The VIP lounge at Sinners occupied the entire east mezzanine.....elevated above the main floor by design, separated from it by smoked glass that could be made transparent or opaque at the touch of a button, accessible only through a private elevator that required both a key card and a biometric scan to operate. It was not a coincidence that it looked, in many ways, like a cage with an excellent view.
Tonight the glass was transparent.
Zain Blackwood had made that decision approximately forty minutes ago, when they arrived, and he hadn't explained his reasoning to his brothers because he rarely explained his reasoning to anyone. The glass was transparent because something had told him to keep their view of the floor unobstructed. He'd learned, over the course of twenty-nine years of being what he was, to listen to those instincts without interrogating them.
He sat now in the largest chair....not by anyone's deliberate arrangement, but because that was simply how it worked when Zain entered a room. The largest space defaulted to him the way the coldest part of any room defaulted to ice. He held a glass of something dark and expensive and hadn't touched it in eleven minutes. His pale grey eyes moved across the main floor below with the systematic attention of someone conducting surveillance rather than enjoying an evening out.
Cael was to his left, one leg crossed over the other, a glass of scotch resting against his knee with the casual elegance that was his most reliable disguise. He was watching the stage. He'd been watching the stage since they arrived, with the particular stillness that meant his mind was moving very fast in a very specific direction, though he hadn't shared that direction with either of his brothers. Cael shared information on his own schedule.
Riven was everywhere else.
He had not sat down in a sustained way since they'd arrived. He'd been at the bar, then at the window, then sprawled briefly across the second couch before restlessness had him up again, currently standing at the smoked glass with one hand braced against the frame, looking down at the floor below with the barely-contained energy of something that would prefer to be in motion. He'd finished two drinks to his brothers' none and was considering a third out of boredom more than want.
"You could sit down," Cael said, not looking at him.
"You could stop tracking my movements," Riven returned, also not turning around.
"I'm not tracking them. They're simply unavoidable."
Riven's mouth curved on one side. He turned from the glass, reached for the decanter on the table beside him, reconsidered, and turned back to the window instead. Below, the current set was wrapping up....he could tell by the shift in the music, a change in the lighting sequence. He watched the performer take her exit with professional detachment. She was beautiful. Most of the women here were. It registered and moved on, the way most beautiful things did for him....noted, appreciated, filed, forgotten.
He was about to turn away.
The lighting shifted again.
The stage went dark for exactly three seconds...that particular dramatic pause that the best performers understood how to use, the silence before the note that made the note mean something. Riven's eyes stayed on the stage out of nothing more than mild curiosity.
Then she walked out.
Later, if asked to describe what happened in the first two seconds of seeing Eva Santos walk onto that stage, Riven would have struggled to find language adequate to the experience. Not because he was prone to speechlessness....Riven was almost never speechless. But because what happened wasn't romantic or poetic or any of the soft things that people used to describe attraction. It was physical first, visceral and immediate and violent in its intensity....a response that moved through him like a current, entirely outside his control, bypassing every layer of composure and landing somewhere ancient and instinctive at his core.
His hand tightened on the window frame.
Every muscle in his body went rigid.
And a heat that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with something deeper, older, more fundamental than desire moved through him with the force of a decision already made.
What, he thought, with complete incoherence, is that.
She moved like the music was a language only she was fluent in. Like her body had been designed specifically for this — not the performance of it, not the technique, though the technique was flawless, but the feeling of it. The way she inhabited every movement from the inside out, so that nothing looked executed, everything looked expressed. Under the stage lighting her skin looked like it was lit from within....this warm, golden luminescence that made it genuinely difficult to believe she was standing under the same artificial lights as everything else in the room.
Her eyes, even from this distance, caught the light in a way that made his chest do something complicated.
Riven realized, distantly, that he hadn't breathed in a noticeable amount of time.
"Riven."
Cael's voice. Low. Controlled. But Cael's voice was always controlled, and what lived underneath the control right now was something that Riven recognized because he was feeling it himself....a kind of stunned, furious, unwilling pull that neither of them had asked for and neither of them knew what to do with.
Riven turned from the window.
Cael's dark green eyes were fixed on the stage below. His scotch had been set down on the table beside him. His expression was the careful, neutral mask he wore when something had gotten past his defenses and he was working to rebuild them, but his jaw was tight and there was a tension in his shoulders that Riven recognized as his brother's version of devastation.
"Yeah," Riven said. Because no other response was necessary.
He looked to Zain.
His oldest brother had not moved. Had barely appeared to breathe. Zain sat in his chair with his pale grey eyes on the stage below and an expression that, on anyone else, might have been mistaken for boredom or disinterest. Riven knew Zain's expressions with the intimacy of shared blood and twenty-nine shared years, and what was on his face right now was not boredom.
It was the expression Zain wore when he'd identified something and was deciding what to do about it.
The silence between the three of them stretched for a long moment, filled by the music from below, by the distant sound of the crowd's response to the woman on that stage.
Then Zain's voice came out low, quiet, absolute. The voice he used for facts rather than observations.
"Mate," he said.
One word.
Neither of his brothers responded. Because there was nothing to say. Because they'd all felt it the moment she stepped into the light....that ancient, marrow-deep recognition that their kind spent entire lifetimes either searching for or running from. It had simply arrived, the way inevitable things did, without asking permission.
Riven turned back to the window. He pressed his palm flat against the glass.
Below, Eva Santos moved across the stage like she owned every inch of it.
And Riven Blackwood, who owned most things he set his eyes on, felt for the first time in his life like something had turn