Page 23 of Shai

It was a small room, the majority of it dominated by two things: a small-

scale model of the city covering the entirety of the table it sat on, and multiple photos and newspaper clippings decorating all four walls. I turned my attention to these first, circling the room like it was an art gallery to read them. They were all about McIntyre, things he’d done, murders that had been connected to him but that they’d never been able to prove, snippets of gossip about his personal life. It was like watching one man’s obsession laid bare—Shai’s obsession.

“Did you sleep well?”

I jumped. Despite having followed him, I’d almost forgotten his presence. “Fuck you!”

“Hardly the way to respond to a polite inquiry.”

I rounded on him, unable to hold back the spark of anger his words ignited. “Your politeness is never politeness.”

One dark eyebrow arched. “Really?” He held his hands out in front of him in a gesture clearly designed to denote innocence. “I was just trying to make conversation. I thought that’s why you followed me in here. My apologies for misreading the situation.”

I found myself staring at his fingers, the same fingers that had wrapped themselves around my cock and had teased me until I’d been nothing but a sweating mess desperate for relief. I pushed it to the back of my mind and forced myself to concentrate on his words. “I didn’t follow you. I just hadn’t been in this room before. I was curious to know what was in here.”

Shai waved a lazy arm around the room. “And now you know.”

I inclined my head toward the nearest newspaper cutting. “It’s a shrine to McIntyre. Are you that obsessed with him?”

If Shai was at all bothered by my accusation, he didn’t let it show. “Know thine enemy.”

“You made him your enemy. You took what was his.”

A gleam appeared in Shai’s eye. “Indeed, I did. And it wasn’t even difficult. It was like taking candy from a baby.”

I stepped over to the table, ensuring I kept a safe distance between myself and Shai. I didn’t want memories of what he’d subjected me to the previous night to raise their ugly head again. I took some time to peruse the table. It was an intricate map. The longer I stared at it, the more details of the city I recognized, landmarks such as parks and the cathedral making themselves known. Little markers were positioned all over it. It was easy to tell that the blue ones represented the part of the city McIntyre controlled, and the red ones, Shai’s half of the city. I was less clear on the purple and black markers. I pointed at a purple one. “What do those represent?”

I stiffened as Shai rounded the table. Stepping behind me, he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me back against his body, his chin resting on my shoulder in a way that intimated that we were lovers rather than captor and prisoner. I made a valiant attempt to shake him off, but he clung on like a limpet, his heated breath skating across my neck as he laughed at my feeble attempts to get free. His hands slid down my chest, the journey inexorably slow and deliberate until one came to rest over my denim-covered crotch. He pressed down with his palm, and there was no holding back my wince. “Are you sore, Elijah?”

I tugged his hand away, under no illusions that I could have moved if he

hadn’t wanted me to. “You know I fucking am.”

Lips grazed my neck and I searched for the sense of revulsion that

should have been there, but it was as if my body had become rebellious to the cause, a frisson of something far too close to pleasure working its way down my spine. And then just as quickly as Shai had grabbed me, he let go, returning to the opposite side of the table and bracing his hands against the side of it. “The purple markers are areas that have changed hands several times. The black markers are potential targets.”

I stared at him, the question I’d asked earlier seeming like a lifetime

ago. There were a lot of purple markers, some on the south side of the river and some on the north side. “How long are you going to keep this up?”

Shai lifted his head, his gaze holding mine. “Until I win.” The quiet confidence with which he’d said the words was nothing short

of scary. “Can’t you just be happy with what you have?”

He threw his head back and laughed, his eyes glinting with amusement.

“Oh, Elijah. I thought you of all people would understand.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. You came here. You risked everything and look where it got

you. Thrown away like rubbish by McIntyre.” He trailed his fingers over the side of the table, tracing the grain of the wood. “Stuck here with me, subject to my every need and whim.” He leaned forward, the lines of his tattoo creasing in on themselves. “Why weren’t you happy with what you had?”

I gave a short, sharp laugh, barely able to believe he was seriously

trying to draw a parallel between the two situations. “I had fuck all. Some evenings I didn’t even have a card for the electric meter. No card, no heating. You’ve got half a fucking city in your pocket. Also”—I was on a roll now and if he didn’t like it, well, tough—"why this city? There are other places ripe for the picking. Places it would be far easier to take over.”