His eyes were wrong—black, with no iris or white. Maybe hers looked the same with her pupils enlarged from being high.
A firm pull snapped along her back when his attention landed, tingling shooting through her limbs—the same electric prickle before a fight. Something about him was disturbingly familiar.
They stared longer, and the room emptied to just him.
Her breathing kicked, not simply from fear but also from acknowledgment. Then, something old surfaced, a feeling of dread. The sensation of standing at the brink of what had already destroyed her. Behind her, a known mind pressed against her awareness. It was precise, but furious. She knew that anger.
Alex?
Was this a memory? No, it was as if her friend’s mind was passing through the crowd—familiar enough to wound, immediately wrong in a way she couldn’t name. That couldn’t be right, though.Saraihad tight security and didn’t let anyone in.
She ignored it and went back to watching the man on the couch. Before she could think better of it, her aura reached out to him.
Auras weren’t a figment of her imagination. They were a psychic field that responded to her emotions and will. Ever since she’d been a child, Audrey had sensed energy around her. The doctors had called it hyperempathy, but Audrey knew it was more. This ability was tangible. It was a physical ability that let her graze other people’s consciousness, feel their moods, even read their minds without warning.
When she was high, her aura flowed into the world even more easily, and right now, it spread forward like smoke, knotting with the strange man’s.
At first, nothing happened. But a second later, his mind opened for her.
She entered, but everything about him felt different than a normal mind. It was as if he’d known she’d reach, as if she’d just confirmed a suspicion he’d long held.
Her breathing stumbled at howgoodhe felt. Her hands drifted down in slow circles as she arched her back, giving the stockbroker more of what he wanted. But her focus stayed on the stranger. Reaching deeper, she encountered layer upon layer of chaos. Not messy chaos but rather a structure built on force.
A familiar voice in an unfamiliar language resounded in her head.
Gor ari gousi.
His emotions crashed into her, too—fear and awe. And deeper?
Recognition.
Interest.
Curiosity.
He tensed in calculation, but all she could do was admire the alien disorder of his mind. A chill wave of disdain hit hard, turning her stomach.
Then, he broke the connection. Like he decided he’d had enough. She gasped, air stuck in her lungs.
His arm shifted; the tattoos gleamed in the light. The world dropped away.
No, that couldn’t be right.
But the memory snapped into place—black bands of moving ink, sharp-angled.
He smiled. His white teeth made time stutter.
It washim.
The man from the backyard. The voice from the prison gate. The mind on the bus. He was more than a stranger; he was at the center of her nightmares, the witness to everything she’d survived and everything she still feared.
He was here.
That perfect smile he’d flashed her meant this meeting had gone exactly as he wanted, and she’d been too high, too wrapped up in hiding and denial to notice it.
Neither of them moved.
The club’s roar melted beneath the drumming in Audrey’s ears. A figure blocked the strobe. The aura that struck her was unmistakable.
