Page 36 of Stalked By Seduction and Shadows

Motherfucker.

I could’ve sworn I heard the ghost of his chuckle somewhere in the tangle of mortals and vampires—all of them reaching, groaning, touching, sucking.

“So? Am I hired?”

“Yes, Scarlett. You’re hired,” Seraph said with an eye roll and a grunt.

Snow squealed and gave me a high-five, and I didn’t understand why her display of genuine joy made me deeply uncomfortable.

It felt fake, even though I had not a shred of evidence to back that up. Why was she happy for me? Didn’t she understand that I was only ever going to cut into her own earnings? Eventually she’d learn to hate me, just like Isabella had. Maybe until then, I could pretend—that I had a friend, that I belonged.

When we stepped out of the club together, it was early morning. The streets sparkled, and my head was still swimming with the collective energy of the patronage.

This job was a means to an end. It was going to help me rescue my sister.

But not even my sister’s scolding voice in my mind could stop the building euphoria in my chest, the kind that made me want to lay under the stars and sing.

Odessa had made me feel powerful. It challenged me, stimulated me in a way that I didn’t know was possible. It was like playing several simultaneous chess matches, flitting from board to board and bringing each king to his knees one by one.

There was just one game that had stumped me tonight, one king that hadn’t fallen. Not even close.

Worse still, I feared it was I who was vulnerable, in a way that was far more sinister than demanding drunks and entitled, handsy players.

Rune made me feel like we’d left the board entirely and entered a game of his own making. And while nothing had ever been more terrifying, neither had anything ripped through me so intensely, burrowed so sneakily inside the deepest crevices of my mind.

19

RUNE

At first, I thought I’d been hallucinating when I saw Scarlett standing there in that sinful, unlawful little red dress. It had taken every ounce of my restraint not to drag her by the hair into my study and interrogate her.

She shouldn’t have been here. Not in Aristelle. And sure as fuck not in Odessa.

But I had to hire her, because it was better she worked here under my watch than anywhere else, especially not in one of Durian’s clubs. The thought of that alone nearly made me explode into a cyclone of shadows and death.

This woman had been sent to destroy me, if not by my enemies than by Lillian herself. It was far too magnitudinous of a coincidence that I’d stumbled upon her in Crescent Haven, of all places, and then she’d found her way into my club in Aristelle.

Granted, this was the biggest club in the city, and she did have experience as a server.

But her presence here felt cosmic, fated, celestial.

Sinister, deceptive, planted.

Why?

What was the truth?

Did the scouts convince her after all? Her shifter friend was nowhere to be seen. Maybe they got in a fight, and she changed course. That was my running theory, besides my hunch that Lillian was finally reaching up from the underworld to punch me in the balls for bastardizing vampirism.

When a tendril of my shadows had escaped to stroke her cheek, I had to carefully hide the shudder of pleasure that shook me to my core. It had been a desperate act of self-preservation to drag myself down into the lower level for several hours. Then it was an act of utter helplessness to climb back up again, caught in her electrifying pull.

She was the brightest thing in this club, this city, this island, and beyond. When I was near her, I remembered what it felt like to face my own death. She’d roused me from the longest, deepest slumber, painting my world in color again after centuries in the shadows.

Seeing her small body shake as she faced down a table of born vampires drew me to her without a single thought. It was dangerous how easily I moved on impulse with this woman—it was perilous for me, for her, and the whole city too.

When I’d met the eyes of the born men, I was at least mindful enough to mask my fury with cold disinterest and a reasonable amount of disdain.

They couldn’t know I’d pulled Scarlett away from them because I was horribly, irreversibly, fucking insatiably obsessed with her. The born couldn’t know her as anything more than one of Odessa’s human servers. Even then, I worried her maddening allure would pull them all into her orbit sooner or later. Even the human scouts had been enthralled.

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