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"What happened?" Margo lifted a pair of worried eyes to him.
Knowing that his eyes were probably glowing, he averted his gaze. "I need to find the bathroom." He rushed out of the dining room.
Finding the bathroom was easy, and after ducking inside, Negal locked the door and leaned against it.
Damn. This hadn't happened to him in a long while. He'd been trained to control his reactions, and he didn't allow his fangs to act on their own accord among humans. Perhaps it had been the time he had spent among immortals where he hadn't needed to hide his godly features that had weakened that mental muscle.
Walking up to the sink, he didn't bother looking into the mirror as he turned on the faucet and gathered water in his palms to splash over his face. After taking a few long breaths, he managed to retract his fangs, and when he finally looked at the mirror, his eyes didn't glow.
He took the opportunity to empty his bladder, washed his hands, and after several additional long breaths, opened the door and returned to the dining room.
While he'd been gone, the chef had served dinner, but neither Jasmine nor Margo were eating. They were waiting for him, he realized.
"I'm sorry. Something must have disagreed with my stomach." He lifted the napkin that had fallen on the floor when he'd made his hasty exit.
Margo smiled. "Now I know for sure that you are really a man and not an angel. Angels don't get upset stomachs."
Neither did he, but he couldn't tell her that. "Thank you for waiting for me." He draped the napkin over his lap. When neither of the women picked up their forks, he frowned. "Is there a special blessing over the meal that needs to be said?"
"Not unless you want to." Margo looked at Jasmine. "Do you want to say anything?"
Jasmine shrugged. "Thanks to the chef?" She waved a hand at the bottle of wine. "We should make a toast to our savior." She smiled at Negal. "We were waiting for you to uncork the wine. The chef just put it on the table without opening it. Usually, whoever serves the wine does the honors."
Margo chuckled. "Not on a yacht owned by a cartel boss. He probably doesn't drink anything that he didn't open himself."
"Good point." Jasmine let out a breath. "I didn't suspect Alberto of anything, so I didn't watch him open the wine bottle, and that was how he got us. He put something into the wine. Probably a roofie."
"What's a roofie?" Negal reached for the bottle, found the opener, and uncorked the wine.
"It's a drug that makes the victim sleepy," Margo said. "It's usually tasteless, and unscrupulous men spike unsuspecting women's drinks to take advantage of them."
Negal commanded his fangs to stay dormant and poured the wine into their three glasses. "I will kill him for you."
Margo's eyes widened. "Are you serious?"
He wasn't sure how he was supposed to answer that. "I want to kill him, but if it will displease you, I won't."
"He's just a maggot." Margo lifted her wine glass. "He's not worth tainting your soul for." She put the glass down without drinking.
Negal took a sip of the wine to refrain from saying that getting rid of vermin would by no means taint him in any way. Margo and Jasmine might have been through a terrifying ordeal, but thankfully, they hadn't seen true evil. If they had, Margo might have had a different view on things.
"Let's make a toast." Jasmine lifted her glass. "To our saviors, who arrived in the nick of time."
That reminded Negal that he hadn't arrived alone, and that the clan pilot and Kalugal were probably hungry as well. "I should tell Kal—I mean Kevin to join us."
Margo put her fork down. "He seemed busy." She frowned. "I wonder how he made all those tough guards obey his command. Come to think of it, why did Jasmine and I drop to our knees as well? We knew that he wasn't talking to us, and yet it was like my body was under his control, obeying his commands and not my own."
"Hypnosis," Negal said the first thing that came to his mind. "Kevin is a powerful hypnotist."
He would have to thrall both women and muddle their memories of what they had witnessed.
Margo grimaced. "That's a very dangerous trick. I'll stay away from that one." She picked up her fork. "Let's eat."
Negal cut a piece off the fragrant roast. "Kevin is a good guy. He only uses his hypnotic power for good."
"Well, thank you." Kalugal walked into the room with the pilot by his side. "I could smell this roast all the way from the salon, and I was salivating. The last meal I had was at the wedding last night."
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