Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121854 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121854 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Then the tableau was past, the two of them racing to another section of the city. They weaved through residential high-rises built with the minimum permissible gap—still wide enough for an angel to fly through, but it took skill not to veer and scrape their primaries on the walls.
It took even more skill to do that while racing up, then diving down.
You’re just showing off now.
Illium grinned at that disgruntled statement, but he could feel Aodhan shadowing him. His friend and lover had to work harder to pull off the nimble movements, but he was perfectly capable of each and every one.
They emerged into clear skies before racing back over the city.
When they landed in front of Erotique side by side, slamming down onto the ground at the last second after pulling up from a high-speed dive, it was with their chests heaving and hair tumbled. “That was fun.” Aodhan’s grin was wild and of the boy who’d joined Illium in every one of his harebrained schemes as a child.
Cheeks hurting from the force of his happiness, Illium shoved a hand through his hair just as Dulce threw open the club’s door. “Oh, thank the Havens!” Her eyes were huge, the irises an intense purple possible only in a vampire who’d started out with eyes a specific shade of blue. Their color was stunning against the raven black hair she currently wore in a shoulder-length mass of waves.
Pressing a hand to her heart, her ring finger encircled by a band of gold, she said, “When I saw the speed of your landing through my office window, I thought I was going to discover you both slammed into paste on the sidewalk.”
“You wound me, Dulce.” Illium clutched at his own heart with both hands. “Are you going to let us in? Sparkle here is attracting attention—hey!” He’d been ready to catch Aodhan’s wing at his back again, had a trick up his sleeve for that, but Adi had just doused him with a bottle of cold water. “Where did you even get that?”
Aodhan capped the bottle with a smile as Illium shoved back his wet hair. “I like to be prepared.” He turned to Dulce. “We haven’t formally met. I’m Aodhan.”
Her lips were twitching. “Dulce, and I think we’re going to be fast friends,” she said. “I’ve been trying to take Illium down a peg the entire time I’ve known him and never yet succeeded.” She held open the door. “Come on in.”
* * *
* * *
Aodhan was curious about this place that he knew Illium had frequented on a regular basis for a number of years prior to the war.
Dulce, while relatively young for a vampire, clearly had a familiar relationship with him. “Nice to see you, stranger,” she said as she threw him a clean towel from behind the bar. “I thought you’d forgotten us.”
“I’ve taken up crochet,” Illium said from under the towel he was using to dry his hair. “Swallows up all my time.”
Rolling her eyes but smiling, Dulce reached up to retrieve a glass.
“I meant to ask,” Illium said as she added two others beside it, “how did the owners lure you back? Last I heard, you were happily managing your own place.”
“Fifteen percent stake,” Dulce said with a grin. “Turned out business dived without my magic touch. I have good people managing my own club, but you know me—I keep an eagle eye on all operations.”
Illium whistled. “Next thing I know, you’ll be the club boss in the city.”
Dulce’s smile made it clear that was her goal. “I know Illium’s drink of choice,” she said with a glance at Aodhan. “What’ll you have?”
Many a senior angel would’ve been annoyed—even angered—by Dulce’s familiarity, but Aodhan liked being treated as just another angel. Even a friend. He knew it was all because of Illium. He was the one who was friends with Dulce…and perhaps had once been more. The way they teased each other, it implied a depth of connection that went beyond friendship.
But Dulce wore a ring now, and Illium was Aodhan’s.
In an immortal’s life, jealousy could be a thing corrosive. Especially jealousy with no cause. Whatever had happened between the two was long in the past, as were Aodhan’s youthful love affairs.
“Do you carry honey mead?”
“I have an artisanal batch that just came in from a new supplier. I’d be interested to hear what you think of it.”
As she poured, he looked around the club. The walls were a gleaming black, noon sunlight slanting in through the high windows. It should’ve looked dingy, a place that came alive only in the night, but the club was both scrupulously clean and elegantly styled.
The glossy black walls worked as well in daylight as they did in the night, and the polished concrete floor added a hard edge that felt deliberate. People didn’t come to Erotique for soft—but neither, from what he’d heard, was it akin to the seedier flesh clubs of the gray district.