Page 39 of Lair

The Easterner’s lips curl in amusement. Adrian glows with blatant pride. The jaw of Anatoly’s sex toy hangs.

Anatoly takes a small evaluative sip, eyes never leaving me, and smiles. “My, my,” he breathes. “She’s a hotblooded one, isn’t she?” He flicks a look at Adrian. “Perhaps she should join us below?”

But Adrian’s face slackens at this, as if devastated by some dire news. “I thought we weren’t retiring to the staterooms until later—”

There’s a malicious gleam in Anatoly’s eye as he shrugs. “Why wait for the fun to start?”

What fun? What the hell are they talking about?

But Adrian, it seems, is fine with excluding me. He shakes his head. “I think not.”

A small, hard hurt throbs in my chest, but I ignore it. “Actually, I’d like to—”

“No.”

The cold finality in his voice turns heads, but Adrian carefully avoids everyone’s gaze, sitting white-knuckled in his chair. He is cool, composed, deliberate. “You’ve had a long day,” he explains with no feeling whatsoever. “You need your sleep.”

My stomach folds in half. “Adrian, what is—”

“What did I just say?”

The ferocity leaves the room humming with a deadly silence. The businessmen look between Adrian and I with sly interest and suspicion. The women stare—unsure, jealous, gleeful.

Then Adrian stands, buttoning his coat over his lean, muscled frame. “Shall we?” And he turns away.

All glide after, Anatoly giving me one last, intrigued appraisal, the girls’ perfect faces contorted in scorn. As they head for the cabins, one of them trails painted nails down Adrian’s back.

To think, I looked good tonight.

A touch on my shoulder—Mrs. Colding, perhaps Thea—but I flinch away. I need to get out. I need air. I stumble out onto the aft deck and breathe in the night, the moon huge and glowy above me. I grip the rails to fight the feeling of my life falling backwards—back to a time when Josh would avoid admitting to others I was his girlfriend. When my feelings were framed as a burden. When he would cross a room as I huddled in the corner and snap at me, “Pull yourself together,” as if he hadn’t been the one, all along, to pull me apart.

You’ll never do better than me.

No. That’s not him. That’s not Adrian. I know him better than that. There’s something else going on here.

To hell with this.

I pound down stairs and passageways to the cabins on the main deck. Slipping off my flats, I tiptoe—a soft-footed and determined voyeur—to the red-stained doors of Voper’s suite. The sight, unaccountably, stops me cold. Something is happening to me. A raising of the hairs on my arms, a tightening in the throat, that tells me I am in the grip of a swift and unreasonable suspicion.

But of what, I don’t know.

I do know, though. I do know. It’s the dread of the witness, the feeling that I am about to see something I will never be able to unsee.

No. Push this aside. This has no use for you right now.

So I take the step forward. I raise my hand, and do what I must do: I open the door to the room that must not be entered.

TWENTY-ONE

Adrian Voper’s suite is impossibly immense, with no windows to be seen in that gloom. The redness of the doors continues inside: brutally expressionistic red canvases on the walls, vases of roses, an enormous bed with crimson silk covers. Those covers are all tangled up. Tangled up and moving.

For there are bodies in the bed. Pasty white forms that must be the businessmen, their flesh slightly loose and sagging on the bone, flesh that hasn’t seen the light of day in years. They are bent over the women, whose heads are flung back and twisted to the side, as if struck down by some natural disaster. They hold them down, the men, long fingers splayed wide as bat wings over innocent-looking mounds of breasts, and place their mouths to young skin. From my crack in the door, it can’t be seen what they’re doing, but whatever it is must be effective—legs slowly writhe in the sheets, accompanied by low, delirious moans. There is the sound of sucking, like a kitten lapping cream.

Suddenly, Adrian Voper’s dark eye is blinking back at me through the crack in the door.

I don’t even have time to jump in fright. Before I know it, he’s through the door and it’s shut fast behind him. He is, I note, fully clothed. “What are you doing?” he snarls. “Only Mrs. Colding is allowed in here. Why aren’t you in your room?”

I open my mouth to speak—but nothing comes out. He’s quite a sight when he’s like this: all glittery black eyes and a tensing jaw, his perfect posture pronounced by shoulder muscles ridged up in anger. His terrifying exquisiteness makes me swallow.

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