He touches his lips to my ear. “Drink?”
I nod. “Sure.”
To another bar, more in the central area. The crowd is denser, here, the air so thick you can taste the sweat. He leads me by the hand, pulls me close to him as we reach the bar.
“Beer?” he asks me.
“Yeah, whatever.”
The bartender slips us a pair of bottles, snapping off the tops. Tommy slaps his left hand onto the bar, tapping a tattoo on the back of his hand, dead center. A stylized H rune. The bartender dives a hand into his hip pocket and comes up with a penlight, illuminating the H, which glows red.
Instantly, I scuttle away from him.
Tommy glances at me, confused.
“I know what that tattoo means.” I curl my lip, disgusted. “I had…an encounter…with Oscar Wendell there.”
Tommy’s face pulls into a rictus of pure hate. He spits on the floor at his feet. “That nasty fucker oughta be taken around back and shot. I ain’t him, sweetheart.”
His reaction mollifies me, to some degree. “Still. I know what goes on there.”
He shrugs. “It’s the life, babe. But I know Oscar, and I know what kinda man he is—meaning, no kinda man at all. And I amnotlike him.” His grin is cocky. “I’m Tommy fuckin’ Chaos, babe. Got big-titty bitches throwing themselves at me all day long, honey. Got no reason to take it rough-like when it comes at me for free.”
Gross.
I back away. “Thank you for the dance, Tommy.” I leave the beer on the bar, slide it to him. “You can keep that.”
He grasps my wrist—light, an easily broken hold. “I’ll rock your sweet, innocent little world, darlin’. Give me five minutes between those sweet thighs, and I’ll have you callin’ my name insteada God’s.”
“Charming.” I tug my wrist free, and he lets me. “Thank you, but no thank you.”
He shrugs, takes the beer meant for me and drains it in a few long glugging gulps, slams it down, empty. “Your loss, babe.”
And he’s swaggering off into the crowd.
“Know who that was?” a deep, leonine voice rumbles in my ear.
A dark shiver slithers down my spine, terminating in an involuntary gush of wet heat between my thighs.
I don’t turn. “Yes. I do.”
“You turned him down.” He’s not touching me in any way, but I feel him all over me, nonetheless.
“Not my style.”
“Who is your style?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Not rock stars, it looks like.” I turn, then. His eyes glitter in the dark; he’s freshly shaved, skin smooth from jawline to the edges of his mohawk. “What if I said my style was you?”
He doesn’t react, visibly. “I’m not. Trust that.”
“How do you know?”
He merely stares at me. Inscrutable, unreadable. “You saw me in that cage.”
“Yes.”
“So why’re you here, Myka?”
