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Lara had insisted on meeting at the Club.
It wasn’t much different from the first time I’d been here, and I’d been a few times since getting married, but walking through without Thomas as a buffer was always more disorienting than expected. I shied away from a woman, soft and wet-mouthed, on her knees between her lover’s legs at the base of the stairs.
Maybe I should have asked Bear to come with me.
But this was supposedly family drama, not Wizard of Chicago business, and what sort of man needed backup to deal with his in-laws?
“Hell's bells,” I complained, when I had to brush off a man wearing nothing but a leather mask. He laughed and weaved drunkenly away.
It wasn't that I didn’t recognize some of the appeal in a place like Club Zero. I’d handled enough cases to know that more people than you’d think were desperate for an opportunity to act on their private passions. It was the origin for a lot of affairs. Sure, sometimes Mr. Humdrum started fucking his secretary because his wife hadn’t lost the baby weight. But sometimes Mr. Humdrum just wanted to be caught in a compromising position. Maybe have his wife tell him, and the rest of the block, that he was a grubby, disgusting pervert.
Divorce was an expensive trade-off, but I’d seen enough investigations go that way that I could only assume that the hindbrain had, at some point, made a compelling argument in its favor.
It was a relief when I finally got to Lara’s office. It was locked, but I got in easily enough.
She’d given me a key.
Lara’s office shared the Club’s general aesthetic of decadent depravity. Framed nudes made up the bulk of the wall behind Lara’s desk. They were all of Lara. Stills from her movies, photos from magazine shoots. There was even a fair but foul political cartoon that was probably worth more now that the artist had gone missing.
I didn’t care for them. It wasn’t that I didn’t find her attractive. On the contrary. But I knew Lara well enough at this point to recognize that the sultry come-hither look she’d given the camera in each of her sessions was a thinly veiled threat. Lara was a predator, same as the rest of her family, and her twisting her body to look tender and fuckable had been little more than a ploy to draw her next meal in close enough for the kill.
I wasn’t a saint. I still paused to squint at a framed photo of Lara, reclining on top of the pelt of a grey wolf. I was intimately familiar with this particular centerfold. It had been Lara’s way of kicking me to the couch after I’d ditched her for the week post-nuptials when we were slated to be honeymooning. Lara’s skin was white, except for the dusky pink of her nipples. Her head was thrown back in exaggerated ecstasy and the red of her wide open mouth matched the blood flecked through the wolf’s fur.
We’d made up, eventually.
There was a large curved sofa tucked against the wall opposite Lara’s desk. The upholstery was a blue velvet so dark it was nearly black. It was comfortable enough. I’d have sat there to wait for Lara, as I’d done before, except that tonight it was already occupied.
Lara’s sister Elisa was dressed for an evening out. Her top was mostly criss-crossing leather straps, wrapped around her torso so tightly that her skin was indented. I focused on the piercings in her eyebrow so I could better avoid looking at the ones in her nipples. I’d learned a few tricks while mentoring Molly.
I tried not to give Elisa a direct pass over, but through my peripheral vision I got the impression of tiny white briefs, a stretch of smooth-skinned thighs, and then familiar white leather boots that folded over her knees and stretched all the way down to a stiletto heel.
“Does Lara know you’ve been raiding her closet?” I asked my sister-in-law. I leaned back against the edge of Lara’s desk – which dated back to one of the French revolutions, if you’d believe it – and crossed my arms over my chest.
“You are welcome to take them off me,” Elisa said. She crossed her legs to great effect and bounced her booted foot in the air. She didn’t like me much. I’d wrangled her into dancing with me at the wedding to keep her from propositioning the Erlking. One political entanglement between the White Court and Winter was enough for the moment, thank you very much.
Elisa leaned in towards her cousin, Felicia Raith, the other half of the threat occupying the couch. “He is so concerned with pleasing Lara.”
Felicia was a slouch in comparison to Lara. Most people were. It wasn’t that she wasn’t cute, because she was. Long curly hair, dark like all the Raiths, and the features of her face and body were all pleasant and proportional. She just had no idea how to use any of it. She gave me a frank look over that she clearly meant to be sensual. I mostly felt a little scraped raw.
“My eyes are up here,” I told Felicia.
She didn’t take me up on my challenge, which was maybe the only smart thing she’d done since I first met her. A wizard’s soul gaze wasn’t something to treat lightly. In my experience mine packed quite the punch.
Instead Felicia bit lazily at the tip of her index finger. Her fingers were long and painted a trademarked white. She had less skin on display than Elisa, but her neckline plunged to her belt. Delicate silver necklaces dangled long between her breasts.
“I’ve heard that you’ve managed to tempt my dear cousin into monogamy,” Felicia said. The word came out like a filthy accusation. She flicked her tongue against the edge of her teeth. “I confess I don’t see what the appeal of you is.”
My faded jeans and my new-from-the-thrift-store shirt apparently didn’t impress.
“I make her laugh,” I said, flatly. The truth was that Lara had gotten bitten by Mab when she tried to collect on a debt owed, as deals with the fae tended to go. I was both the carrot and the stick. By marrying me, Lara was tied to Winter, with all the protections and power that came with it. The obligations and danger too. The leash I had around Lara had been a nasty surprise for us both.
The office door opened and Lara stepped in. I caught a glimpse of Freydis, her Valkyrie bodyguard contracted from Monoc, standing outside before the door shut again. Maybe I really should have brought Bear.
“You should muzzle your pet,” Felicia said to Lara, as soon as the pounding noise of the Club was once more silent. Felicia’s Hunger wasn’t as strong as Lara or Thomas’s, but I could still feel its pull flaring to life in the room. It thickened Felicia’s voice into something like syrup. “He might dislike it at the start, but he has the look of one who wishes nothing more than to be kept. You can imagine it, can’t you, Wizard? Bound and silent for the pleasure and use of your better?”
Felicia’s attempts at seduction were clumsy and her feeding was aggressive and indiscriminate. I was about as pulled in by her as I would have been by a bat to the back of the head. I looked to Lara. She and I’d settled into an agreement for how to manage when our various associations and obligations overlapped. She was supposed to leave any White Council and Winter Court communications to me, and I was supposed to leave her family members to her discretion.
Thomas had beaten the shit out of his cousin Madeline a few years ago in this same club for trying to feed from his partner.
Lara smiled, amused, at Felicia before she walked past me to circle around her desk. Ours wasn’t a relationship of love, like what Thomas felt for Justine. Lara sat down in her office chair.
“Cousin,” she said. “When will you learn it is more enjoyable to hear when the kine’s protests turn to pleasure? To know when they’ve followed you from resistance to surrender?”
Lara wasn’t a tender woman, no matter how much she played the girl-next-door routine around me. She was the head of House Raith. The queen of the White Court in effect, if not in name. It was not a position she held easily. Since our marriage, much of her power was interpreted through how completely she appeared to control me. I twisted my head around to glare at Lara, my jaw clenched.
I was starting to understand what she’d meant when she’d asked me to come around to help with some family trouble. I would’ve preferred bashing heads together.
“Husband,” Lara said. She didn’t flinch from the expression on my face, just met it with level confidence. “A kiss, please.”
Lara didn’t wham-bam me. Where Elisa and Felicia had all the combined subtlety of a bulldozer, and a similar amount of sensuality, Lara was a professional. She looked at me from under heavy lidded eyes and she rolled her bottom lip between her teeth. Energy efficient seduction. I scowled at her, disliking the pounding of my heart in my chest and the sudden throbbing in my jeans.
But I got up, circled around, and gave my wife what she’d asked for.
I’d become intimately familiar with Lara’s Hunger while she and I were searching for a way to save our brother, Thomas. Lara’s Hunger liked me, in its own way. The way a cat liked a mouse. Lara surged up to meet me and I bent down to kiss her. Her mouth was rich and searing under mine. Her Hunger had my body aching from head to toe. My arms found themselves around her. She wasn’t a large woman. She belonged in my grasp.
I don’t know how long the kiss lasted. However long it was, it wasn’t enough. When Lara broke it I groaned, a gut-deep protest. Lara smoothed her hand over my arm, still slung around her hip. It was a proprietary, soothing sort of gesture. I sagged forward, pulling her closer. I searched her face while panting ragged breaths. What did she want from me? What more did she need? The corners of Lara’s eyes tightened at whatever expression I made.
“I see what you mean, Cousin,” Felicia said. Her voice hit me like a cold bucket of water.
I straightened up and stalked over to the mini fridge Lara kept. Her assistants had it neatly packed with a row of Coke cans, along with a few bottles of Mac’s brew. I grabbed one of the square water bottles Lara kept for the special guests and downed it in a long gulp. I wasn’t here for pleasure. I would have dumped it over my head if I thought it would help.
Elisa tossed her choppy bangs. Lara returned to her seat. And the Raith women pivoted cleanly to discussing the overhead costs of the last quarter on the Silverlight Studios side of the family business. It was pointedly nothing to do with me, or my areas of expertise. Equally pointed was how openly they spoke. Maybe they thought I was still too out of it to understand or remember anything. Maybe they just knew there wasn’t anything I could do against them.
I’d been summoned exclusively as a display of power. Winter’s Knight, Chicago’s Wizard. Titan-Slayer, Marcone had called me. And Lara could bat her eyes and say please and I’d bend over for her.
It was the least bloody victory I’d witnessed. By White Court standards it was so clean it was beautiful. I chucked the empty water bottle into the trashcan next to Lara’s desk and felt a vindictive amount of satisfaction in seeing Lara’s mouth purse at the sound of the bottle first hitting the side of her treasured desk. I was so fucking tired of being moved around like a chess piece.
It didn’t take long for them to wrap everything up. Elisa and Felicia slunk out of Lara’s office thoroughly spanked. After they left, Freydis stuck her head in long enough to blanch and draw a swift retreat. The door shutting behind her was a crisp sound.
And then it was just the two of us.
I straightened to my full height. “Do you need anything else from me, Lara, or can I get out of here already?”
Lara’s eyebrows pushed together in an elegant flicker of consternation. I’d seen her soul. While Thomas and his Hunger were distinct beings, locked in step with each other, Lara had merged with her Hunger until they were thoroughly and inseparably intertwined. She wasn’t really human, my wife, although she shared enough of the same inclinations as one that it could be easy to forget that.
There was a very good chance she didn’t understand why I felt ready to blow right now. Hell, she might have expected me to be pleased. Her victory was mine, in a White Court sort of way.
Trying to parse the twists and turns of power was not my idea of a fun date night.
“I was going to order dinner in,” Lara said. Like she hadn’t already done that. Her eyes were bluer than they’d been when she first arrived. She cocked her head to the side, studying me. Her dark hair tumbled over her shoulders. “I could place a call. Invite some of your house to join us.”
I tried to imagine Charity or Georgia’s response to me inviting their husbands out for a quiet night at Club Zero. The hellish thing was that Michael and Will would probably come if I called. They might think I was being held hostage, and needed a rescue, but they’d come.
“Better not,” I said. I bared my teeth. “I’d lose whatever I ate before I got to my car. Do your kind have something against normal sex?”
Lara’s lips curled. “I don’t create the kine’s desires, Harry. I merely provide a safe environment for them to be explored.”
Yeah, and consumed.
Lara leaned back and swiveled in her office chair as I crossed the room. I made the mistake of looking back once my hand was on the door handle.
Lara had gone deep in the closet for tonight’s outfit. It was a shimmery sequined thing that would have better suited a party in West Egg than anything happening tonight at the Zero. The silver almost made her pale skin rosy. Her blink was as slow and languid as a big cat’s. “You truly believe there is nothing here that can tempt you?”
The purr was a dirty trick.
I put my back to her office door. I could feel the vibrations from the club's music through the steel and down my back. “I don’t enjoy guessing games,” I said. I should have already left. I harnessed the irritation I felt at myself and let it barb my voice. If Lara wanted to play a game of appeasement, she should know how deep in the hole she was. “You tell me what’s on the table and I decide if I want it.”
Stars, this was a bad idea.
Lara’s pupils dilated, and her mouth twitched. But she hadn’t survived dear old dad or the rest of her Court this long by blindly chasing after every temptation in her path. I experienced her Hunger stretching into the room like my vision tunneling. It was a web of intellect that could pick up emotions and physical sensation as cleanly as I could Listen. I let it meet a wall of my will.
“Uh uh, honey,” I said, and I sounded as mean and frustrated as I felt. “No phoning in for help.”
Lara's eyes searched my face and her mouth lost some of its amused curve. It was replaced by an edge of frustration, and then speculation. I knew, even before her smile returned, wider than before, that I’d stayed too long. Lara was a smart woman.
I should’ve left. Should’ve let the game die, several steps back. As it was, she got to see just how well a tilt of unpracticed sincerity landed on me.
"Thank you, Harry, for helping me.”