"Where?" I ask.
"There's a break room off the back hallway. I'll tell Miguel you're on your break."
He vanishes into the casino floor, and my brain immediately starts its own private war.
This is insane.
I stack empty glasses onto my tray and try to look like a functioning professional person who isn't currently having an internal breakdown. What am I doing? I should have said no. Should have smiled politely, said *I'm working, Havoc,* and turned back to my tables. Should have kept the fragile professional distance that is the only thing standing between me and a complete disaster.
But I said yes. Because apparently I have the self-preservation instincts of a moth at a bonfire.
He's back in less than two minutes, materializing at my elbow with the particular silence of someone who learned to move without being heard a long time before this casino existed.
"Miguel's covered," he says simply. "Come on."
I follow him through the casino floor, through the employee hallway, past the lockers, past the break room I used yesterday. He stops at a different door, further along, a room I haven't been in before. Opens it, guides me inside with a hand that almost touches my back but doesn't quite.
The room is small. A desk, a table with a coffee maker that's seen better years, two chairs, a window with a blind that's been broken halfway down for what looks like decades. Storage mostly, from the look of the boxes stacked along one wall.
Havoc comes in behind me, and then I hear the lock click.
I spin around. "Did you just lock the door?"
"Yeah." He pockets the key. "I need no one walking in on this conversation." He looks at me directly, and something in his expression is wound tight, like a man bracing for something difficult. "I can only say this once. If someone interrupts me, I won't be able to start again."
My heart is going double time. "You're scaring me."
"It's not bad," he says quickly. "I promise you it's not bad. The opposite."
I stare at him. "Then tell me. Please."
He moves closer.
And God, I forget every time, I forget the sheer size of him. He's not just tall, he's built like someone who was constructed for a different scale than ordinary life. He towers over me, this wall ofdark tattoos and steel eyes, and my whole field of vision narrows down to just him.
"I barely slept," he starts, his voice low and rough, like it's coming from somewhere it doesn't usually come from. "I lay there for hours thinking about—" He stops. Jaw tight. Tries again. "About the kiss."
I don't say anything. Can't.
"And I knew I had to do something about it before I drove myself completely insane." He exhales hard. "So, this morning I went to Pope."
My eyes go wide. "You went to Pope."
"I told him about the motel. About the drunk. About the kiss." His gray eyes don't move from mine, steady and unflinching even when everything he's saying is clearly costing him. "I told him I wanted to pursue this. Whatever this is. Between us. I told him I wanted to see where it goes."
The room is very quiet.
I open my mouth. Close it again.
This isn't happening. This is not a thing that is actually happening to me, Ruby Lane, who is twenty-five years old and living in a motel on East Fremont and can't afford to replace her son's shoes yet. This older, stunning, terrifying, complicated man did not go to his club president this morning to ask permission to pursue me.
Men like him don't want women like me.
That's not self-pity talking, that's just the pattern of my entire life laid out in front of me like evidence. Charming men who wanted something and left when they'd taken it. Indifferent men. Violent men. Men who made sure I understood exactly what they thought my body and my worth added up to.
Not men who went to their presidents at seven in the morning because they couldn't sleep after kissing me.
He steps closer again, and now there's barely a foot between us, and I have to tilt my chin up to maintain eye contact. This close, I can see details that distance softens: the exact silver-gray of his eyes, the texture of the scar along his jaw, the thickness of his lips. There's a tiny dot just below his right eye, barely visible, like a beauty mark that got lost on its way somewhere.
