“You’re kidding me.” But I could tell by the animated look on her face she was not. Hunter was here, and I bet he was watching me under the pretense of being on a date.
“He was in Camelot,” she said, pointing at the upstairs walkway. “But I think they were headed to the Gangster Suite. They’re doing palm readings there.”
Of course they were. I nodded my thanks to Janet, excused myself, and headed in the opposite direction. By the time I passed Egypt, the Blue Hawaii Suite, and a disturbingly accurate replica of the
Just before nine everyone began heading over to the main chapel for the charity auction. Olivia had been chairwoman for the North Vegas Foundation for the past five years, and I’d scrambled to keep up her work, though it was harder than I’d initially anticipated. She’d schmoozed half the glitterati in this city out of time and money at one point or another, and keeping up those contacts was a full-time job in itself. I needed to make an appearance at the auction; smile, shake hands, nod and bid on a few items, and then I could get back to searching for Ben. If he was here.
Yet one look around the packed chapel, one sniff, and my heart plummeted. Damn, I thought for the first time, maybe he really wasn’t coming. Maybe, I thought as I leaned against a fiberglass pillar, he was still pissed at the way I’d disappeared on him, and this was his way of getting back at me. Making me feel what he had. Making me see how abandonment could cleave your hope in two.
“Hey, Archer.” The whisper came from my left, behind a cluster of plastic potted plants. “There’s something you need to see over here.”
I moved only my eyes, then sighed, making my disinterest obvious. Douglas had removed his mask, and his sweaty head sprouted from the foliage, eyes shining.
“What is it?” I murmured lowly, tossing a nod and a smile to the governor and his wife as they passed. “Another message-by-minion?”
I saw him motion to me from the corner of my eye. “It’s a surprise.”
“A surprise like a party,” I muttered, pushing off the faux Roman pillar to follow him, “or a surprise like herpes?”
He didn’t answer, just disappeared around the back door, which led into the outdoor gazebo, moving so fast I caught only a glimpse of his black shroud as he slipped back over to the themed rooms. I tried not to look rushed as I followed, smiling at stragglers in the outdoor tents, and discreetly rushing past a couple making out in the pulsing light of the Disco Suite. More mirrors, please, I thought sarcastically, as I averted my eyes again…and again.
I finally caught sight of his tattered hem disappearing around the corner, and called out for him to slow down, but my voice was drowned out by the organ music straining from the Gothic Suite. A fog machine had mist snaking from beneath the closed door, and when I tried the handle I found it locked tight. No telling what Our Gang was doing in there now. I moved to the window to peer into a replica of Dracula’s castle, replete with leering gargoyles and the flicker of medieval sconces, but my gaze was immediately drawn to the coffin-shaped bed centered beneath a werewolf’s moon.
And to Ben on that bed, satin red sheets pooling around him like blood.
I was there too. My old bob swinging down around my cheeks as I rose and fell above him. The muscles in my arms flexed as I rode him. My small breasts strained through the soft chemise Ben had neglected to remove as he gripped my hips, both of us moaning. A mask like the one Hunter had designed for me lay snug against my cheeks.
A keening wail spiraled out of me and I rushed the door, only to be yanked backward. The arm wrapping around me was as unyielding as concrete.
“No,” Hunter said, repeating it when I jerked against him. “It’s what she wants!”
“Oh, it’s what I want too.” I slammed my heel into his foot, and his grip loosened momentarily, but he pulled me back to his body before I’d taken three steps.
“You have no weapon. Breach that door, and Ben will be dead before you touch her.”
The truth in those words had me sagging. Hunter’s grip relaxed, released, and I lunged for the whip at his side, and raised it to the level I’d seen Regan’s head through the window, but he wrapped his hand around the steel- tipped length so that I’d have to cleave through his flesh in order to wield it. “Think, Joanna. Think what it’d do to him to see ‘you’ slaughtered on top of him. It’s what she wants. She’ll break him through his mind rather than his body, and in doing so she’ll still get to you.”
Because mortals were so easy to break, especially when you didn’t give a shit about any of them.
It was masochistic, but I leaned forward, looked through those cobweb curtains again, hoping against hope I hadn’t seen what I knew I had. That maybe Ben would open his eyes at any moment and throw Regan from his waist, realizing his mistake. But he was too far gone, lost in an ecstasy that was supposed to be mine, spending himself inside her even as I blinked, and causing another blade-sharp wail to rise from my throat.
Hunter wrapped his arm around me again. Regan threw back her head. And I swore she looked right at me as she climaxed.
26
The voice that had begun screaming inside me the instant I’d seen Ben pinioned beneath Regan fell silent as we sped away from the chapel. I was suddenly icy with calm, but the accompanying silence was that of a hurricane’s vortex. It must have frightened Hunter, because he kept one hand on the steering wheel as he drove, the other poised on the console between our seats, tensed. His eyes were on me more than they were on the road, but I didn’t care. I was playing and replaying everything I’d said and done and missed, piecing together the puzzle of how Regan, once again, had gotten to Ben. Gotten, this time, inside him.
Closing my eyes, I leaned back against the leather headrest. I’d told Regan that Ben would never be with her as long as I was alive. So instead of wasting time or risking rejection, Regan had chosen a more effective tactic in making him her own. She’d become me. And that was my fault too. Hadn’t I taunted her less than twelve hours ago? Hadn’t I told her straight out that Ben knew who I was, and we were going to be together tonight, and every night hereafter?
I’d handed him to her on a silver platter, I thought numbly, opening my eyes to watch the zigzag of streetlights flaring before us, disappearing behind. By confirming to Ben the truth of my dual existence, or at least part of it, I’d given her leave to fill in the blanks. And she had. She’d pretended to use a changeling to turn herself into the old me-as Ben knew I’d done before-and with the mask on and the mannerisms she’d studied so closely, and a scent she’d manufactured and bottled after scrutinizing my own, she’d recreated the woman who spoke to Ben’s soul. And he was expecting me, after all. He wanted me. He thought he was making love to me.
None of that lessened my desire to throw myself from the speeding car.
The bay door to Hunter’s warehouse was lifting even as we rounded the final corner, and he pulled in smoothly, then waited for it to close again. He unlocked the car doors and got out. I remained seated, the cabin’s silence a cushion against my senses, only vaguely aware when Hunter lifted me from my seat and carried me through a narrow passageway I’d never even noted. We continued up a flight of stairs that ended in the crow’s nest where I’d sat with Warren a week before. Hunter deposited me on the corner of the desk, studied my gaze as it lingered on the black depths of the workspace below, then lifted me like I was a rag doll, and dropped me to the chair, away from the railing.
“Don’t try to escape the warehouse,” he said, closing the door to the hidden passageway so it melded back into a rickety wooden wall. It was almost pitch-black up here, and I looked around for the utility lights that were casting
