Total pages in book: 104
Estimated words: 104141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Reo moved ahead and gripped the door handle. He looked back at Nyomi, who gave him a nod. Then he pulled the door open.
Light poured through the doorway—warm, golden, impossible—and the sound hit us a half-second later. Jazz music. Laughter. The low hum of a world that had been built just for us, hidden behind these walls, waiting.
But that wasn’t what made me stop walking.
It was what she’d had built in the center of the ballroom.
Holy fuck! TORA!
I actually gasped.
Loudly.
And even though it was loud, no one could hear it over the Claws shrieking, gasping, cheering, and fucking going berserk as they rushed in.
Even Hiro was fucking hooting and hollering.
Oh God! Why would she do that? Now the Fangs are going to want a fucking party! This is never going to end!
Chapter ten
The Ballroom
Kenji
A melodic song filled the ballroom as the band played along the side. Each musician was clear in the light.
A tall man in a sharp white suit held his trumpet at his side and did not play. The saxophone player in a green suit stood the same way, his instrument lowered, eyes half-lidded but focused.
Both of them were listening to the musician at the center—a woman in a fitted gold dress with a violin tucked beneath her chin. Her bow moved slowly across the strings, drawing out a soft, aching melody that stretched through the room. The sound was smooth, controlled, and emotional, each note carried heart-aching emotion.
I recognized the song immediately, “In the Mood for Love.”
Next to her, a woman dressed in red sat at the piano, her fingers moving lightly across the keys, supporting the violin with quiet, steady notes. Behind them, the drummer in blue pants and silver suspenders kept time with gentle taps on the cymbals, barely touching the snare, and letting the melody lead.
The female bass player stood tall with her upright bass, plucking each string in slow, deliberate pulls that gave the song its weight.
But that wasn’t what had us all in a daze.
Tora. . .you’ve outdone yourself.
My gaze went straight to the ceiling the moment I stepped through the doors.
Above the marble floor, a massive black and gold dragon’s claw split the architecture open.
Its total shimmering scaled arm reached roughly thirty feet from the ceiling breach to the tips of its talons. Even across the room, I could see these large individual diamond-shaped scales. The color of obsidian, yet mirror-bright.
Each gold talon looked like fire trapped in glass and was curved in a lethal arc, eight or nine feet long. They tapered into razor points that touched the polished marble floor. And the five talons spanned nearly eighteen feet, wide enough to walk between, but also to cage the entire length of the long table beneath.
The base of it, where the claw tore through the ceiling, held the violence.
Cracked plaster framed the entry point in jagged edges, reinforced with sculpted metal that mimicked destruction mid-impact. Gold bled outward into the fractures, frozen in time, as if heat had surged through the structure at the exact moment of penetration.
The ceiling around it bowed inward, pulled toward the claw's grip because the building itself had yielded.
It felt alive.
It felt anchored above me.
It felt so real that for one breath, I believed that a dragon crouched on the roof and had driven its claw straight through the structure to seize what belonged to it. And now the limb remained lodged there, embedded deep, caught between the act of taking and the refusal to release.
I almost told everyone to grab their guns so the beast wouldn’t get us.
Speechless.
I was absolutely fucking speechless.
She’s put Korin on my roof. What sort of. . .imagination does my Tiger have?
I stopped walking and just. . .stood there with my mouth open.
Nyomi grinned. “Don’t worry. I’ll return your ballroom to its original look. I just wanted—”
“No.”
She blinked. “What?”
“We’re keeping it.”
Reo snickered on the side.
I took in the claw some more and could almost feel the otherworldliness of it pressing down from above. The imagined body coiled over the roofline. The heat of breath that never reached the ballroom. The tension in tendons that held the claw in place, ready to tighten.
If it closed, it would take everything beneath it.
And beneath it, she had placed that table.
A lacquered black runway for at least twenty people to sit, stretched directly under the cage of talons. Every chair aligned with intention. Every seat placed within the reach of those curved points.
Sitting at that table meant sitting beneath the predator, and I couldn’t wait to experience it.
Gold-rimmed charger plates and crystal glasses waited at each setting.
A huge chandelier hung from the dragon claw’s palm, gold-veined and trembling gently as if the dragon above were breathing.
Fuck. . .
This sudden and unwelcome pressure built behind my eyes. I blinked hard twice and willed whatever emotion was trying to creep up back down into the dark place where my beast kept what it couldn't afford to feel.