by RuNyx .
That was exactly the reason she’d been ready and dressed inside the guest room this morning, waiting for him to leave so she could follow him out. Her car, her beautiful baby, had been waiting for her, purring under her as she’d started it. Happy to be back inside it, she’d told the guard at the gate that she needed some computer stuff. After he opened the gates, she had pressed down on the gas, shooting out into the road like a bullet, whizzing past the other cars to catch up with the one Tristan Caine had taken.
She’d been following him for almost an hour, at a very safe distance where she was sure he couldn’t spot her in the rearview mirror, occasionally admiring his driving skills. The man maneuvered the big SUV almost as well as he did that beast of a bike. For some reason she didn’t want to explore, she was partial to the bike.
The hard sun shone relentlessly down on the road as she followed him out of town. The city was slowly left behind for more and more countryside as she carefully kept her distance, knowing how observant he was.
He drove on the highway for almost ten minutes before turning onto a dirt road off to the left, disappearing behind the line of trees that shrouded the path.
Morana stopped her car, the sun glinting off the hood as the cool conditioned air brushed over the skin of her bare arms. Biting her lip, she waited for the SUV to get far enough away so she could follow. The fact that she couldn’t actually see the vehicle anymore made her jittery.
She slowly restarted the car, hovering on the edge of the turn, palms slightly sweaty because she had no idea what he would do if he discovered her tailing him. But it was too late to turn back. She was already on the reckless path, might as well follow through. Plus, answers.
The moment the other vehicle would’ve been nothing but a dot in the distance, Morana turned slowly onto the dirt road. Her car went over the bumps roughly as she drove through at snail’s speed, his choice of vehicle suddenly making sense to her. But that made her wonder –how did he know the areas around her city so well like a resident? Could it be something as simple as GPS?
She grit her teeth, following as inconspicuously as she could, her whole body jarring over the bad road and shushed her mind, storing random thoughts away for later.
Almost after five minutes of driving at a speed slower than her car was capable of, an old barn came into view. It stood tall and abandoned under the high sun, the woods around it concealing it from the view of the highway.
The SUV came to a stop outside it, and Morana quickly maneuvered her car behind some trees on the side of the path, hiding it completely from view behind the thick foliage. Taking her gun out from her bag, Morana opened the door noiselessly and got out, tucking the weapon at the small of her back in the waistband of her jeans, silently crouching down beside a tree to watch the scene.
She saw Tristan Caine’s muscled form fold itself out from the driver’s side, his eyes hidden behind dark shades as he removed the jacket of his suit and threw it in the car. Without missing a step, he shut the door, the fabric of the white shirt clinging to the muscles she knew were harder than they looked. He started walking towards the main entrance of the barn, disappearing inside.
Morana waited for a beat, adrenaline flooding her system as she quietly made her way to the building, still crouched low, looking around to constantly check she wasn’t being watched.
The door was partially open.
Without making a sound, she slipped inside carefully, blinking once, then twice, to let her eyes adjust to the dark as muffled voices reached her ears.
Eyeing a pillar right near the entrance, Morana slid behind it. Looking out, she was careful to stay low in the shadows while the sunlight filtered in through the high windows, the beams lighting the center of the empty space.
Tristan Caine stood in the center, four tall men surrounding him as he stood still, just watching them.
Gripping the pillar with her hands for support, she leaned slightly closer, the voices becoming clearer as they echoed in the cavernous space.
“Last I knew, Doug ran across the ocean without finishing his end of the bargain. Where is he now?” Tristan Caine asked calmly, in a quiet voice that made a shiver run down Morana’s spine. He spoke as though he wasn’t surrounded by dangerous looking thugs with weapons while he had absolutely none.
One of the men laughed, shaking his head. “Why do you want Doug?”
“That’s my business,” Tristan Caine replied in the same voice, his body still but alert, his eyes never moving from the men.
“You wakin’ up old skeletons, Caine,” the man she assumed was the leader of the group warned. “There’s a rumor running ‘bout you. ‘Bout ‘dem missing girls.”
Morana held her breath.
Tristan Caine sighed.
Sighed.
“You want to walk out of here, tell me where Doug is,” he informed them, slowly unbuttoning his shirt at the sleeves and rolling them up those forearms, the hint of his tattoo coming out from under it, a tattoo she had yet to see in detail.
The two men behind him exchanged looks, before suddenly pulling out their knives and throwing it right at his back.
Morana covered her mouth to stifle her gasp, her heart pounding as she watched in disbelief. Tristan Caine dropped down to his haunches without turning back even once, as though he’d been aware of every single movement the entire time, the knives missing him completely and falling down with a clatter.
Before the others could even react, he was on his feet, punching one guy right in the throat, breaking the bone with a loud snap, while kicking the other out simultaneously with his foot.
The other two came at him, one with a gun that he disarmed in seconds while breaking the guy’s wrist, and choking the other man with an arm wrapped around his neck.
The man passed out.
Taking the gun he’d divested the leader of, Tristan Caine shot him right on the knee caps, on both of them, the sound of the gun loud in the barn. Morana watched in silence, swallowing down her nerves, as he sat down on his haunches in front of the bleeding man, and tilted his head to the side casually, his hands draped lazily over his knees.
“Where’s Doug?” Tristan Caine asked again.
The man blubbered in pain, cursing everything to hell and back. “Don’t know, man.”
Tristan Caine pushed the gun into the wound and the man screamed so loudly Morana felt herself flinch.
“Don’t know, I swear,” the man blubbered. “Swear. Just know he visits the Saturn backroom every Saturday. That’s all I know. I swear.”
It was Saturday.
Tristan Caine considered him for a second, then nodded, dropping the gun beside the man and standing up.
Without a care in the world, he walked towards the door, a few steps from where Morana was hiding, her blood rushing to her head, looking at him in awe. It wasn't just awed because of how quickly and smoothly he’d handled four big armed men without a weapon on himself, or at how casual he was about walking away from an injured man with a gun by his side.
She was in awe because watching him, right at that moment, she understood exactly who he was.
The Predator.
Always the hunter, never the hunted. He could not be hunted. He could not be tamed. He could not be destroyed. That kind of unbreakable aura was so, so tempting to her.
She should have been disgusted. She should have been exasperated. She should have been horrified. But she was enthralled because she could remember every single time she’d seen her father shoot a man; she could remember the way the blood spurted from the flesh, coating itself on his fingers as he’d tortured a man. Growing up the way she had, she’d seen men make others bleed, seen them covered in blood, seen them bathe in it.
To her, as horrifying as it was, it wasn’t the presence of blood that was odd.
The fact that Tristan Caine had extracted information from a man, made him bleed but hadn’t let that blood even touch him was odd.
Morana looked at his hands from her hidin
g place, looked at him as he made a phone call and spoke too quietly for her to hear, only one thought going through her head after witnessing the scene she had, in contrast to the countless others in her memory.
His hands - his big, rough hands that touched her so intimately - were clean.
Saturn.
She’d heard about the place of course, but never really seen it. Never wanted to see it.
It was a casino in East Shadow Port that was frequented by many mobsters – like a neutral ground for members of different families to hold a meeting in her father’s territory. As far as she knew, every city had one Saturn – and that casino served only one purpose, to let men meet without shedding blood in other’s territories. On the face of it, Saturn, like every other casino, was flashy – all the glitter an invitation for innocent tourists and civilians to spend their money and try their luck in.
After knowing where Tristan Caine would be headed, Morana had made a quick stop on the way at a boutique. Buying herself the first flashy dress she saw – a very silver, very short number that showed way more skin than she was comfortable showing. But she was pressed for time, so she changed in the dressing room and ran out to her car, stashing the silver heels on the seat beside her.
Pressing down on the accelerator to get to the casino quickly, she cursed her need to wear a dress to get inside the place because that meant no gun. No gun meant bad things. She even slept with a gun - at least when she wasn’t drifting off to sleep on strange couches.
Morana inhaled deeply, eyeing the dark SUV where it was parked innocently, and pulled her own car into the lot.
It was already getting darker outside, the sun fading away to give room to the moon, the air chilly as she crossed the lot to the main door, shivers racing down her spine, not entirely due to the cold.
The guard looked up as she approached, eyeing her in a way that was all too familiar, thanks to her father and his choice of dinner companions. It was exactly what she needed at the moment. Her spine straightened, her teeth gritting as she passed the guard by, wishing for the hundredth time she’d had her gun instead of the small butterfly knife in her bra.
Clenching her jaw, she cleared her mind of everything but getting to the back room, so she could spy in peace and entered the casino.
Bright lights and a plethora of colors assaulted her eyelids, the sound of music and laughter drifting about everywhere, along with the voices of the dealers and the slot machines pinging.
Morana stood still for a moment, fisting her hands beside her, taking it all in. She wasn’t used to such crowds, and her experiences with such a large number of people had not always been the best. No. She preferred her computer and her solitude, maybe a few people.
The dinner with Dante and Amara and Tristan Caine at the penthouse had been nice, a voice whispered inside her. Awkward but nice.
Morana hushed the voice, not willing to hear whatever it had to say, shaking off her musings. She started walking towards the back of the large but overcrowded area. The closer she got, the more clearly she could see a narrow corridor of some kind, with a single red curtain at the end.
Assuming it was the room the man had referred to, Morana looked around to make sure she wasn’t being watched, then made her way to the corridor. Once safely there, she stood at the curtain, trying to listen hard for any sounds, but heard nothing. Hesitating for a second, she pulled the curtain away slightly, peeking around it, and saw a simple wooden door with a keypad on the side.
Bingo.
Stepping into the small area, she pulled the curtain back in place, concealing her from everyone outside, and checked the keypad out. She knew her father’s security, having installed a lot of it herself. She knew if she cracked the lock, there won’t be any alarms of any kind. The keypad was complex, but not uncrackable, not for her at least.
Pulling her lip under her teeth, Morana concentrated completely on the lock, undoing it in a matter of seconds.
The minute the lock opened, a hand grabbed her roughly from the back.
Morana’s hand instantly went to the knife she’d hidden but a gun pressed into her ribs, stilling her.
She turned slowly, looking at an older man her height, his face cruel and harsh, especially under the dim lighting by the curtain.
“What are you doing here?” the man demanded, his hand shaking her in a way she knew would leave bruises.
Morana opened her mouth to make up an excuse when the man’s eyes fell on the open lock. Shit.
“Well, well,” he leered at her with interest. “You want to get inside, little girl? Let’s get inside.”
Shoving her hard through the door, he pressed the gun into her side, ordering her to move. Morana didn’t try to struggle. In a place like that, she knew it would be futile, that she’d have her own knife in her back before she’d even turned around properly. Being smart about this was the only way to make it through.
Fuck.
The dark room at the back of the casino was lit up with multi-colored lights that should have made it look cheap and flashy but had the opposite effect instead. Unlike the outside, there were no female servers in there. That was the first thing Morana noticed. No women at all and that told her something very important – whatever was going on here was highly private and highly important. It was only under those circumstances that women servers were refused at a gathering.
Okay, then.
Morana let her eyes take it all in. There was a huge round table in the center of the room, with dangerous-looking men around it. There was a single gun smack in the middle of the table, within the reach of each and every man.
And seated right across from the entrance, facing the door and every other person in the room, sat Tristan Caine.
His eyes flicked up towards her as the man dragged her in by the arm, and Morana’s heart pounded hard in her chest. Not just because she’d been discovered, but because she had no idea how he would react to this, to finding her here where he was doing whatever he was doing, which was something important by the looks of it.
His face didn’t flicker one bit.
No spark of recognition in those magnificent blue eyes, which seemed even bluer under the lights. No twitch in his jaw muscle at any attempt to control his expression. No movement of his body.
Nothing. At. All.
And yet she could feel the heaviness of his gaze upon every inch of her exposed skin. It went over the slip of her dress, over the hand strangling her upper arm.
God, how she admired that amount of self-control. How she envied it.
She kept her raging emotions completely off her face as well, easily enough, and tried to hide it in her eyes too, but wasn’t sure she managed completely. But no one knew her there, including him for all intents and purposes.
Standing still, she removed her eyes from him and scanned the room (something she should have and would have done first as soon as she entered an unknown environment before she’d met him, and she hated how deeply he was affecting her common sense). There were a total of six men, including him, all wearing expensive suits and groomed hair, a few smoking cigars, all in their forties or fifties perhaps.
He was the youngest man in the room, and yet he emanated the most dangerous air, even in his stillness. Or perhaps that was because she’d seen what his stillness held, what it’d done in the afternoon.
The man holding her arm jerked her forward, and she grit her teeth, the urge to punch the asshole in the nose making her fist clench. She swallowed it down.
“Found her lurking behind the door,” he informed the room in his rough voice. “Anyone know her?”
Everyone stayed silent.
Watching.
Morana stayed silent.
Waiting.
The man holding her arm turned to her, his face just a little above her. “What were you doing, girl?”
Morana stayed silent.
“What’s your fucking name?” the man spit out.
Morana glared up at his attempt
to intimidate her, knowing she couldn’t let her real name be known, not in a crowd she didn’t know, in a casino in her father’s territory, and especially not when Tristan Caine stayed quiet. That told her enough for the moment.
“Stacy,” she finally said the first name that came to her mind.
The man raised a skeptic brow. “Stacy?”
“Summers,” she supplied sweetly.
“Well, Ms. Summers,” the man bit out, his voice harsh, his tone gleeful. “You see this room? Here’s where we play. But it’s not for money. For information.”
Ah. That made sense.
“There are only two ways you leave when you come to this room,” he grinned, his tobacco-stained teeth gleaming in the red light evilly. “You play and win, or you leave with a bullet in you.”
Dead or alive. Nice. Very mob-like.
Morana raised an eyebrow, looking pointedly at the gun on the table, her mind racing. She didn’t know what the game was but she did know that if she refused, the gun digging into her ribs would go off in a second, lodging the bullet very, very close to her heart. Plus these men were playing for information. If there was something she wanted more than freedom from this world, it was information.
“I’ll play,” she informed the man in a saccharine tone of voice, completely hiding her nerves.
She saw the disbelief flash on the man’s face momentarily before he pushed her into an empty chair, right in front of Tristan Caine.
Morana sat down, her back to the door. It was a vulnerable position. Anyone could enter and shoot her in the back.
But she looked up and saw Tristan Caine watching her, watching the door, watching everyone in the room without moving his eyes from her, and she felt her insides relax minutely. If there was one thing she knew for a fact, it was that this man would not let anyone else kill her. Her death was his, and only his. And looking at him, seeing not Tristan Caine but The Predator, she believed it with every fiber of her being. That was also the reason why she could not relax. Because she did not know this man. She’d met him once when he’d pushed her own knife against her throat back in Tenebrae. She’d met him when he’d threatened her on top of her car. Since then, she’d seen only terrifying glimpses of him.