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She frowned up at him. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing,” he murmured, giving his hips a meaningful grind against hers. “I just think it could be amusing, doing other things you’ll enjoy but might not expect. Finding ways to keep you guessing, for a change.”
He was still moving within her, still hard. Getting harder, in fact.
Nova caressed his face, his handsome, otherworldly face. She wondered how long it would take for her to tire of looking at him.
Longer than she dared imagine.
A lifetime and then some.
She held on as he found his tempo once more. Sighed with pleasure as his rising rhythm steered her toward the edges of another crest of sensation. Closing her eyes, she let him take her there, rode with him as his large body began to go rigid and tense, his hips pumping harder now, furious and deep.
She cried out his name. Heard him mutter hers on a coarse shout beside her ear in that next instant, as heat exploded within her and he shook with the force of his orgasm.
Nova’s heart was pounding like thunder in her ears.
Then she heard the rumble again--a rapid drumming, urgent and unsteady. Coming from the other room.
Mathias heard it too, no doubt before she had. He reared back abruptly.
“Nova.” Eddie’s voice sounded oddly thin outside the apartment door.
“Something’s wrong.” Mathias said it before she could voice her concern. His face was grim, nostrils flaring. “There is blood.”
“Oh, God.” Alarm jolted her off the bed. She hurried back into her tank and sweat pants and was racing out to the living area in the next instant. She yanked open the door and shock hit her like a punch to the gut. “Eddie...oh, my God!”
The boy was white as a ghost, his eyes dilated with shock. Blood stained the front of his T-shirt and jeans. A lot of blood.
Nova grabbed him and hugged him close. She felt for injuries, but he seemed unharmed. Her hands came away sticky and red. “What happened to you? Where’s Ozzy?”
“In the shop,” he murmured, his voice thready. “I couldn’t do anything, Nova. He told me to hide. I wanted to help him, but he wouldn’t let me.”
Panic seized her. “Ozzy?” she shouted into the silence of the building.
Mathias stood behind her now, bare-chested, dressed only in his black pants. Nova swung her gaze up at him, a raw sob hitching in her throat.
“Oh, God. What the hell is going on? Oz!”
She lunged past Eddie, only to be halted when Mathias took hold of her arm. “Nova, stay here. Let me--”
She wrenched loose on a miserable cry and bolted for the stairs leading down to the studio.
CHAPTER 8
“Ozzy...oh, no. No!”
Nova found him in the empty tattoo shop, lying in a pool of blood near his station. Dropped in a ragdoll sprawl on his back, his body was motionless, his eyes frozen wide. His throat was gashed open, hideously savaged.
“Oz!” she cried, standing barefoot at the edge of the blood pool, her hands covering her mouth as a howl of anguish tore out of her. “No, Ozzy. No...”
“I was sweeping the back room after Ozzy finished with a client, when I heard a man come into the shop,” Eddie murmured from behind her at the bottom of the stairs. “He was looking for someone. Looking for you, Nova.”
Confusion jabbed through her grief as she stared down at the savagery done to her beloved mentor. “Looking for me? Are you sure?”
“He didn’t seem to know your name,” Eddie went on, “but the man knew what you looked like. He told Ozzy, asked if he knew you. The man said it was important that he find you. He said you were in trouble.”
She frowned, trying to make sense of the horror in front of her. Even in her state of numb shock, she could scent the lie in what the attacker told Ozzy. “Did you see who it was, Eddie?”
