This isn’t the pleasant float of a good buzz.It’s more like someone’s slipped a filter over the world and forgot to tell me.
I shift, and I feel wobbly.His hand is there instantly, braced at the small of my back, steady, warm through the thin silk.
“Easy,” he murmurs, the word a sin and an order.
I straighten, mostly because his hand guides me to.My body follows his subtle pressure like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
My brain feels…slower, like I’m thinking through warm honey.A cold prickle slides down my spine.I know this sensation.I’ve seen women stumble out of private rooms in worse clubs than this with this exact glaze in their eyes.
No.
No.
My heart slams against my ribs, thunder in a too-small cage.
I lift my gaze, searching for my men.
Santo is exactly where I expect, standing near the railing, scanning the crowd.
“Hey,” the stranger says softly, cutting across the scattered thought.“Valentina.Look at me.”
My lips part.The name I meant to say evaporates.My eyes snap back to his like he’s a magnet and I’m made of filings.
“You okay?”he asks, tone threaded with concern that would sound real to anyone who doesn’t know better.
“As I told you.Long week.”
The answer is too easy.Too smooth.Like my mouth’s on autopilot while the rest of me bangs on the inside of my skull, screaming.
He’s clear.Sharp.Unblurred.
Of course he is.
I know, with the cold, sinking certainty I usually reserve for body identification, exactly what’s happening.
He did this.
Slipped something into my drink.
My fingers tighten on my glass.I try to pick it up, to let it fall, to make a scene, to shatter crystal on stone and force my men to look?—
“Careful.”He closes his hand over mine, steadying me before I can follow through.To anyone watching, his gesture might seem attentive.Maybe flirtatious.
He eases the glass from my grip like it’s nothing.Like I’m nothing.
The music muffles further.The hum of voices stretches and warps.
I look in the mirror behind the bar.My eyes are too wide, too unblinking.
The skyline is a smear of neon and glass.The part of me that assesses risk, that inventories exits, keeps trying to rise, but it keeps slipping, sliding away on the same warm, inevitable tide that makes my shoulders relax.
“Valentina?”he asks again, lower now.“You with me?”
I want to yellno.Want to scream that you drugged me, you bastard.
What comes out is, “Yeah.I’m good.”
The lie is as easy as breathing.
