“Jordana,” Carys said, walking over now with Rune. “What’s the matter, honey? Are you all right?”
“It’s him. The man I met in the exhibit this afternoon. He was alive earlier today and now he’s—” Jordana’s stomach lurched, choking off her words. Her chest ached with a sense of loss she could hardly reconcile for a stranger she’d known only a few minutes. “I don’t understand how this could happen. Why would anyone want to kill Mr. Cassian?”
A swift, uncertain look passed between Carys and the two Breed males. Even in her distress, Jordana noticed the change in the air.
“Mr. Cassian?” Carys asked gently. “Jordana, that man over there is Cassian Gray.”
When Jordana didn’t react, Nathan added, “La Notte’s owner. Until tonight, no one would admit to having seen the bastard or to knowing where he might be.” He slanted a dark look at Rune. “I guess the Order wasn’t alone in trying to track Cass down.”
The fighter held the warrior’s stare. “Like everyone told you, Cass dropped off-grid for a few days without warning. It wasn’t that unusual for him.”
Nathan grunted and turned his attention to Jordana. “Why was Cass at the museum today—did he tell you that? What exactly did he say to you? What did he want?”
Jordana shook her head, confused. She hadn’t known the club’s proprietor by name, had only glimpsed him once or twice from a distance on those rare occasions when she’d gone with Carys to watch Rune fight.
What she vaguely recalled was a man with a shock of stiff, white-blond hair and black leather clothing bristling with metal studs and buckles. Not the drab-dressed everyman she’d met today.
“There has to be some mistake. I don’t know the man who runs this club. He’s not who I saw in the exhibit. He doesn’t even look like him—”
“It’s Cass,” Nathan insisted. “He’d altered his appearance and stayed out of the public eye, no doubt because he knew the Order was after him. Maybe he did it because someone else was after him too. The one who chased him down and took his head tonight.”
Jordana winced at the reminder. “The man at the museum today wouldn’t have those kind of enemies. He talked to me about sculptors he admired, about art and some of the pieces we have in the collection. He seemed like a decent, nice man—”
“He was a criminal,” Nathan cut in. “More than likely, far worse than a criminal. If I’d seen him anywhere near you, it would have been my blade biting into his neck.”
She stared up into his sternly handsome face, into stormy blue-green eyes that kindled with the faintest embers of amber light. She didn’t know what skewed reality she had to be living in that would make the kind of possessive, violent remark he’d just made seem like a pledge of affection. Certainly not in her reality—the one she’d chosen to retreat back into after she’d let Nathan nearly seduce her in her building’s elevator.
He cared for her about as much as he might care for any of his bed partners here at La Notte’s sex dens. Possibly less.
Jordana forced herself to break his arresting eye contact. “If I’m supposed to be flattered that you would use me as an excuse to murder an innocent civilian, you’re sadly mistaken.”
His thundercloud eyes narrowed on her. “He was no innocent, Jordana. Trust me on that.”
“Trust you?” She scoffed. “I don’t even know you.”
She turned and started walking away, needing space to breathe, to process everything that had happened today. She felt sickened by the death of the man she’d genuinely enjoyed meeting—whoever he truly was. And she couldn’t deny that seeing Nathan again, even under these awful circumstances, had affected her more deeply than she cared to admit.
In spite of how it hurt her to see him at La Notte with another woman so soon after he’d left her, Jordana couldn’t keep her pulse from beating a little harder around him. She couldn’t keep her foolish heart from wishing things had gone differently last night, that they could start over again, beginning with that reckless first kiss.
She hurried her pace, hoping she could round the corner and make it to her vehicle before the weight of everything she was feeling overwhelmed her.
While Carys and Rune stayed back, she heard Nathan’s long strides coming up fast on her heels. “What the hell is that supposed to mean—you don’t even know me?” His already deep voice dropped to a lower, arrestingly intimate tone. “Seems to me we got pretty familiar last night.”
She stopped abruptly and wheeled around on him, struggling to keep her voice controlled enough so that only he would hear. “Please, don’t remind me about last night.”
He halted where he stood, his square-cut jaw rising a notch. “You’re upset with me. Because of what happened between us in the elevator, or the fact that Bentley-Squire interrupted us and we didn’t get the chance to finish what we started?”
Jordana exhaled a sharp, outraged laugh. “I wish last night had never happened.”
“That makes two of us,” he said quietly, his face hard and unapologetic.
So he regretted it too? God help her, but she didn’t want to feel wounded by that admission. She wanted to feel only anger that he could bring her to the crest of something so incredible—something she’d shared with no other man before him—then turn around and slake his need on one of the trained professionals at the club.
Jordana spotted the leather-clad brunette sex worker near the back door of the building, one of several La Notte employees who’d since come out to gawk at the crime scene. She couldn’t help picturing Nathan’s hands on the female.
Equally painful to imagine was the thought of what the brunette might have done for him to earn the fistful of money Jordana had seen the woman tuck away after Nathan left one of the club’s private BDSM dens.
“I never should’ve kissed you,” Jordana murmured. How much simpler would her life be if she’d just stayed on the safe, secure little path that had been laid out for her?