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“I can’t explain. I just need you to trust me on this.”
“Are you going to leave me here once I shut my eyes?”
“What? No.” He ran a hand through his hair again, making him look tousled and sexy as well as worried. “I have ways of dealing with the camera. Secret ways that you can’t see, which is why you need to close your eyes.”
“Secret ways? That sounds corny. Do you have more tech that I don’t know about? Something experimental? Is that why I have to close my eyes—so you don’t give away company secrets?”
“Something like that,” was all he said.
“Considering I don’t work for CommTECH anymore, there’s no need to keep secrets from me. There wouldn’t be a conflict of interest, as I don’t have a company to share them with.”
“Okay, it isn’t exactly a tech secret. It’s just something you shouldn’t see until we have time to deal with it properly.”
And wasn’t that precisely the kind of thing you shouldn’t say to someone and not expect them to die of curiosity? “Now I really don’t want to close my eyes.”
“Keiko,” he said with strained patience. “We’re running out of time. Do you want to keep asking questions or let me cover the camera?”
“Moody.” Against her better judgment, she shut her eyes, folded her arms, and frowned. He might excel at saving her life, but he sure knew how to get on her last nerve while doing it.
“Turn to face the wall,” he ordered.
She let out a huff of irritation. “No trust.” But she turned away from him.
“Okay, I’m going to cover the camera,” he said. “Keep those eyes closed tight.”
“They’re as tight as they’re going to get.”
“Promise me you’ll keep them that way.”
“I promise.” She snapped the words. “Can you get on with it? Or do I have to stand here forever?”
“I mean it. Don’t look.”
And she didn’t.
For all of two seconds.
She couldn’t say exactly why she turned around to see what he was doing. Sure, she was curious, but normally she would have kept her word—but this time was different. Something made the hairs on her nape stand on end, and she felt the air charge around her. It was a strange, electric sensation that made her skin bristle and her heart race. It wasn’t so much that she decided to turn. It was more she felt compelled to.
And what she saw was incomprehensible.
Mace had loosened his shirt and lowered it down at the back. Just enough for her to see the head of a small tattoo on his shoulder bl
ade. It was a strange tattoo for a man as dangerous and threatening as him. She would have expected a skull and crossbones or a biker-gang emblem; instead, there was a tiny, detailed drawing of a bat.
She shuddered at the sight, remembering the bat that’d pushed her from the ledge. Okay, not literally, but it had definitely been to blame for her fall. She hadn’t been overly fond of bats before that incident. Now she really didn’t like them.
For some reason, she couldn’t take her eyes from the tattoo, even though it clearly had nothing to do with his mysterious plan to cover the camera. The drawing was incredibly detailed. You could almost see every single hair on the bat’s head. And the eyes were so lifelike they seemed to stare at her.
No.
Not seemed.
They were staring at her.
An icy chill ran up her spine as her stomach fell. She couldn’t rip her eyes from the bat. And she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Because the tattoo was moving. Mace’s muscles clenched, his body shivered and tensed, and then the bat morphed from two-dimensional drawing to three-dimensional animal.
Right.
