I blink. Smile at him, even though I want to gag. “Yeah, okay. Let’s dance. I love dancing.”
His hand inches up my rib cage. “You sober?”
“Yeah,” I say, giggling. “Super sober. Super super sober. I have amazing alcohol tolerance. Could have, like, ten of these cups—” I hold it up like it’s a trophy. “Tenof these, and not feel a thing!”
The guy’s eyes gleam. “Okay, good—”
“Dude, she clearly isn’t sober,” Ares snaps.
“She just said that she is,” the guy says. His hand is still moving over my body, and beneath my performance, I feel the first prickling of fear, the urge to slap his hot, heavy hand away. When his fingers slide even higher up my waist, I stiffen, fighting to keep the fear from my face.
Ares’s eyes whip from my expression, then darken as they focus on where this man has grabbed me.
In a flash, Ares seizes the guy’s wrist, yanking it away from me, and shoves him back so far that he almost crashes into the people dancing behind him.
I stare, stunned, my heart beating too fast. I feel for a moment actually drunk, like everything is tilting upside down and spinning away from me, out of control, like maybe this isn’t real. Because my impulse is to go to Ares. Stay close to him. Turn to him for safety, when I should know for a fact that he’s the most dangerous person in this club, in this whole city, even.
“What the fuck, man?” the guy yelps. But maybe he sees the threat blazing in Ares’s face, because he doesn’t try to approach me again. Just shoots Ares a glare and slinks off into the crowd.
Ares whirls back to face me, and I try to adjust my expression, to affect nonchalance. “Is this how you always act when you’re out?”
I shrug. “Thought you said it has nothing to do with you.”
He releases a low breath. Searches over my shoulder, his features tight with concentration, his brows furrowed. “Where is he?” he mutters.
“Isn’t it sucha coincidence that we’re both here,” I say cheerily, pulling his attention back to me, just in case the man he’s looking for hasn’t gone far enough away yet.
“Is it really a coincidence?” Ares asks.
“What do you mean?”
Smooth as shadow, he surges forward, trapping me in place. My body is suddenly frozen, my breaths constricted. “You know, Chanel, I’m starting to think you want something from me,” he says, his voice like silk, the warmth of it bare inches from my cheek, everything about this moment terrible and forbidden and obscene.
“I—” The word rises and dies on my tongue.
I’d promised myself this wouldn’t happen. I’d been determined not to let him affect me.
But no amount of self-awareness or self-control could possibly protect me from Ares’s proximity: his face, lovely and hypnotic, hovering over mine; his long hair the glossy pitch-black of a crow’s wing; his dark eyes burning as though lit from within.
My head swims.
Dimly, I recall the road trip my family had taken in Australia,the long coastal drive down from Sydney to Melbourne. At night, a kangaroo had suddenly hopped out onto the road, right in front of a passing truck. “Run!”I’d wanted to scream at it. “Get out of there.”But it didn’t move. Simply stared, wide-eyed at the blazing headlights.It had seemed so stupid to me at the time, that the animal would justfreeze up,stay in place like a lump of rock while the truck hurtled toward it.
Turns out that in practice, I’m not much better.
None of my limbs remember how to cooperate.
Then Ares pulls away, breaks eye contact, and shame spikes in my veins alongside a strange, disturbing pang of regret.
“I’m going to call you a car,” he says. “You should go home and sober up.”
I start to protest when I hear a terribly familiar voice—
“Chanel?”
No. Not him.
There’s no way he’s here. Out of all the places in a city as crowded as Beijing, out of all the nightclubs he owns, the meetings he could be attending, the overpriced restaurants he could be dining at, the business partners he could be shaking hands with... the odds were meant to be in my favor, but then, nothing’s really working in my favor these days.
