Sting walks behind us.
I can feel his attention on my back. The weight of it, specific and constant, tracking my movement the way he tracks everything. He’s watching the way I walk, the way my fitted top sits across my shoulders, the way my hair moves. I know this because I know Sting, and I know that the more controlled he is, the harder he’s working to maintain it.
Let him watch.
The night is chilly outside the Rot. I feel it on my face and arms, but I don’t pull my jacket tighter. The cold is refreshing, sharpening the edges of everything, including the broken pavement under my boots, the distant sound of wind through hollowed-out buildings, and the anticipation of what I’m about to do.
For weeks, I’ve been the daughter chasing her father’s ghost. The friend absorbing Mara’s guilt. The Runt making her case to men who hold the power. Tonight, I’m none of those things.
The club door appears in the dark. Armen reaches it first, knocks, and waits. The door opens.
I walk in ahead of all of them.
25
VI
It’s darkerthan I remember. Low ceiling, warm air, the bass from somewhere deeper in the venue vibrating through the floor and up into my bones. The last time I was here, I was still figuring out the rules. Still being led. Still watching the three of them in their skeleton masks and trying to understand the version of myself that responded so completely to it.
That girl is gone.
The private room is the same, couch along the back wall, low table, armchair in the corner, the door that locks from the inside. The lighting is dull, and the guys’ bone-white masks glow against it, three grinning skulls with dark eyes above them. God, what that does to me.
Armen takes the armchair and settles in. Legs wide, arms on the rests, the posture of a man who’s here to play and has no intention of rushing. Rogue leans against the wall to the left, arms crossed. I can see his eyes above the skull’s teeth, amused and curious, willing to see where this goes.
Sting stands in the center of the room.
Three skeleton faces looking at me. Waiting. Because I walked in first, because I initiated this, because the energy tonight is different and all three of them can feel it.
My move.
I cross the room to Sting. He watches me come, his mask covering everything from the bridge of his nose down—the painted teeth, the hollow cheeks, the skeletal jaw—but his eyes are bare. Exposed and dark, fixed on me with the full, unblinking attention he gives to things he’s interested in.
I stop in front of him.
“Would you please sit down?” I ask.
His eyes narrow fraction. It’s not refusal, just consideration.
He sits on the couch, controlled, even now. Knees apart, hands on the sofa back, head tilted with curiosity, looking up at me through his dark eyes above the skeleton’s grinning teeth. The mask hides everything I’d normally read, like the set of his mouth, the tension in it, the way his lips part when he’s frustrated. All I have are his eyes.
But they’re telling me everything I need to know.
I straddle his lap.
His hands come up immediately by instinct, the knowing response of a man who knows what to do with a woman on top of him. His fingers find my hips, get a hold of them, and start to guide.
Not so fast.
“Hey. Like this.” I take his wrists and move his hands off my hips and press them flat against the couch cushion on either side of him.
His eyes change, something flaring in them that I’ve never seen.
It’s surprise. I’ve somehow managed to surprise Sting.
God, that does something to me. Sting, letting me run the show, Sting, with his hands pinned by nothing but my request,every tendon in his forearms standing out with the effort of staying still. The most controlled man I’ve ever met, holding himself in place because I told him to.
In no particular hurry, because I want to make this last, I roll my hips over his lap and trace the exact moment his control, his goddamn control, starts to wither. Behind the mask, his breathing goes ragged and when I glance down, I see his fingers digging into the cushions below us.
