Page 9 of Nikolay

He did not thrust his fingers in some crude performance for onlookers. He worked her in slow, deliberate circles, patient enough to be merciless. The heel of his hand anchored her. His fingertips moved with devastating consistency, and every pass of them changed her face by another degree—eyes squeezing shut, lips gone wet where she’d bitten them, chest heaving against the hand that held her still.

The cross gave a faint iron shudder each time her hips tried to chase the touch and met restraint instead.

His mouth found her ear. I couldn’t hear the words, if he spoke any, but I saw the effect. Her head fell back against his shoulder. Her throat bared itself fully. Her body stopped trying to fight the restraint and gave in to it all at once.

There was something almost holy in the silence around them then. Not innocence. Nothing so pale as that. But reverence, maybe, for the stripped-down truth of what was happening—her trust, his control, the room witnessing both and knowing the difference between this and harm.

Her breathing broke apart.

That was the only way to describe it. It came in pieces, no rhythm left to it, each inhale jagged and each exhale sounding less like a breath than a plea. Her thighs began to shake hard against the black iron. He never changed pace. Never hurried because she was close. If anything, he became even more exacting, keeping her balanced on the edge until I thought for one stretched second he might hold her there forever.

Then her whole body seized.

A shudder started low and raced through her so violently her arms strained in the cuffs. The cry that tore from her was full-bodied and broken at once, a sound the room took into itself like something sacred and profane in equal measure. Her head dropped forward. Her knees nearly gave. He kept her upright with the hand on her chest while the orgasm rolled through her in visible waves, leaving her trembling and slack against the cross.

Only then did the audience breathe.

Applause came a moment later, low and reverent exactly because nobody with any sense mistook what they’d just seen for a cheap trick. Glasses lifted again. Someone near the bar muttered an appreciative curse. The sound spread, but gently, as if the room itself understood the scene had not fully loosened its hold yet.

I blinked and realized my own lips were parted.

Hell.

My tray had gone loose at my side, my pulse thudding in my throat like I’d been the one with leather singing across my skin. My cheeks felt hot, and irritation flashed through me quick as lightning because I knew better. I had seen demonstrations before. Maybe not this couple, maybe not with that particular grave beauty and that kind of patience, but enough to know how Obsidian worked. This shouldn’t have hit me sideways.

And then I looked up.

Across the room, half-shadowed near the far aisle, stood Nikolay.

He was very still. So still he looked cut from the dark itself, too large and too composed everywhere except the face he was no longer controlling well enough to fool me. The low light made his eyes look darker than amber, almost brown-black, until a slant of gold from the bar caught them and lit the truth underneath. He wasn’t watching the couple on the stage.

He was watching me.

No—my face. My mouth still parted, my hand slack on the tray, my whole fool body visibly caught for one helpless second in the aftermath of what I’d just witnessed.

The expression on his face hit me so hard I forgot to breathe.

Want.

Not passing interest. Not that chilly disdain he wore around me like a bespoke coat. This was rawer than that, rough enough at the edges to make my stomach drop. It looked like hunger dragged too close to the surface. Like he’d been stripped to something he hated and couldn’t hide in time.

For one suspended heartbeat, the room fell away. The music, the applause, the movement of bodies, all of it. There was only the distance between us and that terrible, blazing look on his face.

Then his jaw locked.

It happened almost visibly, the way a door slams in a storm. His expression hardened, desire wiped clean beneath something colder, sharper, contemptuous enough to leave a bruise. He turned before I could make sense of whether that contempt was for me, for himself, or for the fact that I had seen him wanting at all.

And then he walked away.

I set my jaw, shifted the tray back into proper balance, and reminded myself I was at work, not sixteen and mooning over a boy who’d looked at me like sin and then flinched from the sight of it. Table twelve still needed their wine. The demon at the booth still needed his card run. Life went on, humiliatingly enough, even after a man looked ready to devour you across a crowded room and then decided he’d rather hate you for noticing.

The crowd was already loosening back into its pleasures, conversation returning in low streams around the afterglow of the demonstration. Somebody laughed too loudly near the back lounge. A server passed me carrying a silver bucket of champagne. The stage attendants moved with discreet efficiency, clearing the implements and giving the couple privacy enough to descend.

I forced my feet into motion.

My pulse still hadn’t settled. It beat too high in my throat, too aware of my own skin, and there was a lingering warmth under my sternum that made me want to cuss myself out in detail. I knew better than to get rattled by a scene at Obsidian. I knew better than to get rattled by him.

Especially him.