Her eyes stung, and her throat burned. Maybe he understood and maybe he didn't, but more words would get her nowhere. "Fine." She dropped the knife and turned for the door.
As she reached for the doorknob, his voice rolled over her again. "This doesn't mean I'm giving up. Cerys and Two can burn. I'll show you, Lexie. Somehow, I'll fucking well show you. I'm not letting you go."
"I know," she said as she slipped out the door.
It was what she was afraid of.
Bren
She was trying to be sneaky, but she was watching the show.
The door behind the unofficial VIP section led to the back staircase, and stood mostly in shadows. Bren doubted anyone else had noticed her there, braced against the jamb with the fingers of one hand on the doorknob, as if she needed her escape route ready to go.
Out on the stage, beneath the garish lights, Ace was flogging a woman. He had her bent over a low table, completely naked and tied so that all he had to do was turn his wrist to flick the leather tails against her exposed pussy.
And Six was watching every quick slap.
Bren studied her profile in the low light. "Do you like the idea?"
She started at his voice and jerked her gaze from the stage, as if she'd gotten caught doing something far more incriminating than watching. "What idea? Getting whipped?"
"That," he agreed easily, "or being on the stage. Not all the shows involve pain."
She folded her arms across her chest, under her breasts. Defensive and wary, and he knew the answer before she spoke. "No, not really. I've never liked being the entertainment."
He stopped beside the curtain and listened to the woman onstage moan and plead. "Is that what you see out there?"
"Maybe. I don't know." She shivered and glanced at him, her expression torn by honest confusion. "Is she acting?"
"Nope." He vaguely recognized the woman as one of Ace's regulars. "She likes it like this. Sometimes he stops when she's ready to fuck, and other times he keeps on whipping her."
"Oh." She seemed flustered, maybe more so when she realized how close she'd drifted to him. No matter how many careful feet he put between them, Six always seemed to cover the distance in a dozen shifts of position or tiny shuffling steps, and she never really relaxed until they stood shoulder to shoulder.
So shy--not about sex, necessarily, but pleasure. Bren held her gaze but tilted his head. "Tell me what you see when you look at that."
She hesitated. "You're not gonna like it."
"Probably not." But he couldn't counter it with his own point of view if she never said it.
Wetting her lips, she glanced at the stage again, just in time to watch Ace drive a choked plea from his lover's lips with a skillful application of leather. Six flinched at the woman's throaty cries and looked away. "A man whipping a woman. And a bunch of other men getting off on it."
"Abso-fucking-lutely. What else?"
Her expression tightened. "That's it. I didn't even see that she liked the pain. You told me that."
"What if I told you that was part of the fantasy for her? Being watched?"
She didn't say anything at first. She took his words and digested them, then turned back to the stage and studied it again, a tiny furrow of concentration appearing between her brows. "So she's using the men to get her fantasy?"
So careful, too, those little leaps in logic. "In a way. She isn't making the best of being on the stage, Six. It's what she wants."
"I don't think I could want that," she admitted after a moment, and there was apology in the glance she threw him. "The people watching, I mean. That was always the part I hated most."
A tiny slip, the kind of glimpse into her former life that made him want to dig up Wilson Trent and kill him some more. Instead, he smiled. "No shows for you, then."
Her slight exhale of relief sounded almost sad. But her gaze swung back to the stage with renewed curiosity, as if the words had freed her from a sense of foreboding. "The pain... Does it feel good because she always likes it, or because Ace is doing something special?"
"To hear Ace tell it, everything he does is special." Bren leaned closer. "Have you ever had an itch, one of those crazy ones that you can't stop thinking about? On your back or your arm, wherever, but all you