The employee access card Amanda slipped her, along with a spell of distraction, allowed Mia to slip unnoticed into the staff corridor. Quickly she followed familiar halls to the elevator bank, careful to use a repetition loop to disguise her presence on the security cameras. Her magic might still be mostly wild and dangerously unpredictable, but she had learned the basics of defense and deception the hard way—do or die. So far she’d kept death at bay.
Minutes later, she stepped off the elevator onto the thirty fourth floor and stopped in front of the oversized closed door. Xin had been given the Jade Suite, one of the half dozen high roller accommodations the resort kept for its most preferred guests. Her stomach clenched at the memory of her only other visit to the room.
One year ago, during the Fourth Annual ParaPleasures Expo, she had done the unthinkable and allowed herself to be seduced by one of the guests. Or maybe she'd been the one doing the seducing. Either way, her life as she'd known it had ended. One truly earth-shaking night had changed her forever.
When she’d walked away from the baccarat table after her shift a year ago, she had thought nothing of her future. Caught up in the power of the moment, she had thrown every personal principle and Dunvegas employee rule to the winds and jumped for what she’d thought would be a fleeting taste of paradise.
Instead, she had landed in a hellish world she’d never dreamed she would be a part of. A world where she was hunted for her power, where only her wits and a bit of luck had kept her ahead of the mages who would drain her of both life force and magic force and think nothing of it after the act was done.
Now Xin Li was back in Vegas. She had every intention of making sure he tasted a bit of her personal hell before this night was through. He had been her ticket down to the depths; because of him, she’d spent weeks walking the edge between sanity and dementia, afraid of every shadow. If Amanda hadn’t found her cowering in the Dunvegas maze one desperate night, she’d likely have ended up dead long ago.
Amanda had been hiding her from the power hungry mages who’d flocked to the city for months now. Slowly Mia had learned to hide her powers, even if she couldn’t quite master their use. Now Xin Li was going to give her back her life or give her a damn good reason why he couldn’t.
Whatever Xin had done to change her, there had to be a way to fix it and make her normal again. Human again. Damn it, she couldn’t even get close enough to another mage to ask a basic question such as, “Is it possible to get rid of these powers besides dying?” without ending up running for her life. She’d never met such a greedy, grasping, murderous bunch before—and that was saying something, considering the vamps and death demons that used to literally haunt her table in the card room.
With one last check of her mental shields, she straightened her shoulders and took a deep, centering breath. Hand raised in the air to knock, Mia felt the brush of power as the double doors swung open before she could make the first touch.
Xin Li. He stood framed by the open doors. Tall and slender, his body was a lean mass of muscled perfection.
Gorgeous. Mia’s breath froze in her chest. For an instant, the memory of how that skin had tasted rushed through her senses, a haunting symphony of mouthwatering spice flavored by the slightly bitter tang of salt. Nothing had ever tasted so sweet on her tongue.
He was built like a runner, with not an ounce of fat to mar the sculpted lines of strength. Dressed in nothing more than a pair of black trousers that rested low on his hips, it was all too easy to picture the body beneath. The taunt skin of his abdomen teased Mia with its smooth hollows, and her fingers itched with the hunger to trace delicate lines across the silky surface.
She barely had the impression of shocked gray eyes before she heard the spell he had whispered. Ganla draumela.
It hit the walls of her shields and passed through with the ease of a sword cutting through a silken veil. In the space of a heartbeat the world faded to black, leaving nothing but the taste of defeat and the fear of death to follow Mia into the darkness.