Sacrifice Me: The Complete Season One (14 page)

I could hardly breathe as he spoke. He had this
way of being hard edges and soft tones all at the same time. I had
never met anyone sexier in my entire life.

“As for what you’re wearing? Believe
me, it has nothing to do with you not looking good enough.” He
cleared his throat again, and I could swear his bottom lip trembled
ever so slightly. “I just would have rather had you working
behind the scenes tonight instead of on display for everyone to see.”

I moved one step closer to him and his eyes
searched my face. “Why are you protecting me? You don’t
even know me. Why not just let those guys tear me apart the other
night?”

He lifted a hand to my cheek and brushed a strand
of hair out of my eyes. His fingers lingered for a moment on my skin
and my insides went up in flames.

“There’s something about you,”
he said, his walls down for the briefest of moments. “I can’t
explain it more than that. I just knew you were worth saving.”

My breath was shallow and my body yearned to move
closer. I wanted to feel his hands on me again. My eyes were drawn to
his lips, overcome by the desire to know what it would be like to
kiss a man like Rend.

“You don’t have to dance if you don’t
want to,” he said. “I can find another job for you if you
want to go back and get changed.”

It was a tempting thought, but I refused to let
Azure think I had complained to the boss and gotten my way like some
child. I wanted her to know I was stronger than that.

“I’m good,” I said, letting a
smile tease my lips. “It might even be fun.”

He groaned and clenched his jaw. “I’m
going to keep my eye on you tonight,” he said. “If you
need anything or anyone so much as offers to buy you a drink, you
come find me. I’ll be in the bar or back in the private room
behind the curtain most of the night.”

I hoped he couldn’t see me blush in the
half-darkness. “I can take care of myself,” I said. “Most
of the time.”

He paused, then put a finger under my chin,
lifting my face to his. My lips parted and I forced myself to keep
breathing. Our eyes locked for a few intense seconds, then he dropped
his hand and turned away.

“Azure. My office. Now.”

I looked over just in time to see a look of terror
cross her eyes.

I rejoined the other dancers in a cluster near the
black curtain.

Lyla grabbed my hand and pulled me to her side.
“Oh, my God, what is going on with you and Rend?”

“You have to tell us everything,” Shay
said.

“I have never seen him look so—”

“So shaken.” Lyla’s eyes were
huge and glimmering.

At this point, my face was probably beet red, and
I was sure they could all see it, even in the sparse lighting.

“There’s nothing going on,” I
said.

“Liar,” Cherish said.

“Big, fat liar,” Lyla said. “Listen,
Rend is untouchable. Unshakable. He never lets himself get rattled.
Not even when he’s about to tear someone to pieces.”

“Literally,” Shay mumbled.

I snapped to look at her. “What do you mean,
literally?”

“Why do you think everyone calls him Rend?”
Cherish asked.

“Let’s just say he’s known
around our kind of people as someone you don’t cross,”
Lyla said.

My hand went to my forehead. The spot where his
fingers had brushed my skin was still tingling. Surely they didn’t
mean that he had killed people before? Is that what they were saying?

It seemed unbelievable, but I had seen the fear in
the eyes of those vampires the other night. They had been terrified
of him and he hadn’t even lifted a finger toward them.

“I think you definitely picked the right
outfit,” Lyla said, giggling. “He could hardly take his
eyes off you.”

“I’m so jealous I could kill you,”
Peri said. “Seriously, I’ve never seen Rend with a woman
and I’ve been working here for almost fifteen years.”

I laughed out loud. “Yeah, right.”

She eyed me. “What?”

“You can’t be much older than I am.
How have you been working here fifteen years? You would have been,
what? Ten years old when you started?”

“Oh,” she said, lifting the back of
her hand up to her mouth to cover her laughter. “Girl, that’s
just the glamour. If you saw the real me underneath all this magic,
you wouldn’t question it. I’m thirty-nine.”

My jaw dropped open and I shook my head. “There’s
no way.”

“I would show you, but no one sees the real,
unmagicked me. No one.”

“I think we’re all going to have to
take a night off coming up and have a girl’s night in where we
teach Frankie here some of our tricks,” Shay said.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Peri. Almost
forty years old? It was incredible how young she looked. And I
couldn’t help but wonder what other truths were being hidden
behind some curtain of magic in this place.

Nothing was as it seemed, and if I could no longer
even trust my eyes, what could I trust?

“If you say nothing is happening between the
two of you, I’ll believe you,” Lyla said. “But I
saw the way you were looking at him, too.”

“All I’m going to say is be careful,”
Misty said. “Prettier, more powerful women than you have fallen
for him and ended up with nothing more than a broken heart. He’s
completely immune to love.”

It occurred to me that I should probably be
offended by the fact that she’d offhandedly insulted my looks,
but the truth was that I didn’t doubt it. Rend was gorgeous
beyond words and it wouldn’t surprise me if the hottest model
in the world was in love with him.

“Don’t worry about me,” I said.
“I have no delusions about his feelings for me. Besides, I’m
just here because I happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong
time. Rend saved me. End of story.”

I didn’t have a chance to say more, because
the lights dimmed further and the music turned up to near-deafening
levels.

“Ooh, party time,” Lyla said, raising
her voice above the music. “Come with me, Franki. I’ll
show you to your spot.”

I followed Lyla through the dark club, my knees
weak at the thought of dancing in front of a crowd full of strangers.

She led me to an actual cage with strong black
bars. “This is usually my spot, but I thought you might want to
be back here where you had a good view of the bar,” she said
with a wink.

“Thank you,” I said. I leaned in close
to her ear. “What exactly do I do?”

She smiled and squeezed my arm. “Just
dance,” she said. Then she reached into a black bag she’d
been carrying and pulled out two tubes of clear liquid. She uncapped
them, handed one to me and downed the other. “And drink that.
Trust me.”

“What is it?” I stared at it, thinking
about the shot from the other night. “Is this Red Dragon?”

“Mixed with a few other things,” she
said. Her eyes were glimmering again. “This is Rend’s
special brew for the dancers.”

“Rend made this?”

She cocked her head to the side. “Rend makes
everything we sell in here. He’s the alchemist.”

“Alchemist?” I stared at the tube.
Just how much did I still have to learn about this world? It seemed
like there was some new surprise around every corner.

“Just drink it and enjoy it,” she
said. “You won’t regret it.”

I took a deep breath and lifted the tube up in a
kind of salute. “Here’s to no regrets.”

For some reason, an image from a dream appeared in
my head. A hallway with a thousand doors, each one opening my eyes to
some new secret. Some new mystery.

As I brought the shot up to my lips, I wondered
just how far I could go before I lost myself to this new world. And
to a man who was immune to love.

Episode 3: The Darkness

The shot burned going down.

The heat started on my lips and flowed across my
tongue, down my throat, spreading through my body like wildfire. I
closed my eyes, drinking in the sensation of being lit up from the
inside out. An intense energy filled me from head to toe, its power
putting me on the edge of control, as if one more drop would have
been too much.

“Good, right?” Lyla asked, smiling.

I opened my eyes and the entire room looked
different. The light that flowed through the glass tubes running
across the ceiling seemed brighter. The music seemed louder. Every
wisp of air across my skin made me shiver. I felt it travel into my
body and become a part of me.

“I never felt anything like it,” I
said, my voice unsteady. It was different from the plain Red Dragon
shot I’d had the other night on my birthday. This was
intensified. I was less fuzzy and more awake. On fire.

I felt sexy.

Lyla flipped a switch near the base of the iron
cage and the door swung open. “Climb up,” she said.

I gripped the bars and pulled myself into the cage
with almost no effort. I had more raw energy flowing through me than
I could ever remember in my whole life.

Lyla closed me inside. “Now all you have to
do is dance,” she said with a giggle. “I’ll come
get you when it’s time for a break. Do you smoke?”

I shook my head, having a hard time concentrating
on what she was saying. It was like sensory overload.

“Okay, well, you can come outside with us
when it’s time or you can go back to the break room or
whatever,” she said. “See you in a few hours. Have fun.”

She winked, then made her way to a similar cage on
the other side of the room.

The doors to the club must have opened, because
there were suddenly all these people moving onto the dance floor and
standing in line at the bar. A few minutes ago the place was nearly
empty and just like that, it was packed.

If they were selling these homemade potions
instead of liquor, it was no wonder there were so many people here.
Damn.

I briefly wondered if anything going on in this
place was even legal and how in the hell they had managed to stay
open this long without getting into trouble. But my mind couldn’t
focus on the question long enough to worry about it.

My body wanted to move.

At first, I was hyper-aware of my body. I judged
every movement. Was I doing this right? Did I look okay? But then the
music consumed me. It swallowed me whole, the beat controlling the
beat of my own heart. I couldn’t fight it anymore. I let go,
not thinking about how I looked or who was watching me. I just let my
body move the way it wanted. I had never felt so free in my life.

Hours must have gone by like that and not once did
the energy from the shot let up. Sweat coated the back of my neck and
the skin on my arms. My hair caressed my face and shoulders. I could
have danced forever.

But then, the dark feeling from the other night
was back. It was like being sucked into a black hole. Or maybe more
like having a thick, heavy black cloak thrown over my body, covering
me in a veil of fear.

I reached out and grabbed hold of the iron bars,
for the first time really looking through the crowd. He was here.
Whoever had been watching me that first night was back, and his eyes
were locked on me.

I turned around in the cage, searching for a pair
of eyes staring back at me, but no matter how hard I looked, I
couldn’t find him.

As long as I was having fun, the potion that
flowed through my system felt good. It gave me energy and made me
feel sexy and beautiful. But adding in that taste of fear was like an
amplified version of the worst panic I’d ever felt. I suddenly
couldn’t breathe.

I turned my attention to the bar, searching for
Rend. He had somehow sensed this darkness before. Did he sense it
now?

He wasn’t behind the bar, though, and I
couldn’t find him anywhere in the crowd. Was he behind the
black curtain with his friends?

I knew I would look stupid rushing into their
private room with fear written all over my face. And I didn’t
want to give Azure the satisfaction of seeing me freaking out.

I glanced over and was relieved to see that she
wasn’t paying any attention to me. If I totally lost it,
though, she’d see it. Everyone would. They would think I was
crazy.

I had to pull myself together.

I took a deep breath and forced myself to focus on
the music. Whoever was out there in the darkness was just watching
me. They couldn’t touch me here in this cage in front of
everyone. As long as I worked for Rend, they couldn’t hurt me.

After a few minutes, I was able to push the dark
feeling to the edge of my consciousness and focus on the music again.
Still, all sense of freedom was gone now. I was in survival mode,
which was much more like my normal state of being. Instead of giving
myself up to the potion running through my veins, I was fighting
against it.

When Lyla finally came to tell me it was time for
us to go on a break, I nearly jumped out of the cage and kissed her
on the mouth. I wanted to get out of there and off display for a
while.