He wasn’t the best-looking man she had seen. No, she had seen many, many more beautiful men. But he was, without a doubt, the most dangerous-looking. Maybe it was the way his jaw was carved, shadowed with a dark scruff that seemed to perpetually be the same length. Or maybe it was his frame—tall, wide, muscled in the sleek way of a combative panther. Or maybe it was the stillness, his sheer ability to lock and focus on something so intently it made him feel like a weapon of death. Or maybe, it was those eyes—one utter black, the other an odd combination of green and gold—hypnotic, ensnaring, lethal, a duality of death and afterlife within one gaze.
Maybe it was none of those things. Maybe it was just the fact that she had seen him murder people without an iota of emotion for so long, she just associated danger with him.
The reason she knew he was rich, however, was simply because there was no way he could have the access to the clubs and every other part of this seedy underworld that he did unless he had money. Only two kinds of people had that access—slaves or buyers, and he was the farthest thing from a slave she’d ever seen. Though she didn’t know if he was a buyer, if he had his own sex slave or a harem of them serving his every need.
The idea left a rotten taste in her mouth. With everything he did on the side while also stalking her, she wondered if he got the time. And why he did what he did, why no one knew him, or who he was outside of it, she didn’t know. She didn’t know a thing about him despite knowing him for years, and despite being one of the only people to have seen his face.
Feeling older than her twenty-four years, tired to the bone of simply breathing, she kept her face steady, breaking their gazes and looking into the water.
“Eyes.”
The slow, deliberate command of a word speared through her body. She clenched her jaw, not understanding what he was doing here, and why he was speaking to her when he had never said what she wanted to hear.
“I won’t ask again.”
Something in the tone of his voice, like an underside of a blade, cut through her confusion, making the small part inside her that knew he was dangerous instinctively react. It reminded her of the handler she’d had when she’d been fourteen, training her in the art of obedience for the right man. She had learned, not through obedience but through fear.
She turned her neck to look at him again, her gaze locking with his devilish mismatched eyes, waiting, a sliver of fear in her body lingering after the memory of her adolescent training.
He tilted his head to the side. “Afraid of me, flamma?”
The knuckles on her hands turned white with her grip. No, she wasn’t afraid of him. Or maybe she was. He elicited vastly different responses in her.
“Won’t you give me your voice? Even if I give you your answer?”
The question was soft, but effective enough to make her heart begin to thud. Would he answer her? Or was he toying with her? From the look on his face, she couldn’t tell.
“Will you?” she finally gave in, speaking to him for the first time in months, swallowing as the man with her answers stood still against the wall.
“One day.”
Bitter disappointment crashed into her, followed on its heels by rage, her words falling from her lips in a barrage she had been keeping in for so long. “You’re worse than these monsters. You dangle hope and take it away every single time.” She turned her face, her lips quivering, hating the ease at which she cried, the ease with which she felt. “Stay away from me. I want nothing to do with you.”
He stayed still beside the sink, leaning against the wall, casual but alert, his devilish gaze steady on her as she resumed her silence.
“They will be here in a few minutes,” he told her, shifting topics at her continued, deliberate silence.
She already knew that. That wasn’t news.
“I want you to tell them what happened.” He straightened from the wall he’d been leaning against as he spoke. “Tell them the Shadow Man was here.”
Why?
She almost asked but bit her tongue, her gaze wary as she looked at the man almost the entire underworld was terrified of, and for good reason. His entire expression stayed neutral the way it mostly did, but his eyes gleamed. He didn’t answer her silent question, refusing to acknowledge it just like she refused to voice it.
She watched as his hand went to his inner jacket pocket, bringing out a black eternal rose, putting it on the counter beside the sink. “If I stay away from you, you’ll miss me, flamma.”
Fuck him.
She wanted to ask him why he left those for her, why that specific rose, why specifically after a kill. She had fifteen of them now, an entire bouquet worth that she kept hidden in a box lest someone steal it. As twisted as it was, they were the only gift she had ever received, and she was possessive of them, along with the clothes he brought her every time.