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I drop my voice to a confiding whisper, just for him, just under the held breath of the room. “But if you’re going to threaten me with a good time, sugar, we do it in that specific corner over there. It’s my favorite. The camera sits a fraction higher on that wall, so if you bend me over and have your way,a man built as wide as you covers the goodies completely.” I pat the forearm crushing my ribs, fond as anything. “I do love to entertain my audience. But my pretty pussy is precious and exceptionally valuable, and not just anyone has earned the right to enjoy the sight of her.”

I rise onto the very tips of my toes inside his grip, stretching my mouth up toward the underside of his stubbled jaw, and I let the next words ghost warm against his skin.

“She’s pierced, too.”

I wink, and sink back down off my toes, and feel the shudder that moves through the granite at my back like a fault line deciding whether to slip.

“Miss Valentine.”

The voice cuts across the silent hall the way a scalpel parts skin—quiet, unhurried, certain of its welcome.

I roll my eyes upward and find him at the far edge of the quarter, exactly where a sane man would not stand: Dr. Lucien Graves, in a suit this room cannot afford, arms crossed over that enormous chest, two fingers rising to nudge his glasses up the bridge of his nose as though he’s watching a lecture run slightly long. There’s a bottleneck of armed guards between him and me and he regards them, and the broken glass at my throat, with the mild interest of a man checking the time.

So he came to watch the co-mingling. My session. My first one with him in the building.

How flattering…or is it telling?

I file it.

I stick my tongue out at him, because he’s being insufferable and someone should tell him.

Then I spin.

Fast—faster than a captured Omega should be able to move, faster than the arm around me can correct for, the spin I’vedrilled ten thousand times on poles they took away and beams they don’t know I practice on.

The motion peels me out of his hold and torques his own momentum against him, and the surprise of that alone rocks the big body back half a step. But the surprise that matters, the one that drops the hall’s collective jaw, isn’t the slip.

It’s that he’s no longer holding the broken bottle.

I am.

And it’s at his throat.

Silence, total and crystalline.

The tension in the room pulls so taut I could pluck it and play a note. I step into him instead of away, crowding the man who outweighs me twice over, the green glass steady against the thick artery in his neck, and I lean up to whisper the way you whisper a secret to a lover.

“Name.”

My voice has gone flat.

Stripped of the sugar, the skip, the lunatic music. Deadpan as a closed door.

And I watch what it does to him—watch his pale grey eyes drop from mine to my mouth and climb slowly back, watch the heavy bob of his throat against the edge of the glass, the swallow of a man who has just felt the temperature of a room change and found, to his evident interest, that he likes the cold.

“Riot,” he says. First word he’s given me.

Low, gravel-dragged, unbothered.

I grin, and I press—just a fraction, just enough—and a single bead of blood wells up bright against the green glass and slides down his throat in a thin red thread. He doesn’t flinch.

He watches me watch it, and his scent darkens, the smoke thickening, the iron note swelling to meet the fresh copper at his neck, and the air between us turns frankly obscene.

“No weapon raised against me shall prosper,” I murmur, sweet as a hymn. “Unless it’s cock. I’m partial to a thick, veiny thing weaponized against my exceptionally generous pussy. But that’s the only blade I let near me, sugar.”

I toss the bottle.

It shatters against the floor with a crash that lands like a gunshot in all that pin-drop quiet, glass skittering across the tile, and not one soul in the hall so much as breathes.