Fangs, Fate & Other Bad Decisions novel Chapter 79

Chapter 79

Harley’s footsteps echo through me long after she vanishes through the ballroom doors. I hear them like a rhythm I can’t follow, growing fainter until they disappear completely.

I don’t move. Not right away. My jaw is set, and my fingers are clenched around the stem of my wine glass so tightly that the crystal might crack any second now. But I keep my posture elegant, like nothing happened. Like the woman I just danced with didn’t look at me like I was the beginning and the end of something she didn’t ask for.

Griffin shifts beside me. He doesn’t speak at first, but I can feel the weight of his stare on the side of my face.

“You do realize you just fucked that up, right?” he eventually says judgmentally.

I don’t answer.

He continues anyway, quiet but merciless. “You looked at her like she was oxygen one minute. Then you spent thirty minutes pretending she wasn’t in the room right next to you.”

take a slow sip of my wine, savoring the sting of it, hoping it will mask the more awful one in my chest. “I was being careful.”

“You were being a coward,” he corrects scathingly.

My glare cuts to him, sharp and immediate. But he doesn’t even flinch a millimeter.

“Don’t look at me like that, Mr. Draven. You went to her. You danced with her like your soul recognized hers. Then you ignored her like she was some inconvenient detail you could forget.”

When I hear him call me by my surname, I know I’ve royally fucked up. When we’re in the boardroom amongst clients, sure. But outside of it? Not in decades.

“You don’t understand,” I hedge.

Griffin barks out a soft laugh that’s sardonic and sharp, “Oh, I understand all right. I understand that you’re terrified. That you’re standing on the edge of something real and rather than step forward, you’d rather throw yourself back into the lonely abyss.”

I run a hand through my hair while exhaling through my nose, the chandelier above us sparkling like a pretty trap.

“You didn’t see her face when she left,” Griffin says, quieter now. That wasn’t a woman who just needed ‘a minute. That was a woman breaking into a million pieces at the hands of a man she thought was different.”

I flinch. Just slightly. But it’s enough.

The table chatters on around us–a cacophony of clinking glasses, pleasant lies, and money–soaked laughter. And beneath it all, the hollow ache of knowing I’d been handed a miracle, and then fucked it up by holding it like it might bite me.

Ten minutes pass. Then fifteen. And I check the door after every few minutes.

Still no Harley.

I stand abruptly. My chair scrapes against the polished floor, and Griffin rises with me.

Then I stagger. One step. Then another.

“What is it?” he asks.

My hand goes to the edge of the table for balance as something claws through me–a surge of pressure and heat and pain that isn’t mine. A flare in my wrist. A sharp, tearing sensation across my palm. A hammering throb at my temple. Then the unmistakable copper tang of blood.

Not mine.

Harley’s.

My pulse turns violent as Griffin catches my shoulder. “Thane. Talk to me.”

Chapter 79

I swallow hard, my voice rough as stone when I say, “She’s hurt. Something’s wrong. There’s blood.”

Griffin’s expression shifts instantly, all charm vanishing when he asks with urgency, “Where is she?”

“I don’t know, I only felt it.”

Then we move. We push past stunned guests, threading our way between tables, and ignoring polite protests. My eyes scan every corridor and every alcove, but she’s nowhere.

Griffin disappears, already pulling out his phone to text someone, maybe the valet or my security that’s lurking in the shadows somewhere. I head towards the side hallway outside the ballroom with blood in my mouth and fire in my limbs.

Eventually, I push through a set of glass doors leading to the hotel’s front drive, my breath shallow, and my collar clinging to the beading sweat at the nape of my neck. The night air is cooler here, sharp with exhaust fumes and the fading remnants of cigars.

A sleek black SUV pulls away from the curb, with a familiar figure behind the wheel.

In the hackseat, behind the tinted glass, there’s a blur of fabric and a pale, feminine arm,

She doesn’t look back. But maybe she can’t.

Griffin skids to a stop beside me as his eyes narrow on the retreating red backlights, and asks, “That Mike’s car?”

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