Page 94 of Silk and Sirens

“Doc?” Groaning, I sat up. My body felt like it had gone one-on-one with a truck and lost. Dragging a hand down my face, I pulled it back to see my palm smeared with black.

“What the fuck happened?”

“It’s activated charcoal,” Arabella said calmly, stepping forward to take Sebastian’s place on the edge of the bed. “It helps absorb any GHB still in your stomach.”

My head snapped towards her, eyes narrowing into slits. “Did you just say G?”

Sebastian crossed his arms, watching me carefully. “Your wine was drugged. How much do you remember?”

My mind was sluggish, but I remembered. “I was on that fucking date with Vivienne Blackwater.” The words tasted like ash.

“Did you leave the table at any point?” he asked.

Shit.

“Yeah.” I’d been with Aeris … long enough for Vivienne to spike my drink. “Where did you find me?”

Sebastian and Ara shared a look.

I’d never thought a man like me could be fucking spiked, a mistake I wouldn’t make again.

“Bas,” I growled. “Where. Did. You. Find. Me?”

A muscle ticked in his jaw. “In a hotel room, pretty much naked and unconscious.”

White-hot rage exploded through me, burning away the fog in my head. I swung my legs off the bed, ignoring the way the room spun. My gaze caught my reflection in the mirror across the room, my chest bare and streaked with black vomit from the charcoal they’d clearly forced down me.

The humiliation was fucking searing.

I was going to rip Vivienne’s spine out through her throat.

“Where’s Lang?” I stood slowly, fury coiling tight in my muscles.

“He’s with Aeris in the other room.”

My gaze snapped to his, a strange, vicious panic slicing straight through the rage. “Why is he with Aeris?”

Sebastian watched me carefully. “She’s the one who called us.”

“He hurt her?”

“You’ll have to ask him that.” Sebastian studied me carefully. “But her life is forfeit after last night.”

“You don’t touch her.” My jaw tightened as I said it.

“She needs to be taken out,” he replied evenly. “We’re close enough to the endgame that she’s becoming more of a liability than an asset.”

“Don’t test me, Bas,” I warned. “No one fucking touches her but me.”

“What are you going to do?” he asked dryly. “Keep her around like some dangerous little pet?”

“Isn’t that exactly what you did with Ara?”

“I’m right here,” Arabella said dryly.

“Don’t bring my wife into this,” Sebastian growled, though there was more amusement than anger behind it. “Ara was never an assassin blackmailing us.”

“No one touches her,” I said, leaving no room for argument.