Page 6 of Little Blue

A hand lands on the small of my back. It’s big, and warm, and powerful. I feel it everywhere and have to fight my answering gasp as my eyes snap to the wolf who observes me.

“What do you need?” he asks.

I shake my head. His touch is muddling my thoughts, but I manage to reply, “I didn’t pay.”

“It’s taken care of.”

“By whom?” I demand, and when he says nothing, it clicks. I gape. “You?”

When he nods once, I sit and begin to rummage through my small purse. Plucking one of the tokens from inside, I slide it to him. I’m pretty sure I see amusement in his eyes as they hold my own, then he places his own bet on the table. The croupier does his thing, and I watch as, as usual, I lose.

“Thank you.” I offer a small, wobbly smile to the croupier, who nods apologetically. Then, I stand and face the man who won, even though his bet was just as risky. His suit is top tier, though I don’t know brands well enough to call out the one he wears, and his shoes shine in a way that only new shoes can.

He's clean, his body perfectly honed. Everything about him screams wealth and power—and yet as fate would have it—he won.

The rich always get richer. It’s the way of this very fucked-up world.

“It was—interesting speaking with you.” I keep my tone respectful and cool. “Congratulations on your win.”

Even though I’m parched, I ignore the drink on the table and walk away. It’s ten-thirty anyway, and I miss Lucy.

Two

Ilya

Misha steps closer when the little beauty in blue walks away from me, as though she has every right. It’s a rare thing to find someone brave enough to turn their back on me. If it weren’t for the quick flutter of her pulse under her creamy skin, the violent rise and fall of her luscious breasts with every tremble of breath she dared to breathe, I’d think she was one of those who simply lacked the innate awareness of when they stood in the presence of a true predator.

Most people froze in my presence. As though they thought if they ran, they’d tempt the thing within me that yearned to chase, to maim, and claim. She’d tensed at first, frozen in the same instinctual fear that paralyzes so many. Then, defiance flashed in those lovely, intriguingly sad blue eyes.

She’d been afraid of me. I know, because I could scent it. It dripped from her pores like saccharine honey after the comb has been ripped viciously from the hive. Addictive and sticky sweet.

Still, sensing that she’d encountered a true predator, she’d didn’t cow. She didn’t buckle under the weight of my glacial stare. She didn’t wait for the dismissal I always gave when my prey refused to give the chase I craved, before she dismissed me.

Color me intrigued, Little Blue. Something you should have known better than to do.

“That was interesting,” Misha observes, and even though I’ve yet to tear my eyes off the temptress in the blue silk dress as she weaves through slot machines in her desperation to escape this place—me—and I think, people in general, I agree with a silent nod. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone brave enough to walk away from you before you’re done with them.”

Little Blue slips around a corner, toward the entrance doors. I snap my gaze to Misha. He’s one of very few people who don’t flinch when I fix my eyes on him.

More than once, in the hopeless confessions that drip with agony, and hunger for the bliss of death, I’ve been told that my eyes are soulless. My mother believes one can see into the soul through the portal of the eyes. I’ve confirmed this with every soul I’ve claimed, over, and over again, as I dip my hands beneath skin, through flesh and muscle, past bone and cartilage, to the ticking bomb every living thing houses within the vessel their souls possess.

I’ve come to believe there is a glitch in my portal. Or perhaps the rumor is true, and I’m nothing but a void. A vessel of death and torment wreaking havoc upon the most depraved of this world, taking pleasure in the way they beg, the tears they cry, the mercy they think they’ll be granted. Mercy they never deigned to give in the ends they delivered.

Hypocritical.

A delusion I do not share for myself.

I have no doubt that when my time comes, my body will go in the pinnacle of torment. That light that lives in the eyes of everyone I’ve ever crossed—that shimmer that dims when the time bomb explodes—that is where I differ.

Because when I look in the mirror, that light is missing.

It's that missing light, that dullness behind the brilliantly sharp blue of my irises, that makes people uncomfortable. That makes them squirm.

The reason I’m known in the criminal underworld as Ilya Volkov, The Void.

I turn to my oldest friend and chosen brother. The corner of Misha’s lip lifts. Many men have been punished for far less. “I want everything there is to know about her on my desk by Monday morning.”

That fucking grin widens. “We’re not flying home Monday morning?”

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