Archer let me go, but he still walked with us toward the exit as his wife continued her closing remarks.
“Where are we going?” I hissed.
The golden rabbit turned to me slowly. “Up.”
It was just an hour. An hour of my time. I hadn’t actually beenbought.It was all fantasy, for a good cause.
The crowd parted for us, ogling me the whole way. Wes waited for us in front of the open doors, blocking the path out. He glowered.
One of the men next to me snickered. Another made a whispered comment I couldn’t fully hear, but I caught the wordinteresting.
“Wes,” Archer said slowly. “Is there a problem?”
Wes looked momentarily stunned when I stepped out from behind the huddle of men. It was the first time he’d seen me all night.
Varied emotions passed through his intense eyes in a split second, from wrath to horror to shock.
But all I could remember was him with someone else, the woman he was planning on telling me about in the car—the reason we couldn’t act on our so-calledcompulsions.
“Nova,” Wes breathed, ignoring the others entirely.
I released a shaky exhale and stepped forward. Not toward Wes, but toward the exit.
When he reached for me, I stared him hard in the eyes and shook my head. “Don’t,” I hissed.
I shrugged away from his outstretched hand. He flinched slightly, as if I’d slapped him. I left the ballroom, and when I looked over my shoulder, Wes looked on the verge of swinging on the men who trailed me. Archer approached him, erecting a barrier between Wes and the masked men as he spoke in a low, peacemaking tone.
Wes’s fists clenched. As Archer spoke to him, his eyes never left mine.
I turned and kept walking.
23
NOVA
It became abundantly clear that these men were merely Roman’s henchmen, bidding for him by proxy.
None of them touched me. In fact, now that they had me, they hardly even looked at me.
Upstairs, we reached a hall in the left wing with a golden rope divider and three security personnel. They nodded to the men and let us through.
Two girls squealed and bounded down the hallway, stopping abruptly when they saw us. Their mouths clamped shut, but mine fell open.
They were the young pregnant women, dressed in flowy white dresses with big, blooming flower crowns in their long hair.
They stared at me for two long seconds before exchanging a cryptic look. The men wordlessly parted for them to pass. I stood in the center of the hall, too stunned to move. They walked past me, one on either side, laughing.
After they were out of earshot, I turned toward the rabbit man. “I don’t want to sound like a puritan or anything, but should they really behere?”
The rabbit snorted, but he didn’t answer. None of them did.
I didn’t care if it was judgmental or sex-negative or whatever. Call me old-fashioned, but a kink dungeon did not seem like the best place for pregnant women.
And everything about those two women screamedcult, more than about anything else in The Circle. The white dresses, the long hair, the flower crowns, their concerningly young features. Did this mean the fathers were here in the VIP section? And who were they?
We entered a large room, where more men who looked like wax statues mingled with beautiful, young, mostly women. I spotted the caviar immediately, along with exotic fruit and other small, luxurious foods.
“Let’s go somewhere more private and discuss,” a man to my left said to a small blonde woman.
