“Seriously! Ask Rosa, she had her face pressed to the door the entire time.”
He turns his head toward the kitchen door and bellows for the housekeeper. When the wooden panel immediately swings open, I know she was standing on the other side, awaiting her inevitable summons.
“Is it true?” Xaine asks, like he doesn’t even have to explain what he means.
“It’s true,” Rosa says with a nod. “She didn’t touch. He didn’t touch.” Then, as if Xaine had personally solicited her opinion, she adds, “I think he’s gay, anyway.”
With the wave of a hand, Xaine shoos her back into the other room and the housekeeper disappears from sight. In the meantime, I stand there smirking as Xaine glares down into my face.
“So what were you up to before he turned up?”
Digging into my pocket, I pull out the thumb drive. “New song.”
He cracks a grin. “Oh, really?”
When he reaches for it, I pull it just out of range. “You forgot to say the magic word.”
In return, he gives me the full-fang smile. “Las Vegas.”
“That’s two words,” I say, but then my brain sputters to a halt. “Wait, what?”
Taking advantage of my utter bewilderment, he plucks the thumb drive out of my hand and nudges me toward the stairs. “We’re going to Vegas. I’ll listen to this on the plane. We need to pack, because we’ve only got like an hour.”
“I am not going to Vegas.”
“Yes, you are. We’re piggybacking the release of the new single on top of the PR I have going for playing Batman. Big red carpet event, the whole nine yards. It’s going to be huge, Lore.” He jabs playfully at my ribs. “You and me? We’re the hottest thing in this town right now, and you’re not even out there to see it. You need to see it.”
“I can’t go to Vegas, Xaine.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Everything I’ve been chasing after is right here. Jess is here, too. I need to stay close in case—”
“Fuck Jess, and fuck Asher.” Xaine scowls, his glee replaced by frustration. “Fuck Cas Declan and Jax Trace, too, while we’re at it, because none of those assholes matter right now. This is your chance, Lore. Your golden opportunity to do something with your life that doesn’t have anything to do with what happened in the past. Stop looking back.” His hand slips across my shoulder, fingers skimming up my neck until he’s cradling my jaw in his palm. Pissed and indignant on my behalf, he adds, “There’s nothing left behind you, Lore. It’s time to look ahead.”
It tears me up a little, breaks my heart a bit more, and leaves me feeling the tiniest bit hollow inside. “I don’t think a trip to Vegas is the answer.”
“Why not?” he demands. “Are you afraid I’m going to knock you over the head and drag you off to a twenty-four-seven wedding chapel?”
I can actually feel my eyes go wide with horror. “Well, I wasn’t, but I am now!”
An expression flashes across Xaine’s face that looks an awful lot like hurt, but it’s gone as quickly as it appeared, leaving that all-too-familiar arrogant smirk in its wake. I can feel the tension building between us, palpable and thick. He’s standing so close to me that my heart begins to skip, thudding hard in my chest as my anxiety builds.
“Do you trust me?”
Now there’s a question for the ages, and I teeter on the edge of something that threatens to undo the balance we’ve achieved this last week. Somehow, it feels like everything… everything… hinges on my answer. Xaine looks at me, those crazy-blue eyes of his latched on my face. I didn’t come to Los Angeles with the expectation that I’d end up with him, but one crazy random happenstance after another and here I am, standing so close to my rock star fantasy that it steals my breath.
It’s weird, being this close. Different, because I know him now.
Different, because I care.
“Yes,” I whisper. “I do.”
Xaine’s pleased expression morphs into something wholly wicked. “Then come to Vegas, sweetheart. I promise you won’t regret it.”
I draw in a breath and hold it, eying him with suspicion. It’s now or never. Time to jump without a net or spend the rest of my life wondering what the fall would have been like.
“Okay.” When Xaine grins, fangy and altogether pleased with himself, I stick a finger up between us and poke him in the chest. “No funny business in Vegas. I mean it. I won’t marry you.”
“Don’t recall asking,” he says. “But would it really be so bad?”
I can’t help the squeeze of pain in my chest that rises into my throat. I don’t want to talk about this with him. Don’t want to talk about it ever again. I can only live one day at a time. When it comes right down to it, Xaine’s lifespan is forever. And mine?
Considerably less than forever.
“Never mind, don’t answer that,” he says. “The Apocalypse jet will be ready in an hour, so you need to pack your shit before I mount you on my dick like a hood ornament and carry you to the airport.”
“Charming,” I say, following him up the stairs. “You’re a prince among men.”
“Damn straight.” He pauses at the door to the master bedroom. “And don’t you forget it.”
“Somehow, I doubt you’d let me.”
He turns, eying the messy, dark cavern that is the master suite. The shades are drawn, and there are clothes, sheets, pillows and the like strewn everywhere. The odd-man-out in the tableau is the set of pink luggage in the corner, and Xaine stares at those bags now like they’re some sort of blight on the junk skyline.
“You know,” he grumbles. “You can unpack your stuff.”
“You just told me to pack it,” I point out. “Why would I unpack it?”
“No, I mean, you could have unpacked it before now.”
“I know.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t.” I give him a sidelong glance, but Xaine’s eyes are fixed on the pink suitcases in the corner. He broods, considering those bags like he wants to kick one for the pure joy of breaking a toe on it. Not that he’d actually break a toe, but I get the feeling punting one of them would help ease the furrows in his forehead.
“Doesn’t matter,” he says eventually. “That just means we have time for a quickie.”
Xaine reels me in, tugging my arm until I fold against him. Graceful as a dance, he slides one hand along my arm, the other around my waist until we’re cheek-to-cheek. I laugh out loud when he bends me backward, dipping me low. There’s a pause then, a moment when he just watches me, his eyes alight with affection.
“You don’t laugh as much as you should,” he observes. “You smile. Lopsided ones, crooked like your twisted, crazy brain… but you don’t laugh as much.”
“Word on the street is that rock stars are a very serious bunch,” I tell him.
“Serious as a heart attack,” he says. “And seriously? You smell good enough to eat. Pun intended, everywhere.”
That pulls another light chuckle out of me. “What? No skunk spray times a hundred and douche?”
“You think I’m joking,” he says, walking me slowly backwards, “but all I can smell right now is the lingering stench of eau de record executive windbag. I may need to cleanse my palate.”
Two seconds later, my shirt is off and the hot press of his tongue tickles over my ribs, leaving a wet trail behind to grow chill in the ridiculously frigid room. Strong arms reach beneath my ass, hooking under the shelf of my butt cheeks, lifting until my feet are off the ground. A startled squeak slips out of me as Xaine heaves me up, and my first instinct is to reach for the only stable thing within my grasp, which happens to be his head. His tongue snakes into my belly button as he starts walking, and I grab hold of his ears, tugging on them in a futile effort to put some space between his face and my skin.
“That tickles, you ass!”
Xaine’s idiot grin is perfectly framed by my boobs. “Someone failed anatomy, because that is not an ass, but that’s ne
xt on the list.”
He tips me over onto the mattress, and then falls atop me without any of the grace I know he’s capable of. A second later, he dives in to bury his face against my throat. I laugh louder at that, a full, throaty laugh that bubbles up from my center, from somewhere in the vicinity of my heart.
“Guess we both failed anatomy,” I tell him, “because that is not an ass either—”
Without warning, Xaine goes completely still, muscles bunching until he’s a statue above me. Rough hands clamp down on my arms, holding me place. His head tilts slightly, eyes searching the wide expanse of the bed. His nostrils flare, and he draws in a sharp breath.
“Xaine…” The rest of my question goes unspoken, because I get the sudden sensation of moisture seeping through my clothes. Without preamble, Xaine lifts himself from the bed… our bed… and pulls me up after him. A chill snakes down my spine as I reach out and touch the tips of my fingers to the soft fabric of my shirt, dangling from my upper arm. It’s soaked, and when I move my hand into the dim light that permeates the dark confines of the bedroom, I see—
“Don’t,” Xaine orders, closing his fingers around my wrist and tugging the whole arm down where I can’t look at it. My gaze goes to his face then, searching the half-light for answers as anxiety clogs my throat. Xaine scans the room, gaze sliding from corner to corner then glancing behind me. He holds my hand in his the entire time, enveloping it, his thumb brushing lightly along the pulse at my wrist. For comfort.
Or something.
“Lore,” he says, very seriously, “I need you to listen to me.”
“It’s blood, isn’t it?” I can hear the waver in my voice. Instead of answering, he draws in a deep breath, an exploratory inhalation that summons goosebumps. “I’m covered in blood.”
“Shhh, sweetheart.” He edges around me, then as one we slowly return to the bed. Xaine reaches down, and I watch his hand, my gut weighted by dread and fear. He digs his fingers into the heavy black comforter and tosses it back.
“Oh, my god,” I hear myself whisper.
Blood is splattered across the sheets, glistening in the low light, dripping from the bed frame to the floor. There are pale patches that I’m sure are skin—were skin—and whiter patches that I’m relatively sure are bone, but one thing I know for certain: I’ve seen their faces before.
“It’s us.” I stagger back a few steps, hitting the end of my tether when Xaine’s grip stops me from fleeing. My mind flashes back to the day of the photoshoots, the day of the interviews, the day I flaunted myself on television and taunted Benicio so that I could lure him in. “It’s them.”
“Who are they?” Xaine asks.
I swallow heavily, barely holding back the bile. It’s a slaughterhouse scene, like someone tore them limb from limb and left them there in the bed like that, posed like lovers, untouched faces forever frozen in rapture. “They are us. Our standins from the junket.”
Oh, my god.
“I can smell someone else,” Xaine says. “Sickly sweet with a hint of—”
“Decay,” I finish, because I get it, too. In my nose, at the back of my throat, choking me with its cloying scent. Raw, meaty, metallic, it’s soaked into my shirt and bleeding through my pants.
Bleeding through my pants.
“I should have smelled them before,” Xaine snarls out. “Smelled him before. But I had a nose-load of Jax Trace… and you.”
“Oh, god.” The words burble out of me, some semblance of understanding cutting through the shock. I start brushing at my arms, my face, start tugging at my clothes until I’ve pushed the sodden jeans off my hips and dropped them on the floor with a wet splat—
Blood on skin, coating, burning like acid and leaving behind sores. Raw flesh that itches and peels.
It’s not over.
—then, I’m frantic, scraping the drops off my skin, sloughing off the perfect crimson beads like Lady Macbeth. It smears, painting me with rusty color, and I can feel it at the back of my neck, gluing my hair to my flesh.
It’s never over.
Xaine grips me, drawing me to his chest, pinning me in the protective circle of his arms to stop my compulsive wiping.
“Rosa!” he shouts, dialing a number on his cell phone. Then he’s talking on the phone to Asher or the police or someone and it doesn’t matter, because all I see is two pairs of staring blue eyes, two bodies intertwined, two corpses’ worth of blood soaked into the sheets that he and I woke up on this evening.
“Benicio’s not dead, Xaine,” I mumble into his shirt.
But it’s not Xaine’s voice that answers. “They never really are, kid.”
When I turn my head, Jax Trace is standing in the doorway. Numbly, I feel Xaine’s arm clamp down tighter; he’s no longer responding to the person on the other end of the line. Distantly, I process his head turning to greet our unexpected re-visitor, lip curled back. Jax doesn’t seem to care; his gaze stays fixed on mine. There’s a world of concern on his too-young-to-look-so-old face; all I can do to acknowledge it is give him a tiny nod before turning back to Xaine.
“I think Vegas might not be such a bad idea, after all,” I whisper.
“You can’t leave town,” Jax tells me, expression stern. “I have… other responsibilities… and I can’t chase you all over the damn planet.”
“Nobody asked you to,” Xaine snaps out. “I’ve got this.”
Jax’s lips press into a tight line. “You’re in over your head, X.”
“When am I not in over my head?” Xaine counters. “We’re getting the hell out of LA, and you’re not stopping us. You worry your pretty head about those other responsibilities. I’ve got Lore.”
There’s a pause, each man staring the other down.
“Get the lady’s bags, Trace,” Xaine says, taking two steps toward the only thing standing between us and freedom, “or get out of my way.”
The Dark Prince hath spoken.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Xaine
Fifty-five minutes. That’s how long it takes to fly from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. I sit with a recently-showered but still-traumatized Fuzzy Bunny in my lap and listen to her new song while Lonan and Rebel Gunn the One-Legged Wonderboy sort out security logistics and discreet weaponry. There’s a third guy, Jude, but he sits apart from the other PFC goons, staring out the window and occasionally shooting sidelong glances in my direction.
I don’t blame him. I’ve been keeping an eye on him too, and while I’m inclined to trust Asher’s instincts, I’m not one hundred percent sure even he knows what he’s working with here.
Not my circus.
I’ve got the volume on the earphones turned up as high as it will go, the song set on repeat, one hand on Lore’s ass and the other threaded through her hair. She’s gone quiet. Too quiet. Too still, with only the occasional sigh to mark the fact that she’s still awake. She fidgets whenever I stop petting her, so I keep petting her, keep touching her softly as I listen to the girl she was a few hours ago croon into my ear. This isn’t some poppy one-hit wonder that’s going to have all the teenagers bopping up and down and screaming. Nope, this is the perfect quiet-audience ballad. A lighter song. A cell phone recording song. The kind of song that will move an entire crowd of thirty thousand. The sort of song that will rip people up inside when they’re sitting alone by themselves.
The kind that rips me up more than a little.
A vicious lie of hope and fate,
A cry of wild-winged glory,
Tearing through a place in me,
Some aching, darkened place
In me…
The melody is still buzzing around in my head when we disembark. The pilot steps out to shake my hand like he does at the end of every flight, and there’s more security waiting for us in the corridor. They’re milling around the Next Big Thing, and they don’t even know it. Hell, Lore doesn’t even know it. Pinned against my side, she stares down at her feet, and I can tell her mind is a hundred miles away. She�
�s trapped in her own headspace, wondering when—not if—Benicio is going to catch up with us.
You are a monster, you are the cure,
Stamp yourself across my heart,
And write it in my blood,
Paint my face with your desire,
Rock me…
The deep, dark, sin-eater flavored introversion lasts until that first step into the terminal. The second Lore’s shimmery little shoes hit the cool marble tiles, there’s a collectively indrawn breath, and a ripple moves through the crowd.
This is where they get those paparazzi shots that you see splattered across the entertainment rags. This is where those high-flash-right-in-the-face, bad-hair-and-yoga-pants pictures originate. Lore’s still in Regular Joe mode, striding through life under the impression that she’s invisible. That people don’t notice her, notice us. It’s not until the first photographer screams her name that she looks up. Those blue eyes go wide, and she actually backpedals a bit, because she’s been caught by surprise.
My arm shoots out to reclaim her waist before she can turn and flee. The Phantom Firearms boys are doing their best to keep the path clear, and most of the fans are taking the wall of muscle seriously. Lore takes too long to adjust; a full minute passes before she stops staring at the flashing cameras like she’s Bambi. With my arm around her, she’s not got much choice; it’s walk, or walk, because we’re certainly can’t turn back now.
“Smile, sweetheart,” I whisper in her ear. “You’re on Candid Camera.”
The second her brain clicks into gear, that trademark lopsided grin makes an appearance along with the matching embarrassed blush. Lore ducks her head as we wade through the gathered crowd. Every once in a while she looks up, right at some photographer, and gives a little wave. I can feel the heat rolling off her, and she leans into my body like I’m some sort of protective barrier.
I am. And I won’t lie, I like it that way.
You found me in the shadow
Of the night beyond the storm,
Fighting for the light in me,
A tangled, twisted hope
In me…
It’s a relief when we hit the tacky stretch Hummer parked outside, and it’ll be easier from this point forward. The hotel we’re staying at is brand new, technically not even taking reservations from the public yet. We’ll be able to test run the swanky restaurant and swing by the nightclub or hole up in the penthouse with all the room service on the planet. Until tomorrow, at least. The red carpet party for the new single release is going to be the usual media circus for me, the paparazzi’s communal wet dream, and probably Lore’s worst nightmare.
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