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.