“I can’t,” he muttered.

“Why?”

“I don’t, like … you know, move that way.”

Such a lie, she thought as she remembered the feel of him on top of her. He moved just frickin’ fine.

“Do it anyway.” She grabbed his hips and pulled them in close. “Dance with me.”

Moving against him to the beat of the music, she felt his immediate response, his arousal popping up, rubbing against her belly because he was so much taller than her.

“People are going to know,” he ground out—but his hands were already on her waist, squeezing, holding their lower bodies together. “From class.”

“Who cares. Like they don’t already.”

Novo knew. Hell, the female was part of the reason they’d kissed for the first time. Peyton? As she’d decided before, she could deal with him. Boone? He cared only about the training; she wasn’t even sure the male knew anyone’s name. And Axe wasn’t even coming tonight. Nor Anslam. And no member of the glymera would ever show up in a place like this.

Live now, she thought, losing herself in being with him, close to him, held by him.

Pulling his head down to her, she whispered in his ear, “I’m not wearing any panties.”

The groan that ripped out of him was louder than even the music.

“Pardon me,” he said, straightening. “I gotta go do something.”

“Mmmm,” she purred, imagining him in the bathroom, taking care of that arousal. “And what might that be?”

“I have to go kill all the human men in this club who are looking at you. Won’t take long, they’re weak and can’t run fast.”

Throwing her head back and laughing, she felt her heart soar, especially as those strong arms wrapped around her even more tightly.

This was going to be the best night of her life. She could feel it.

Chapter Thirty-nine

The key turned out to be nothing that you put in a lock. It was more a tangible pass that got two people through a mountain of security that stood around a nondescript door to a nondescript garage structure in a seedy part of downtown Caldwell’s mostly abandoned industrial park.

Following behind Butch, but ahead of the trainee he’d brought with them, Marissa found that with her mask in place, she had a confidence she might not otherwise have felt. There was something liberating about hiding your features when you were going into an environment that you didn’t know how you were going to handle. It meant you didn’t have to self-monitor your expression and fake composure, for one thing. For another, you could more freely try on a persona that could take whatever was thrown at them.

Because who else was going to know the truth?

In the dense darkness of the club’s interior, Butch’s reassuring hand reached behind and patted around to take hers, and the instant the connection was made, she felt even more confident. Nothing was going to touch her, harm her, unsettle her. Not with him here.

The first thing she became aware of was a growing thumping sound, and she assumed it was the bass beat of some music. As they rounded a tight, architecturally random corner, she discovered it wasn’t a concert-worthy set of speakers doing their duty. It was the rhythmic chopping of a grind wheel that seemed to serve no purpose other than to—

Oh. Okaaaaay.

There was a woman with her legs spread underneath it, and the machine was penetrating her with …

Looking away, she found a male squeezed into a Lucite box, his naked body contorted, one side open so that people could …

Shifting her eyes elsewhere, she saw a row of exam tables, people in latex bodysuits just like hers strapped to them one after another in contorted positions, sexual organs exposed for the consumption of lines of anonymous strangers.

Okaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay, they were in a sex club. Yup.

And it was weird, the interior space was twelve times the size it had appeared from the outside, so it must have been created by knocking out walls of other buildings, that garage thing just the start of a lineup of facilities that had been merged. Everything was dim, everyone was in costumes and masks, and sex in all its permutations and combinations was everywhere.

It was one nonjudgmental experiment and expression of eroticism after another, the moans and groans offering a soundtrack that the techno music complemented rather than overrode.

Bizarrely, she found the whole thing curiously … unshocking. And not really ugly, either. The people seemed genuinely turned on—and God, they were so nice. Unlike the few times she’d been out at human gatherings and been gawked at, here, people would meet you in the eye and smile, like you were part of their … well, club. And when she bumped into someone, the response was relaxed and nonaggressive.

It all seemed so … normal?

Maybe it was the unapologetic nature of it all. Maybe it was the mask hiding her identity. Maybe it was the dead-serious purpose of her being here. Whatever the combination, she was relieved.

Deep into the club, Butch, Axe, and she formed a circle. As Butch looked to her in his skeleton mask, she patted his hand and nodded, giving him the thumbs-up sign.

After he nodded back at her, he turned to Axe. The two of them leaned in and traded some words. In the meantime, she looked around for some pattern of dress that indicated who was staff.

Had the dead female come here before she died?

A series of flashes lit off over to the left and she narrowed her eyes. Someone was taking photographs of people who were strung up on rotating wheels and incapacitated as men ejaculated on them, whipped them, drew blood.