to disgust him as much as it delighted me, albeit not as much as the fact that I'd beaten him at whatever game we'd been playing. As soon as he'd kissed me, he was off again, running out of his father's office and down the hallway. "Boys have cooties!" I'd yelled, Mary Janes clomping as I ran after him.
"Are you all right?"
I blinked and looked up. We'd reached the other end of the room. Ethan had stopped and was gazing at me curiously.
"Just thinking," I said. "I'm still in shock about Nick, about his father. About their attitude.
We were friends. Good friends, Ethan, for a long time. I don't understand how it came to this. There was a time when Nick would have asked me, not accused me."
"The gift of immortality," Ethan dryly said, then glanced back at Chicago's rich and famous, who sipped champagne while the city buzzed around them. "Infinite opportunities for betrayal."
There were a bevy of his own stories behind that little aphorism, I guessed, but I couldn't see past my own.
Ethan shook his head as if to clear it, then put a hand at my back. "Let's go home," he said. I nodded, not even up to an argument that Cadogan wasn't "home."
We'd just moved into the foyer when Ethan stopped, his hand falling away. I glanced up.
Morgan stood just inside the door, arms crossed over worn jeans and a long-sleeved white T-shirt. A single brown curl draped rakishly across his forehead, and his blue eyes - accusing blue eyes - stared back at me.
I exhaled a curse, realizing what Morgan had seen. Me in a ball gown, Ethan in a tux, his hand at my back. The two of us together, in my parents' house, after I couldn't be bothered to return Morgan's phone calls. This was definitely not good.
"I believe someone has crashed your party, Sentinel," Ethan whispered.
I ignored him, and I'd just taken a step toward Morgan when I felt like I was falling through a tunnel. I had to touch Ethan's arm just to keep myself upright.
It was the telepathic connection Morgan and I had formed when he'd challenged Ethan at Cadogan House. The link was supposed to work only between vampire and Master, which might have been why the link with Morgan had such a strong effect. And why it seemed so wrong.
I'm sure you have an explanation, he silently said.
I wet my lips, uncurled my fingers from Ethan's arm, and forced my spine straight. "I'll meet you outside," I told Ethan. Without waiting for a response, I walked toward Morgan, forcing myself to keep my eyes on his.
"We need to talk," Morgan said aloud when I reached him, his gaze lifting to the man behind me, at least until that man slipped silently beside us and out the door.
"Come with me," I said, my voice flat.
We followed a concrete hallway to the back of the house, the walls still imprinted with the grain of their wooden forms. I picked a random door - a breach in the concrete - and opened it. Moonlight streamed through a small square window in the facing wall, providing a single beam of light in the otherwise pitch-black space. I stood quietly for a second, then two, and let my predatory eyes adjust to the darkness.
Morgan stepped into the room behind me.
"Why are you here?" I asked him.
There was a moment of silence before he met my gaze, one eyebrow raised in accusation. "Someone suggested I might see something interesting in Oak Park tonight, so here I am. You're busy working, I assume."
"I am working," I replied, my tone all business. "Who told you we'd be here?"
Morgan ignored the question. Instead he arched his eyebrows, and with a look that would have melted a lesser woman, raked his gaze across my body. Had waves of angry magic not radiated from him as he did it, I'd have called the move an invitation.
But this was different. A verdict, I think, of my guilt.
He crossed arms over his chest. "Is that what he's dressing you in these days while you're... working?"
He made it sound like I was less a Sentinel than a call girl.
My voice was tight, words clipped, when I finally spoke. "I thought you knew me well enough to know that I wouldn't be here, in my father's house, if there weren't a phenomenally good reason for it."
Morgan gave a strangled, mirthless half laugh. "I imagine I can guess what the phenomenally good reason is.