Abaddon was loud and crowded, as it had been on her first visit. The lights circled and flashed, alternately illuminating and obscuring the dancers on the floor and the mezzanine, and the music pumped out from the tall speakers, vibrating the floor below them and making regular speech impossible.

Not that Lily had any intention of carrying on a conversation until she was somewhere a little more quiet—and private. Gabriel was hardly going to want to prove himself here in front of hundreds of customers.

She looked around, spotted him coming out of the door that led out back to the light booth and, she assumed, his office. Pulling up short, she put a hand on Miri’s elbow and leaned in, pitching her voice to be heard above the music. “This way,” she said, and turned away, headed to meet Gabriel as he came in their direction.

He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt again, and wore them like he was doing them a favor. The shirt was just tight enough to showcase everything there was to see, as were the jeans, but unlike some of the guys in the club, who were clearly trying too hard, Gabriel looked like he wasn’t trying at all. It was a knack he had whether he was in jeans or a twelve-thousand-dollar suit.

Holy shit, she thought, I’m dating a guy who wears twelve-thousand-dollar suits. And I’m wearing six-year-old jeans and a shirt that belonged to my dead father.

They met at the edge of the dance floor, and he smiled at her, then at Miri. “I thought you were in for the night?” he said, and leaned down to brush his lips over hers.

“We were,” Lily said, and turned to Miri, gestured from one to the other. “Miri, Gabriel, Gabriel, Miri. Can we go back to your office or somewhere quiet?”

He nodded and led them back to the door he’d come out of, then stood aside so they could enter.

“Wow, tight squeeze,” Miri said, as she and Lily entered the short, narrow hallway.

She averted her eyes from the light booth door and pointed to the one on the left. “That one?”

“That’s the one,” he said, and waited until they’d opened the door and moved through it before coming into the short hallway and shutting the door behind him.

Funny, she thought, he wasn’t so conscientious about personal space when he was ushering me in so he could grope me in the light booth.

They were now in another, slightly longer hallway, which ran for about twelve feet, then ended at a fire door. Through the small window she could see stairs. Gabriel brushed by the two of them, said, “Follow me,” and headed down the hallway and through the door.

They followed him up a flight, down yet another short hallway, and finally into a large room furnished with a sleek metal desk and a bank of a dozen monitors, some showing different angles on the dance floor or the bar, one focused on the restroom doors, and three set up to show traffic at the outside doors, where the bouncers were.

“Here we are, then,” Gabriel said, closing the door behind them. “What can I do for you?”

“I told Miri everything,” Lily said. “She doesn’t believe me, so you need to show her.”

Gabriel said nothing for several moments, while Miri just looked uncomfortable.

“Show her what, precisely?” Gabriel asked, his tone chilly.

“I don’t know, something,” Lily said. “Like, your eyes, or … show her how strong you are, that would work.”

He gazed at her, implacably.

“What?” she said.

“No.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said no.” He leaned against the edge of the desk, crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m not a golden retriever, to sit and roll over and shake on command.”

She rolled her eyes at him; she couldn’t help it. “I’m not asking you to do party tricks. Miri is my best friend, and I need her to believe me.”

“And my answer stands,” he said. “I’m willing to bend. I’ll make concessions for you—even against my own nature—like I did a few hours ago. But I’m not a circus animal, Lily. I won’t be tamed and brought to heel and made to perform, not even for you.”

Miri cleared her throat. “I think maybe—”

But whatever it was she had been intending to say, she was interrupted by the loud crack of the office door being flung open so hard it bounced off the wall, leaving behind a doorknob-shaped dent in the plasterboard.

A woman strode in—and what a stride it was, in knee-high leather boots with 4-inch heels—and caught the door as it rebounded, followed through on that momentum by slamming the door shut behind her.

She stood for a moment, making no movement except to clench and unclench her fists, and Lily got the oddest sense of building power, almost like the charge in the air before a really big lightning strike. And indeed the woman’s hair—a thick but fine-textured white-blonde that fell in a straight curtain to her waist—was frizzing ever-so-slightly around her head. She was clad in black jeans so tight they were like a second skin and a barely-there silk halter top in poisonous green that left her back bare except for a few thin criss-crossing spaghetti straps.

And the skin of her back was … moving. Subtle sweeps and waves of motion rippled across it as though something were trying to get out. Lily was both fascinated and repulsed, struck speechless, and unable to look away.

The woman took three steps across the room, came to a halt in front of Gabriel, and said—No, Lily thought, she growled—“What have you done?”