Chapter 8

At exactly 11:56, not that I'd been checking my phone obsessively every three seconds or anything, he knocked on the door of the hotel room. And I knew it was him, because I could sense his magic in every cell of my body, scent him even through the door.

Relief washed over me and weakened my knees. If he'd called my bluff and blown me off, I didn't know what I'd have done.

Actually, I did. Because calling Cunningham, satisfying as it might have been in one way…well, I knew I couldn't and wouldn't do it. The half hour I'd had to wear a track in the hotel room's carpet, pacing and waiting, had been enough to let me think that through.

The fairy—and I simply couldn't bring myself to think of him as Tyler, of all the bullshit—had sounded genuinely afraid on the phone. Not of me, except insofar as I represented a blackmail threat, but of Cunningham. Maybe I'd have been offended by the fairy's lack of respect for the more concrete threat I represented, except that it occurred to me that I'd promised not to hurt him, and he probably considered me still bound by that, fae logic being what it was.

Honestly, it offended me more that he thought I needed a promise to keep me in check. Choking fantasies aside, I'd never be able to bring myself to beat up on someone so much smaller than me, even if he had powerful magic.

Spank him, maybe. My cock twitched. Yeah, I could spank him, possibly even mark up all that perfect white skin by nipping and sucking on him until he squirmed.

But not beat him.

Cunningham might beat him. Or worse. That asshole's reputation didn't give me any confidence in his having a gentlemanly reluctance to abuse his lover.

So my gentlemanly reluctance to land the fairy in the kind of hot water that could get him bruised, battered, or even dead would've meant he got away scot-free.

Thank the gods he'd shown up, and I didn't need to choose between my morals and my pride. I rubbed my hands over my face to scrub away my worry and weakness before I stepped forward to answer the door.

When I wrenched it open, the sight of him standing there froze me in place for a long, suspended moment. And the scent of him, my gods. Light and tart and somehow green like the beginning of spring, soft like a breeze off a warm sea. He'd worn his hair in a ponytail tonight, sleekly pulled back from his face to show off those cut-glass cheekbones and the delicate line of his jaw. He'd worn all black again. His long tunic had another high collar, this one more of a wrapped scarf sort of affair. Tight, shimmery black pants led down into knee-high leather boots.

He blinked at me, long eyelashes sweeping down and then up again, feathery soft, his eyes wide and deep and dark, more enchanting than his magic. If he ever wore eyeliner he'd give me a fucking heart attack. My heart galloped anyway, trying to force its way out of my ribs.

His lips were pressed together in a tight, anxious line, and he raised his eyebrows at me.

Right. I'd been standing here gaping at him like a teenager catching his first glimpse of porn, and with much the same effect below the waist. Hopefully my jeans would camouflage my reaction a little bit.

"Nice of you to show up, Tyler ," I ground out, trying to regain a bit of the upper hand, and stood back to let him in.

Moving farther away from him took conscious effort, as if I had a solid object behind my legs that I had to push through.

He slipped inside like a beam of moonlight, and I shoved the door and let it click itself shut. The fairy stood facing me, biting his lip, hands balled into fists at his sides. The air between us thickened, buzzed, drew me in like quicksand. The hotel room blurred into a halo of cheap lighting and unimportance, a meaningless background to his shining beauty.

I leaned in, my body straining toward his, my breath fast and rough.

"You shouldn't," he whispered. "You'll only make it worse." But he didn't move away from me, and his chest rose and fell as quickly as mine.

Make it worse . That'll wear off, I think .

The buzz faded enough to let me shake my head, shake it off, at least a little bit.

Fuck. I'd been about to—gods dammit. Everything about this was already worse, including my growing suspicion that kissing him had been like the first hit of heroin, and that my longing and my headaches and my mental strain and fog had all been symptoms of withdrawal from his particular brand of heady, intoxicatingly deadly magic.

"That's why you stopped me from sucking you off or eating you out," I said, and it wasn't a question. "Trying to make yourself feel less like a son of a bitch for enchanting me to get me to take your deal, and then again so you could sneak out and steal that coin you supposedly paid me with. And you didn't stop me from kissing you last time. So I'm not that impressed."

"It's not my fault that you kissed me without asking permission!" He spoke too quickly and too breathlessly to be convincing, and I started rethinking the choking thing. I could choke him a tiny bit, couldn't I? Shake some honesty out of him like a stubborn bottle of ketchup? "And licked my neck and my—"

" You told me to do anything I needed to do to get it over with, and you told me it'd probably but not definitely wear off, without even explaining what ‘it' was, and you —"

"—shoulder and my ankle and—"

"—cheated me, stole from me, and lied to me!" I finished in almost a shout, drowning out his list of body parts that I'd supposedly licked. I didn't remember licking his ankle, but whatever.

He crossed his arms over his chest, mouth tightening, and lifted his chin. "I did not lie to you," he said loftily. "I don't directly lie about factual, objective things, although I do occasionally exaggerate when it's a subjective matter that's open to interpretation." Subjective…open to…the sheer, jaw-dropping chutzpah bullshit of that statement had me, well, standing there gaping at him like an idiot. He took advantage of my total gobsmackedness to keep talking. "I can pay you another way, since you seem to have lost the coin. You can do anything you want with me, as long as it doesn't involve your mouth, and if it does, that's your lookout. I've warned you."

It took a moment for all of that to sink in, but…was this what it felt like to be the only sane person in an asylum?

"Lost the coin," I repeated flatly. "Lost. The coin. And so you propose to pay me another way? Let me get this straight, pay me. For fucking you. Which you offered to pay me for. By letting me fuck you?"

My hands flexed at my sides, claws sliding out and all the muscles in my arms going hard and rigid. Everything in the room had taken on a gilded tinge as my alpha glow intensified.

"Ah," he said. "I, ah." He glanced shiftily from side to side, feet shuffling, as if he sought an escape route that he already knew didn't exist. "Ah? Yes? You seemed to enjoy it the first time?"

Enjoy it the first—the golden glow went crimson around the edges as my chest tightened with pure, incandescent rage.

I was going to fucking kill him.

Kill him, or—I lunged, and he cried out and twisted like an acrobat to dodge me, but I seized him inexorably around the waist, jerked him against me, and fused my mouth to his, hard and brutal. My head went light and spinny as the whole world narrowed down to the sweet softness of his lips, the flick of his tongue, my own forcing its way into him. He writhed in my arms and I clamped him tighter, and maybe I'd have come to my senses and let him go.

Except that between one instant and the next, his arms wrapped around my neck and he clung to me, his helpless moan swallowed in my kiss, his body arching up to melt into mine.

If I hadn't needed my mouth to ravage him, I'd have let out a roar of triumph deep and wild enough to bring the whole building's roof down. Instead I yanked him even closer, bending my body over his, shoving a thigh between his legs and half lifting him off the ground.

He squirmed on my knee, riding me, spreading his legs, and that forked tongue curled around mine, and that was it.

We crashed down onto the bed, his hands clawing at my back. One of mine wrapped in his long tail of hair, with the other working under the hem of his shirt and splaying over the softness of his skin.

I tore my mouth away from his and nipped him under his chin. His scarf-like collar was in my way, concealing that throat I needed to bite and lick—

"Don't rip it," he gasped, and shoved at my shoulders. "Don't!"

The frantic note in his voice shocked me out of my single-minded focus on stripping him bare and splitting him open on my cock, reminding me that I was…

Angry. I was also furiously angry, in addition to the surge of pure, bone-searing lust.

"Why not?" I growled, and lifted my head to stare down into his eyes, baring my teeth. "Why the fuck should I care about your fucking clothes? Hmm? Why shouldn't I claw every stitch you're wearing to shreds and leave you here to find your way home in a fucking hotel bedsheet?"

His cheeks, already pink, went cherry-red. They'd be burning hot if I pressed my lips to his skin, and my cock pushed violently against his thigh, seeking his tight wet hole—

And the look in those beautiful eyes was pure, unadulterated terror.

My cock ached with the need to force him open, take him, knot him. But slowly, reluctantly, I pushed up and off of him, bracing myself on my hands to either side of his shoulders, giving him room to breathe.

That was something I needed as much as he did, and I sucked in air, trying to get my heartbeat to slow, grounding myself in mundane sensation: my knees digging into the too-soft mattress, the faint shush of the fan high up in the wall, the cool air on my sweaty skin.

"Explain it to me," I said, as gently as I could manage with my laboring lungs and around my dropped fangs. Smilodons weren't known for their reassuring affects for a reason. "Why shouldn't I?"

His lips pressed together in as flat a line as a mouth that plush could manage. "It doesn't matter. Simply respect my—"

"Absolutely fucking not." If I didn't stay firm, those big, glossy eyes gazing pleadingly up at me would have me caving in seconds. Usually I didn't lean on my alpha magic to get my way. But this time I didn't feel bad about it. "No," I said, and my voice resonated with command. "Answer the question now ."

I'd expected him to react. Possibly with instant obedience, although I hadn't been counting on it, and more likely with annoyance or a few words reluctantly dragged out of him.

Instead, his whole body jerked as he gasped and flinched away from me, his eyelids fluttering, his hands flying off my shoulders to come up in—yeah.

A defensive position, like someone would take when trying to deflect a blow to the face.

If someone had offered to bet me a million dollars at a hundred to one that my desperate lust and offended fury could vanish like magic within the space of a single heartbeat, I'd have taken that bet.

…And I'd have lost.

I stared down at him, both of us frozen in place.

He had an alpha—no, I couldn't think of Cunningham as his lover. Nothing that neutral or benign. Abuser probably fit a whole lot better. And I'd dominated him. Threatened him. Used my alpha magic to try to command and control him. Probably the exact same way Cunningham did before he…

My gut churned and bile stabbed at my esophagus, and I rolled to the side, coming to sit on the edge of the bed next to his dangling legs, scrubbing my hands over my face and breathing through the nausea.

Suspecting that Cunningham might be the kind of man to mistreat someone in his power had been one thing.

Seeing the absolute confirmation of it was something else.

"Jesus motherfucking fuck," I choked out, as my determination to have my revenge and make him pay came crashing down around me and crushed me under the rubble, "fucking Christ."

Had I ever felt this guilty? No, and that included living with the knowledge that a Vegas loan shark might force my parents to lose their home.

A soft rustle to my left suggested the fairy had moved, and then the bed dipped slightly as he sat up, the motion a flicker in my peripheral vision. I didn't turn my head. Meeting his eyes would be more than I could stand; I'd have to see my own behavior reflected in their panicked brightness.

His silence had a breathless, wary weight to it.

As if he were afraid that the wrong word would bring on a burst of violence, maybe.

My working assumption, based on my preexisting experience with and opinions of the fae (generally justified, to be fair), had been that this particular fairy had been wreaking mischief and mayhem on me simply for his own amusement, or possibly for some malicious reason no human-adjacent species could comprehend.

Now…

Well, now it simply didn't matter. There were a few things about him I'd been missing. And those far, far outweighed any damage done to me, even if he had been messing with me for fun.

"I'm not going to call him," I said at last, and dropped my hands to my knees. Looking at him still felt impossible, but I could at least give him a view of my expression. He might trust me more if he could gauge my sincerity. "You have my word. It doesn't bind me the way a promise does you, but I'll keep it. You can get up right now and walk out of here, or do anything you want, and I swear to you, that fucking son of a bitch is never going to hear about any of this from me."

Although I might go and kill the aforementioned fucking son of a bitch, obviously without breaking my promise and telling him why, as soon as the fairy had walked out the door—but that didn't seem like something he needed to hear.

His minute twitch was more than enough to tell me how much I'd surprised him. I half expected that he'd simply get up and leave as I'd offered, but except for that involuntary reaction, he didn't move a muscle. My consciousness of his body next to mine had changed, from pure desire to something more awkward and strained, but it hadn't diminished. All the cells in my body seemed to have oriented themselves in his direction, iron filings chasing a magnet.

His breath came too fast and too shallow, but he still didn't move.

"How did I—how did you—you didn't seem to, to know anything. When I arrived." He paused to suck in an audible breath, blowing it out slowly. "What do you think you know?"

Translation: How had he given himself away?

At last, I gave into temptation and twisted around, shifting my weight and looking him right in the eyes. Those eyes, gods.

I'd grown up in central Washington, with a view of Mount Rainier framed perfectly in my bedroom window. And every damn morning—or about half of them, anyway, given the typical weather—I'd looked outside and had to do a double-take, because the mountain was just so incredibly big that you never got used to it.

His eyes were the same. Every time they caught and held me, every time I really looked at him, it startled me all over again that anyone could be so incredibly beautiful.

"I'll be honest," I said—with a bit of irony, because I knew I was pulling the same bullshit he usually did, answering a question he hadn't asked while ignoring the one he had. "I thought about throttling you, and possibly turning you upside down and shaking you to see if that fucking coin fell out of one of your pockets." That earned me the faintest, palest glimmer of a smile, and my breath caught as I forced myself not to lean in and kiss it off his mouth. "But I really don't understand how anyone, especially anyone like me, someone who's stronger than most—like, where does that even come from, looking at you and wanting to hurt you?"

Those unbelievable eyelashes swept down as he stared at his hands twisting together in his lap, biting his lip. Rosy heat spread over his cheeks again. Shame, probably. Figured. I knew a lot of strippers, and people in our profession didn't tend to attract the nicest guys, so I'd seen this before. Somehow, it was never the assholes who knocked their lovers around who were ashamed of themselves, but the opposite.

The wall heating unit chugged into life, humming and clicking, highlighting the bubble of silence between us.

Not surprisingly, I cracked first, because the suspense of waiting for him to speak had started to build up into a crawling sensation in the back of my neck and a twitching in my fingers, and if I didn't do something , I'd have him flat on his back again.

"I know because you have more tells than a ten-dollar-tournament player, and because I'm smarter than I look."

The fairy glanced up, and all the traces of fear in his face had faded away at last, thank the gods. A small amused smile played around the corners of his mouth.

Shit. I'd really walked into that one.

"Go ahead. Say it," I told him. "It's because—"

"—you couldn't possibly be stupider than you look," he finished for me, his smile widening and mischief starting to spark again in his eyes. "But you know, within the first minute that I saw you, you fell down on stage. My first impression didn't indicate, um, how do I put this?"

"Don't put it at all," I growled. The impulse to place the blame for that fall where it belonged, on the incredibly distracting fairy who'd caused it, rose up strong. Except that no, I didn't want to admit that his scent had been enough to short-circuit my brain and motor functions, right? Instead, I chose to ask him something else I'd been mulling over. "And I know you were fudging the truth when you told me you picked me because I was the first one you noticed. You knew I used The Hammer on stage, which meant you'd already been in the club looking around before I came out, if you heard me get introduced. There were other guys out there and visible before that."

A minute twitch of an eyebrow told me that hit had landed. Not a big tell, that one, but still enough to get him fleeced at a card table. He really didn't belong in Vegas.

"So you chose me while I was dancing," I went on. "Which means you wanted a fucking idiot. So you could cheat me and get away with it. And I really want to know why. What were you doing? What was the point, why me, why this bullshit? I'm not going to go to that motherfucker, and I won't hurt you. So why not just tell me? Since you welshed on our deal. Pay me by telling me the truth."

"The truth?" His smile faded away, and I could've sworn the light in the room dimmed. "You know, according to my own people's rules, I really don't owe you anything. I paid you. And whether or not you believe it, I didn't steal from you."

What? That coin hadn't walked off by itself, that would be…

…That would be…

Part and parcel of an artifact that stank of magic and had been given to me by a fairy.

"It's the coin, isn't it?" I said, as realization finally dawned. "This is all about the coin."