“I’ve let my love for you interfere with my ability to manage the club, or at least my ability to treat you like an employee.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Damian. I love that we work together every night.”

“You love keeping an eye on me at work, but you hate the job. You hate watching me flirt on the dance floor, and you hate having to dance with strangers. You’ve gone from being one of the top moneymakers on tips to making almost nothing, because you’re so busy watching me with my partners that you don’t pay enough attention to your own dance partners.”

“I’ll do better tonight,” she said, touching his arm.

“People come here to dance with vampires and shapeshifters, Cardinale. They come for the illusion that they can have a romance with one of us. They come for someone to pay attention to them, to really look at them, talk to them, listen. If Guilty Pleasures is about lust and the possibility of sex, then Danse Macabre is about romance and the possibility of a relationship.”

“But you and I are each other’s relationship,” she said, a hand on both his arms as if she were trying to get him to look at her, or shake some sense into him.

“That’s what I wanted more than anything else in the world, a real relationship with one person who truly loved me.”

“I love you! I love you truly, madly, completely!”

“People come here to be listened to, to feel special, but you’re so worried that I’m cheating on you that you don’t have any room to even pretend for a few minutes.”

“Pretend what?” She yelled it, even though they were inches apart. Her hands dug into his bare arms hard enough that she mottled his skin.

Roger said softly, “Do we need to be here?”

His whisper made Ricky and me jump, as if we’d been frozen by the emotions in the room.

“No,” Echo said, stepping back and herding me ahead of her and both male guards, as she got us out of the office and into the corridor that led to the main part of the club. She wasn’t leaving me alone with Cardinale, and I couldn’t argue, because I wasn’t worried about her hurting me anymore. I was more worried that she’d force me to kill her. If Cardinale wanted to do suicide by cop, she needed to find a different cop, someone who wasn’t emotionally invested. Of course, that emotional investment had made me hesitate and not shoot her earlier. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d let a vampire make my holy objects glow that much and not shot them. If she’d pulled this shit with a regular police officer they’d have shot her a long time before they were blinded by holy fire. I was glad I hadn’t shot her, and that would make me hesitate the next time, if there was a next time.

Echo stayed a half step behind me, with Ricky behind her and to my other side. She’d sent Roger ahead to wait by the door at the end of the hallway. That she kept Ricky with her meant she had some faith in his skills, or maybe Roger was just that much worse. I owed him a thank-you for suggesting we leave before Damian finished his talk with Cardinale. One of the things I was working on in therapy was that I had trouble protecting my boundaries from the people I was close to, but apparently Roger was better at it. I could shoot and fight just fine, but if Roger, Roger Parks, was better at boundary issues, maybe I could just have him follow me around and get me out of awkward emotional conversations all night. It wasn’t in security’s job description, but it might be damn useful to me.

“If you are in a private area with Cardinale, you must have security personnel with you from this point on, Anita,” Echo said.

“Okay,” I said.

She gave me a sideways glance. “You aren’t going to argue with me?”

“No, if she wants to suicide by cop, I don’t want it to be me.”

“Suicide by cop: When a person wants to commit suicide but is afraid to do the task themselves, so they threaten police or pose a threat to innocents so that police feel they must kill them to protect others or themselves. Yes?”

I nodded. “Yeah, that’s it.”

“Do you believe that was what Cardinale intended with you tonight?”

“No, at least not in the front of her head.”

“Front of her head?”

“It was a subconscious thought, in the back of her head, not a conscious thought, which would be in the front of the head.”

“Ah, I think much more happens in the back of people’s heads than in the front.”

“Ain’t that the God’s honest truth?” I said.

“Yes, I think it is,” Echo said.

I could feel the bass beating through the still-closed door; I kept walking and Roger opened the door, so well-timed it was like an automatic door. I didn’t even have to pause as we walked through. In fact, I hadn’t been planning to pause. I was just so used to security opening doors for me I took it for granted now. When did that happen?

There had been a time when I would have known as much about Cardinale’s background as possible by now, but I’d trusted that if Jean-Claude thought she was okay, then she was, but what a six-hundred-year-old vampire king would think was okay might not be okay to me. Was it a sign that I trusted Jean-Claude that much, or that I’d grown arrogant?

Echo paused with her hand on the door and turned to say, “I will make certain that Cardinale does nothing unfortunate tonight. If you can put this incident aside and be truly present for the date and its issues, I think that would be best. If you talk of all this first, it may spoil the mood.”