Niniane concentrated on getting her breathing under control. She focused on a mote of drywall dust dancing in the air. She growled, “Now I am going to take a shower. I am going to put on some real clothes, and I am going to calm down. Does anybody on this floor have a freaking problem with that?”
No one replied. Okay, fine. She took that as a no. She nodded to herself and headed for the stairwell.
The leashed lightning that was Tiago shadowed her. She had just stepped into the doorway, when Tiago said, “Just one thing.”
The rich, strong sound of his voice shocked her. She realized he had not spoken aloud since he had appeared. She swiveled.
He stood in the doorway facing Carling. His broad shoulders filled the space. Niniane could just see the outline of his profile. The planes and angles of his face were serrated. He hadn’t sheathed his sword. The tiny hairs at the back of her neck rose as he pointed the tip of the sword at Carling in naked threat. Every one of Carling’s people took a step toward him.
“If you do anything that puts her in danger again, I will burn down your world,” he said. The lightning was in his voice.
Carling’s eyes lit up. She smiled at him and said softly, “You might try.”
Tiago’s savage aggression. Carling’s sinuous deadliness. It was just too scary.
Niniane shouted at both of them, “Oh, for crying out loud!”
She left them to their standoff and stomped down the stairs.
Death prowled behind her. She couldn’t hear him but she knew he was there. She wouldn’t turn around again. She wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of showing him how freaked out she really was.
She reached the next floor down. That stairwell door was guarded by two uniformed police who stood aside as she approached. She smacked the door open with the flat of her hands and stormed down the hall. Last night she had been too sick to notice the number of the suite they had occupied, but it was easy enough to find. It was the only door with another pair of guards, a male and a sandy-haired lanky woman, standing at attention. Their bright smiles at her appearance vanished, and they paled as they looked at what followed in her wake.
She paused in front of the suite door and glared at it because she didn’t have a keycard. The sandy-haired woman opened the door for her. Not trusting herself to speak, Niniane gave the woman a curt nod before she stomped inside.
Then she reached the suite’s living room and came to a stop. Someone had come in to clean while she had been kidnapped. The breakfast dishes had been removed. The table gleamed with polish and a fresh bouquet of flowers. The coffee table was bare of gun parts, Tiago’s canvass duffle set against one wall. She could see the corner of her bed in the other room. It had been neatly made. The second bedroom door was closed. The heavy living room curtains had been drawn to reveal a bright, sunny Chicago day outside. A cerulean sky was dotted with fluffy white clouds.
She pressed her fists against her temples as she struggled with a sense of disorientation. It looked so normal out there in the sunshine, outside of this hotel filled with crazy people. She turned as Tiago entered the room and finally sheathed his sword. He unstrapped the scabbard and laid it on the table. Then he removed one of the shoulder holsters and put that on the table too.
The cataclysm that had consumed his expression had vanished as if it had never existed. His face had become a smooth blank.
Had he calmed down already? How did he do that? She hadn’t calmed down, not in the slightest.
Then he looked at her.
No. He wasn’t calm at all. The cataclysm still raged inside him.
Her breathing grew ragged and her mouth shook. Something breakable uncurled inside her, causing her to open up her arms to him. For the space of a single heartbeat she pleaded with him in silence. Please don’t reject this. Don’t turn away from me.
Tiago took the short distance toward her in a lunge. He snatched her up. She wrapped her arms around his neck and clung tight as he held her in a grip that threatened to cut off her air supply. His dark head lowered, and he buried his face in the crook of her neck.
She cupped his head with a hand, stroked his short hair and murmured to him. She hardly paid attention to what she said. The words didn’t matter. “I know. I’m sorry. I was scared too. I was so scared. Thank you for coming after me. Thank you so much for finding me.”
He sank to the floor and sat on his heels, bringing her down with him until she straddled his lap. He rocked her, savoring with desperate focus all the sensual evidence of her, the weight of her body and shape of her graceful, delicate bones, her arms holding on to him as tightly as he held on to her, the touch of those small, gentle fingers.
When Niniane had disappeared, he had gone to a place he had never been to before.
He had panicked.
He reassembled his guns in seconds. He informed Cameron so she could mobilize police and call in a forensic witch to analyze the Power in the bedroom before it could fully dissipate. He called New York. Then he strapped on his guns and his sword and came to a complete standstill, because he did not have a clue how to track Niniane through the maelstrom of energy that had taken her.
She had vanished into thin air. She was just gone. The horror of it, the wrongness, had opened up a black hole inside of him that sucked away everything else—any sense of decency or perspective or moral compass—it all vanished until what had been left behind was a howling beast that would savage anyone or anything that got in its way.
Desperation drove him up to Carling’s floor, which had turned out to be a stroke of sheer dumb fucking luck. He hadn’t been capable or clever. He went to ask Carling to help him track Niniane down. He had been prepared to do something he had never done before. He had been ready to beg. Then he caught a whiff of Niniane’s delicate fragrance in a place where it should not have been, and the beast consumed him.
If Niniane became endangered again, he might do more than just burn down Carling’s world. He was a destroyer by nature. As the Wyr warlord, he could channel that violence in controlled, targeted ways that achieved a great deal of good.
The beast inside him was an entirely different matter. Unleashed, it might engage in wholesale slaughter.
And the beast wouldn’t care.
“It’s okay,” he whispered. Even he didn’t know who he was trying to reassure, himself or her. His lips moved against her fragile skin. “It’s okay now.”
She nodded, her cheek pressed against his. His heartbeat pounded against her breastbone. He was more than twice her size. He was as big as a moose, and as he was wrapped around her, he felt exactly like the right size. He felt like home.
I’m in so much trouble.
She froze. Wait. Did I just say that out loud?
“What do you mean?” Tiago said. He ran his big hands up and down her back. “What kind of trouble are you in? What happened?”
“What happened isn’t my fault,” she sniffled. “I’m just sayin’.”
He raised his head and frowned at her. The raw, bruised look had not quite left his eyes. She had never seen him look like that before. She put her forefinger to the deep line between his brows and tried to smooth it away. He pressed his lips to her palm. The exchange did nothing to sway his attention from other things. He said, “How did you disappear, and why do you feel and smell like Carling’s Power?”
“Actually,” she muttered, “it’s not so much what she did to me, as it is what she did to you. She has a Djinn who is indebted to her. He owes her three favors, or he did—he’s now down to two. She had him transport me from the bedroom up to her suite. She said it was to teach you a lesson.”