Rehv yanked the opener free of the desk by jacking up his palm so that it caught the scabbard and popped the blade out. Putting his hand up where the man could watch, he twisted the opener back and forth with grim precision, creating a portal in his skin and bones, widening the puncture into a little window. When he was finished, he withdrew the blade and put it carefully beside the phone.

As blood dripped down the inside of his sleeve and pooled at his elbow, he looked at the man through the hole. “I’ll be watching you. Everywhere. All the time. She turns up with another ‘bruise’ from ‘falling down in the shower’ and I’m going to mark you up like a calendar, feel me?”

The man jerked to the side and threw up down his pant leg.

Rehv cursed. He should have known something like that was coming. Fucking pansy-ass bully bastard.

And good thing this fool with the partially digested pasta dripping onto his piss-laden Doc Martens didn’t know what Rehv was really capable of. This human, like all the other humans in the club, had no idea the boss of ZeroSum was not just a vampire, but a symphath. Motherfucker would have shit himself, and what a mess that would have been. It was already wet-obvious he wasn’t sporting Depends.

“Your car is now mine,” Rehv said as he reached over to the phone and dialed housekeeping. “Consider it repayment plus interest and penalties on the cash you’ve been skimming from my bar. You’re fired for that, and for side-dealing H in my private zip code. PS, next time you try to crop off someone else’s turf? Don’t mark your packs with the same eagle you wear on your fucking jacket. Makes it too easy to figure out who the rogue dealer was. Oh, and like I said, that lady of mine had better not show up with so much as a chipped nail or I’ll be coming for a visit. Now, get the fuck out of my office and don’t ever come in this club again.”

The guy was so shell-shocked, he didn’t argue as he was frog-marched toward the door.

Rehv slammed his bloodied fist into the desk again to get everyone’s attention.

The Moors halted and so did the meat. The human was the only one who looked over his shoulder, and there was absolute terror in his eyes.

“One. Last. Thing.” Rehv smiled tightly, keeping his sharp canines to himself. “If Chrissy quits, I’m going to assume its because you forced her to, and I will come after you for my pecuniary losses.” Rehv leaned forward. “And bear in mind, I don’t need the money, but I’m a sadist, so I get a hard-on hurting people. Next time, I’ll be taking my piece out of your hide, not your wallet or what’s parked in your driveway. Keys? Trez?”

The Moor crammed his hand into the back pocket of the guy’s Z Brands and tossed over a key chain.

“Don’t worry about getting me the title,” Rehv said as he caught it. “Where your Ass-cura is ending up, we don’t need paperwork to transfer ownership. Bye for now.”

As the door shut behind the drama, Rehv glanced at the key ring. The tag hanging off of it read, SUNY NEW PALTZ.

“What?” he said without looking up.

Xhex’s voice was low, seeping out from the dark corner of the office, where she always watched fun and games go down. “If he does it one more time, I want to take care of it.”

Rehv fisted the keys and leaned back in his chair. Even if he said no, if Chrissy got cracked again his chief of security would probably roll out a beat-down anyway. Xhex was not like his other employees. Xhex wasn’t like anybody.

Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She was like him. Half symphath.

Or half sociopath, as was the case.

“You watch the girl,” he said to her. “If that sonofabitch gets busy with his class ring again, we’ll do a coin toss for who gets to fuck him up.”

“I watch all your girls.” Xhex walked over to the door, moving with smooth power. She was built like a male, tall and muscular, but she wasn’t coarse. In spite of her Annie Lennox haircut and her tight body, she wasn’t some bulky she-male bitchsicle in her standard uniform of black muscle shirt and black leathers. No, Xhex was lethal in the elegant way of a blade: quick, decisive, sleek.

And like all daggers she loved drawing blood.

“It’s the first Tuesday of the month,” she said as she put her hand on the door.

As if he didn’t know. “I’m leaving in a half hour.”

The door opened and closed, the sound of the club on the other side flaring, then getting cut off.

Rehv lifted his palm. The blood flow was already stopping, and the hole would be closed in another twenty minutes. By midnight nothing would show of the penetration.

He thought of the moment when he’d impaled himself. To feel nothing of your body was an odd kind of paralysis. Although you moved, you didn’t recognize the weight of the clothes on your back or whether your shoes were too tight or if the ground beneath your feet was uneven or slippery.

He missed his body, but either he took the dopamine and dealt with the side effects or he tangoed with his evil side. And that was one MMA fight he wasn’t sure he could win.

Rehv palmed his cane and carefully eased himself up out of his chair. As a result of his numbness, balance was a bitch and gravity wasn’t his friend, so the trip over to the panel on the wall took longer than it should have. When he got over to it, he placed his palm on a raised square and a door-sized panel slid back, all Star Trek and shit.

The black bedroom-and-bath suite that was revealed was one of his three crash pads, and for some reason it had the best shower. Probably because with only a couple hundred square feet, the whole place could go tropical just by running the damn thing.

And when you were cold all the time, that was a serious value-add.

Stripping off his clothes and starting the water, he did a quick shave while he waited for the spray to get nuclear hot. While he ran the razor down his cheeks, the male staring back at him was the same as always. Cropped mohawk. Amethyst eyes. Tattoos on his chest and abs. Long cock lying loose between his legs.

He thought about where he had to go tonight and his vision changed, a red haze gradually replacing all the colors of his sight. He wasn’t surprised. Violence had a way of coaxing his evil nature free, like food laid out to the starved, and he’d had only a sweet lick of the plate back in his office just now.

Under normal circumstances, it would be time for more dopamine. His chemical savior kept the worst of his symphath urges at bay, swapping them for hypothermia and impotence and numbness. The side effects sucked, but you had to do what you had to do, and lies required upkeep.

As well as performance.

His blackmailer demanded performance.

Palming his cock, like he could protect it from what it was going to have to do later tonight, he went over and tested the water. Even though steam was thickening the air until he felt like he was breathing cream, the shit wasn’t hot enough. It never was.

He rubbed his eyes with his free hand. The red in his vision persisted, but it was a good thing. Better to meet his blackmailer on like terms. Evil to evil. Symphath to symphath.

Rehv stepped under the spray, the blood that he’d spilled washing away. As he soaped up his skin, he felt dirty already, totally unclean. The feeling was just going to be worse by the time dawn came.

Yeah…he knew precisely why his working girls steamed up their locker room at the end of their shifts. Whores loved hot water. Soap and hot water. Sometimes that and a wash-cloth were all that got you through the night.