Where Winter Finds You (Black Dagger Brotherhood #18)- J.R Ward Page 0,19

a missing person? “Or perhaps the menu?”

The woman’s smile was sad for a reason that Therese couldn’t begin to guess at. “I’d love a glass of white wine. And what did you say your name is?”

CHAPTER SIX

shAdoWs was every club in America. You had dark corners, random lasers, booming music, and plenty of booze. The sex and drugs were BYO, and for the most part, Trez left his clientele alone on those fronts. There were two reasons for this: One, the less you hassled them, the more often they came back and dropped their cash, and two, he really didn’t give a shit—and that had been true well before he had loved and lost his queen.

Staring down at the churning crowd from his second-floor office, he watched them through the kind of one-way glass that psychologists used to monitor the interviews of insane people. And this made sense. The men and women below, stimulated and stimulating each other, were not on the normal bandwidth, and that was why they came to his establishment. Most of them were young, but they were all out of college if they had gone to one, the twenty-one-year-old age requirement for drinking in New York weeding out the underclassmen. Most had low-level jobs, ones that were above menial but not by much. Most were renters in bunches of two and three. Most had STDs or were going to get them as soon as they jumped into the one-night stand pool on the dance floor.

All of them were desperate for a break from the stress in their lives.

Yeah, ’cuz there was nothing like getting away from your mistakes by making new ones.

Trez should know. After his two decades of being a pimp and an enforcer in Caldwell, nothing had changed, just the faces on those young bodies and maybe some of the politics. And for a long time, he had been down there with them, and not only in terms of security or sales of sex or drugs. He too had partaken of the women and the females. It had been a nice distraction, whether it was the sex workers who he provided a safe environment for or the women who came to dance and see what they could pull. He had always been a sure thing, and not just at the club. Everywhere. He had had sex with real estate agents, lawyers, tax accountants, personal trainers, landscapers, laundresses, mechanics, hairdressers…

And in spite of that track record, as he looked over the crowd, he saw nothing of interest. There were plenty of good-looking women down there, most of them half dressed and double-jointed, with willingness written all over them. But to him they were another species, and not just because they were mostly human. He’d no more have sex with them than he would a wolfen or a mailbox.

Letting go of his sex addiction had been easy. Letting go of what had taken its place, his Selena, was impossible.

Down below, the crowd’s random pattern of grinding abruptly shifted and found a cohesion that rarely happened, bodies packing in tight to clear a path. Someone had come into the club and was walking through the cram of people—and whoever they were, folks were getting out of their way in a hurry, parting like the Red Sea of Fuckboys and Casual Lays.

Trez recognized the figure immediately. Then again, like anyone else on the Eastern seaboard wore a floor-length sable coat indoors, and carried a walking cane that doubled as a weapon? Rehvenge was back in his element, strolling through the club like he owned it, his Mohawk and his amethyst eyes nothing that any of the clubbers had ever seen the likes of before, the aura of don’t-fuck-with-me exactly the kind of thing their survival instincts recognized as a cue to skidoo.

Trez backed off from the glass wall and went to the door to his office. As he left and proceeded down the stairs, he couldn’t think of why his old boss was doing an out-and-about, especially in a club. Rehv had staged his own death a couple of years ago in a spectacular explosion, wiping out the identity he’d cultivated as a drug dealer and club owner on the scene. Why the resurrection?

Down on the floor, Trez came around the base of the staircase as Rehv broke through the last of the congregation.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Trez murmured as they met face-to-face.

Rehvenge was not merely your average vampire. He was a symphath, and not just a Joe