Page 27 of The Reveal
I can feel everything inside me shifting. Changing.Humming.
Like he’s some kind of tuning fork and my body is responding despite my best efforts.
It doesn’t help that he is, by far, the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.Ruinousseems like a vast understatement. He is almost too beautiful to look at directly.
Last night the werewolf alpha was a study in brawn. Brute force, muscled accordingly and riotously.
But this man is something else entirely. There’s all that lean muscle, honed to perfection. If the werewolf was a hammer, Ariel is a knife. The kind assassins use, long and sharp and so deadly it feels like blood just tolook. His hair is black and closely cropped. He has a fierce nose and a cruel mouth, though looking at it makes everything inside of me go soft.
Soft and hot, and I don’t understand it at all.
He has his arms crossed over a chest marked in wicked-looking scars, and I can see the hint of a dark-inked tattoo that loops over one shoulder and comes around again at the opposite hip.
I don’t have to see the rest of it in the nonexistent reflection. I know, somehow, that it’s some kind of dragon. That he is fire.
I feel as if I’m running. As if I’m trapped in that alley with terrible nightmares coming in hot on my heels.
But I can’t look away. His gaze is like quicksilver, a searing alchemy that I can feel roll all through me like he’s turning me into something new.
I blink. I pull in a breath. I watch as the lines of spinning and kicking suddenly ... stop.
Like a screech, though there is no sound.
Well.
There is one sound.
My pounding, wildfire, disastrously mortal heart.
Every single one of the vampires turns to stare right at me, but the only stare Ifeelis his.
Wrapped all around me like his tattoo.
“Hi,” I say brightly. Foolishly. “I’m Winter Bishop. You summoned me?”
7.
The vampire king lifts a hand in a manner that should appear languid but ... doesn’t. He waves it, just slightly, but I stand straighter at the sight of it. Like it’s a command wired straight through me.
It must be, because all the other vampires disappear.
I look around for puffs of smoke, or hints that they simply moved really fast, the way Ty did last night, but there’s nothing to see. They’re just gone.
“Vampire tricks,” says the king.
I find myself thinking about his name. Ariel. Like an angel.
But paired withSkinner. Which I suppose is self-explanatory, really.
My own skin prickles with warning. Thenblareswith alarm as it really settles in on me that I am standing all alone in this huge room, all mirrors and high white ceilings above polished wood floors, with this valley’s apex predator.
He doesn’t move, but that almost makes it worse.
My body knows exactly what he is, and I wait a strangled breath or two for it to decide if flight or freeze is the better option here—fightbeing laughably out of the question—but something else happens. At first, I think it’s catastrophic, a disastrous explosion of heat from the very depths of me, but it doesn’t make me keel over.
It just makes me too hot and too uncomfortablyawareof that heat in all the worst places.
All the most humiliating places.
