Page 52 of Night's Reckoning
She stared at the reflection of the skyline in the glass. “He says we aren’t friends anymore.”
“He said he wasn’t your friend?” Cheng narrowed his eyes. “I’ll be honest, that sounds very stupid. And unlike Ben.”
Tenzin swung her legs back and forth. “It wasn’t exactly that. He said, ‘This isn’t friendship.’”
“Oh.” Cheng shrugged. “That’s quite different.”
“How?”
“You know…” Cheng smiled a little. “You’ve been getting better about reading human reactions—any reactions, for that matter—which is one of the reasons I’ve put up with your odd relationship with him. I think he’s been good for you. But do you really not understand what he’s talking about, Tenzin?” Cheng leaned forward. “Do you really? Or are you afraid?”
She stared at Cheng, who was coming far too close to being overly perceptive. “This isn’t about Stephen.”
“You don’t think so? How about Nima? Is it about Nima?”
Tenzin couldn’t say anything. A flood of anger washed over her. Anger at Nima. At her humanity. At her loss.
“Nima is none of your business,” she said quietly.
His face softened. “You and I would never be what you and Nima were, Cricket. My heart isn’t built that way. But yours was once.”
“You don’t know how my heart is built. You don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
“Does anyone know you?”
Nima had. And she was gone. She was dead because she was human, and she’d taken Tenzin’s memories with her into the darkness.
And now Tenzin was feeling inexplicable urges to bite Benjamin. She wanted to hurt him and wanted to lie next to him and absorb his heat. He distracted her and made her want things she’d forgotten. It irritated her, like the feel of an insect buzzing around her face. She felt more at ease when she was in his presence, and it made her angry.
You say you want to know me.
I don’t think you do.
Her eternally silent heart had beat wildly for a few seconds when she’d seen the two vampires stalking him tonight. The sensation was physically painful.
You don’t want to know the things I have seen.
Ben might have thought he had the situation under control, but she’d seen their body language. They weren’t going to leave him alive. He would have been dead and gone because he was so infuriatinglymortal.
Tenzin hopped down from the balcony ledge. “Ben will be coming back in his own car. Make sure the valets are expecting him. And be thinking about who might want to hurt Ben. It’s not my father, but it could be one of your enemies trying to hurt me through you.”
Cheng shook his head slightly. “Or we could guess it’s very likely that just as the man has allies of his own, he also has enemies. Did you think of that?”
“Of course I thought of that.” But she’d dismissed it. Ben’s enemies weren’t likely to follow him all the way to Shanghai, and they weren’t likely to know the location of her home. This was far more likely to have something to do with Tenzin, her sire, or Cheng.
“I’ll let the valets know about Ben.” Cheng looked up as she walked by. “Did you at least find that book you were talking about?”
She stopped in her tracks.Shit.
* * *
Tenzin walkedout of the room and toward the balcony on the far end of the floor. She opened the door, closed it, and floated up to the small room that Cheng had customized for her. It was the only place other than her own home she was willing to stay while she was in Shanghai.
It was only accessible from the air and there was no door connecting it to the rest of the building, only a small hatch nearly invisible to anyone who didn’t know what to look for.
Tenzin imagined it had once been a storage area or something similar, but Cheng had finished the walls with calming blue silk wall hangings and carpeted the small room with silk rugs before he blocked up the old doorway.
The single window in the room overlooked the Shanghai skyline. She could see the glowing lights of the Pearl Tower among the dozens of brilliantly lit skyscrapers that dominated the modern Shanghai sky.
