Not right now. Right now, the drug was bad enough to mess with her system. She didn’t need him to add to it.
Covering her with the blanket in the hotel room above the club, a place he knew like the back of his hand thanks to his own past, he was on the move, able to see through the pitch black thanks to his night-vision glasses. The darkness was for her, to shield her from the cameras, their audios disabled. With the way the room was locked and darkened, no one would dare to come in, not unless they wanted to risk facing him.
And no one in this world in their right minds wanted to face the Shadow Man in the dark.
Touching her cheek with his gloved hand, his mouth and chin wet from her, her taste etched on his tongue and his memory, he let the neurons in his brain register the rush they were feeling.
She had spoken to him, to warn him, to save him. Despite all her anger and hurt, she cared for him. Soft-hearted little fool, but his fool. She was rare, the fire of life, of warmth. He didn’t understand emotions, but he understood science. Something happened chemically in his brain and his body where she was concerned. He looked at her, heard her, and felt sensations in his system. It was the oddest response, one he had extensively researched, only to realize it was some form of synesthesia and it didn’t have a rational explanation in all cases. The wires in his brain were simply crossed, and they simply electrified when crossed with hers, and that was something he knew already.
Leaving her in the aftermath of her intense drug-induced episode, he walked to the door and looked out the peephole. Three men with guns waiting for him, as expected. Idiots.
Taking steps back into the room, he checked the feed on his phone before pushing it into his pocket, and headed for the window. Wedging it open easily, he jumped on the ledge, the adrenaline rushing to his body at the height. He liked heights. It reminded him of the home he would take her to one day.
Holding the upper edges of the window, he jumped onto the pipe that ran on the side of the building, his trained muscles working with memory, and began to climb up, one foot on the window edges, another on the pipe, glad that he’d worn his athletic workout gear. That had been more incidental than deliberate though. He had seen the feed from her room coming online, and known within seconds it was a trap for him and she was the bait.
They didn’t know she wasn’t the bait he would bite, she was the prize he had already won in this bloody game—he just had to claim the winning.
But he realized a message, a louder message, needed to be sent.
Coming to a stop on the window five stories above where she was, he looked in and saw it occupied with Howard and two girls, both of them sucking on his cock as he lay in bed, grinning with the mouth he had put on his girl.
The other man was going to regret that.
With the stealth of a cat, years of martial arts and parkour training kicking in automatically, he swung himself to hang from one hand until his other got a solid grip on the windowsill. Holding himself steady, checking to see all occupants of the room were distracted, he slowly opened the window and jumped in noiselessly, immediately ducking behind a giant couch on one side.
“Blasted window,” he heard Howard mutter. “Doll, go shut it.”
He stayed still as one of the girls closed the window and turned back, just as a knock sounded on the door. Someone, he assumed the girl, opened it.
“What’s the status?” Howard asked, the sound of sucking resuming.
“The room has been quiet for a few hours. Dark too. We don’t have visual.”
“You think he’s come yet?”
“Doubt it. The entrances are monitored. We’re on high alert.”
Their security was laughable. He wondered if the Syndicate knew how terrible the operations were on ground level or if they even cared.
The noise of Howard’s grunt came, followed by the rustling of the girls scrambling up and leaving.
“Keep an eye on her room. If he doesn’t show up by dawn, kill the girl.”
A burn began at the base of his spine at the words.
Any normal man would’ve felt anger perhaps, or even lust for revenge. He felt neither. In his head, it was a simple equation that had been messed with. Emotion didn’t fit into that; it didn’t need to. Was that psychotic? Maybe. But he had never pretended to be anything else than the devil he was.
A few minutes later, the door shut, and he heard the other man settling down in his bed, the lights going out.
Shadows formed over the room, and that’s when he took over.
Straightening from his crouch, he walked on silent feet to the bed, watching the out-of-shape shirtless man slumbering. The man was a spineless coward on a power trip. Having the meeting with him at the housing complex alone had made him realize that.