High Voltage (Fever #10)(109)

I toss my hair from my eyes and scowl up. Then, “Lor!” I exclaim, delighted to see him.

He stares at me in utter disbelief. “Dani?”

“Mega in the flesh,” I flash him a hundred-Megawatt grin to prove it. “I’m back. And you are so never going to believe the things I’ve seen and done.”

Then Fade and Kasteo are there with him, all three of them staring at me, with a mixture of irritation and disbelief.

“What’s with you guys? I told him I’d be back.”

“The boss,” Lor says flatly. “You told him that.”

I nod. “I sent him a message.”

“He sure as fuck doesn’t think you’re coming back,” Fade growls. “And I’m sure as fuck glad you are because he’s been goddamn impossible to live with. Go fuck him and make him sane again.” He turns and stalks away.

To Lor, I say, “He thought I wasn’t—wait, I don’t understand.”

“Just go to him, honey,” Lor says. “He’s in his suite. Never comes up. Spends most of his time as the beast. Ain’t eating, ain’t sleeping, ain’t fucking, and it’s getting ugly around here.”

    I surge to my feet before he even finishes speaking, lope up the stairs, taking them three at a time, dash onto an elevator and tap my foot impatiently as it descends. How could he not know I was coming back? I don’t believe Y’rill would lie to me. I frown, remembering her exact words: I adjusted it so he would receive it at the proper time. Okay, so what was the mysterious being’s idea of “the proper time”?

When the door whisks aside, I explode from the elevator, freeze-frame down the hall, and blast through the door into the anteroom of Ryodan’s suite.

It’s still trashed. He never cleaned it up. Broken glass crunches beneath my heels as I stalk to the hidden panel that conceals the doorway to his true suite and push it open.

As I step into the room, I inhale sharply. This room, too, is trashed, every piece of furniture demolished. Savage claw marks scar the paneled walls, the chandeliers are torn from the ceiling, wires dangling, exposed, crystal splinters glistening on the floor. The bed is a collapsed jumble of wood, with slashed velvet pillows, shredded linens, pulverized mattress.

I narrow my eyes, letting them adjust to the gloom. He’s here, I can smell him; that spicy, darkly exotic scent that always clings to his skin, animalistic, druggingly masculine, blatantly sexual. I can feel him, every nerve ending in my body electrified by his presence.

There’s more in this room. Rage. Fury. Grief. It’s embedded in every demolished item, gouged into each panel, carved in deep gashes across the floor.

He grieved me. Believed I was never coming back. But why?

All my senses are cranked up to full volume. This is my night. My choice, my long-denied, deepest desire, and I feel achingly, incredibly alive. I hear him inhale, as if questing the air, catching my scent. Then a rough laugh floats from the shadows near the fire where he sits in a tall armchair.

    “Not again,” he says, with a rasp of agony in his voice.

I wince. I know the power and persuasion of hallucination. I lived it in my cage. I’d wake from a tortured slumber smelling food, certain Mom had come home and I was going to open my eyes to a heaping bowl of my favorite creamed corn, topped with a crispy helping of fried chicken and green beans only to find there was nothing there for me to gnaw on but my own knuckles.

Again.

I knew the despair of the moment the brain processed the deceit, that hope crumbled to ash. That the thing you wanted so desperately wasn’t there, and maybe never would be again.

He smells me and thinks I’m a dream.

I intend to fulfill every one of his wildest ones tonight.

I step carefully into the room, skirting bits of debris and broken glass, trying to decide what to say, how to convince him I’m real. Some of my hallucinations had been so extreme they’d nearly unhinged me. I’d actually eaten imaginary meals. Starvation messes with your head. Sustained deprivation of anything you desperately need does.

He desperately needed me. I like that. I feel the same about him. I decide the best approach is to simply touch him. Let our bodies do the talking.

As I skirt the shattered coffee table and approach his high-backed armchair, I inhale sharply, butterflies fluttering from my stomach to my throat. I’m…nervous? No. I’m exhilarated. Okay…a little nervous and have no bloody idea why. Just that this man has always rattled me.

    God, this is it! He’s here, I’m here, my skin is flawless ivory, we’re free to be together, to be everything I’ve ever hungered to be with him. I know I’m real; yet even I almost can’t believe this moment has come. I’d thought it would never happen. That I’d lost us forever.

Still, I was quickly disabused of my grief. He’s been grieving me for months.

I clear his chair and circle to stand in front of him.

He tips his head back and stares at me with narrowed silver eyes, stained with crimson streaks. “I’m getting better at this,” he mocks. “Christ, you look so fucking real. So fucking sexy in that dress.” His gaze rakes me from head to toe, heat floods my body, fire ignites in my blood. “I never told you. You define beauty for me, Dani O’Malley. Copper flames and emerald ice. The snow and rose of your skin. Those insanely powerful legs. The steel in your spine. The unquenchable fire in your spirit.”