but notseeingher made the animal in him restless, aggressive. It urged him to pull over the car and pin her in place as he searched for that damn sigil. Then he’d wipe it away, revealing golden hair and pale blue eyes and a lush mouth and the too-striking cheekbones that made her features almost brutal.
The animal craved a look at that face. It wanted to spend the upcoming frenzy of the rut with her, yes, but it also just wanted tobaskin her. But Silas had a destination in mind, so he soothed the animal by stroking her tense knee and breathing her in.
He wasn’t typically one for explanations, but he made an exception for her. “We’re going somewhere I know there won’t be any listening ears.”
“We couldn’t have stayed in San Francisco?”
“San Francisco is one of the single most surveilled cities on theplanet.”That’s why he preferred to work pretty much anywhere else on the continent, though the Draakonriik was also a royal pain in his ass.
Elves were worse, though. Enriched by the technological boom and a collectively ruthless business savvy, they kept a tight fist on their territory — who came in, who left, and what a person did nearly every moment they were there. The EVP was known for being one of the most highly controlled areas of the continent, but what few average people understood was that it also boasted a correspondingly intelligent and ruthless underground network of spies, criminals, and black markets.
What even fewer knew, even among his ilk, was that those underground activities were closely monitored and sanctioned by the EVP itself. Nothing, not even crime, happened in an elf’s territory without their consent.
Which was exactly why he stayed the fuck out. Usually. Silas didn’t play within the EVP’s rules for criminals nor did he care to report to Kazimier Le Roy, the orcish attack dog secretly in charge of the intelligence unit that patrolled the underground. They would be stupid to trust Silas even if he said he would.
He’d been playing a little game with the orc for years. Whenever he snuck across the border, he made sure to let Kaz know — after he’d slipped back out. A sort of mutual respect existed between them, something developed over years of near-misses and exchanges of information. Silas let Kaz know where the holes in his security were, which he thought was awfully generous of him. In exchange, Kaz continued to let him come and go with only cursory attempts at capture.
Silas had nothing against Kaz other than the fact that he would probably put a bolt between his eyes the second the orc saw him in San Francisco. There were no hard feelings about it one way or the other. It was a matter of principle and winning the game.
It would become much, much more than that if the orc knew Silas was onlyinthe city to steal the plans for the m-generator his new mate co-created.
Silas rubbed the backs of his claws against the denim covering Petra’s knee once more. That restlessness in him only grew when he thought of what might happen should Kaz — very distracted as of late, apparently — discover that Silas was a threat to his mate.
Normally, he would have rolled his eyes at the dramatics he imagined, loads of snarling and threats and piping hot plasma bolts ready to melt a hole through his brain, but now…
He understood it. Just a little.
He didn’t like people touching his things, either.
“You understand that women generally don’t like being kidnapped and then driven in the dead of night to some undisclosed location, right?”
Silas rolled his eyes. “Why would I kill you if I need your bond?”
Petra went quiet again. After some time, she said, “There are worse things than being murdered, Shade.”
