by J. R. Ward
After he polished off his Bordeaux, he put the glass down and rubbed his eyes under the wraparounds he still wore. It might be weird to keep the sunglasses on, but whatever—he didn’t like the idea that other people could look at his unfocused pupils and he couldn’t see them staring at him.
“Wrath?” Beth came over to his side, and he could tell by her tense tone that she was trying to keep the fear out of her voice. “Are you all right? Does your head hurt?”
“No.” Wrath tugged his queen back into his lap, the little chair creaking once again, its spindly legs wobbling. “I’m okay.”
Her hands brushed his hair from his face. “You don’t seem that way.”
“I just…” He found one of her hands and took it into his own. “Shit, I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do.”
He frowned hard and tight. “It’s not about me. At least, not really.”
There was a long pause, and then they both spoke at once:
“What is it?”
“How’s Bella?”
Beth cleared her throat as if she were surprised by his question. “Bella’s…doing the best she can. We don’t leave her alone much, and it’s good that Zsadist has taken some time off. It’s just so hard that she lost both of them within days of each other. I mean her mother and her brother…”
“That shit about Rehv was a lie.”
“I don’t understand.”
He reached around for the Caldwell Courier Journal she’d been reading him, and tapped the article she’d just finished. “I find it hard to believe that someone blew his ass up. Rehv was no dummy, and those Moors who guarded him? That head of security? No fucking way they’d let some cocksucker with a bomb anywhere near that club. Plus, Rhage said that he and V went to the Iron Mask the other night to drag John home, and the three of them are working there—iAm, Trez, and Xhex are still together. Usually people scatter after tragedy. Except that bunch is right where they always were, like they’re waiting for him to come back.”
“But there was a skeleton in the ruins, wasn’t there?”
“Could be anyone’s. Sure, it was male, but what else do the police know? Nothing. If I wanted to disappear from the human world—hell, even the vampire one—I’d plant a body and blow up my building.” He shook his head, thinking of Rehv lying in his bed up at the Great Camp, so fucking ill…and yet well enough to have his assassin take care of the guy who’d wanted to kill Wrath. “Man, that SOB was there for me. He had every chance in the world to fuck me when Montrag met with him. I owe him.”
“Wait…why in the world would he fake his own death? He loved Bella and her young so much. Hell, he practically raised his sister, and I can’t believe he would ever hurt her like that. Plus, where would he go?”
The colony, Wrath thought.
Wrath wanted to tell his queen everything that was on his mind, but he hesitated, because he’d been flirting with a decision that was going to complicate the shit out of things. Bottom line was, that e-mail about Rehv? Wrath’s intuition was telling him the guy had lied about it. It was just too coincidental that the thing came in and the next night Rehv “dies.” It had to have been legit. But with Montrag dead, who could have—
There was a sharp crack and a free fall and a hard-ass landing.
As Beth shrieked, Wrath cursed. “What the fuck?”
He patted around, feeling splinters of old, delicate French wood all around them.
“Are you okay, leelan?” he said sharply.
Beth laughed and got up to her feet. “Oh, my God…we broke the chair.”
“Pulverized it might be more accurate—”
The knock on the door had Wrath struggling up to his feet with grunts of pain. Which he was getting used to. Payne always went for the shins, and his left leg was killing him. But it wasn’t like he didn’t return the favor. After this last session, it was quite possible that she was nursing a concussion.
“Come in,” he called out.
The instant the door opened, he knew who it was…and that she was not alone.
“Who is with you, Mary?” he demanded, reaching for the knife he wore on his hip. The scent wasn’t human…but it wasn’t a vampire.
There was a subtle clinking and a long, lovely sigh from his shellan, as if she were looking at something that pleased her greatly.
“This is George,” Mary said. “Please put your weapon away. He won’t hurt you.”
Wrath kept his dagger in the palm of his hand and flared his nostrils. The scent was…“Is that a dog?”
“Yes. He’s trained to assist the blind.”
Wrath recoiled slightly at the b-word, still struggling to accept that classification as pertaining to him.
“I would like to bring him over to you,” Mary said in that level voice of hers. “But not until you put the weapon away.”
Beth stayed silent, and Mary stayed back, which was smart of them. His neurons were firing in all kinds of directions, thoughts racing everywhere. The past month had had a lot of triumphs and a lot of shitty losses: Back when he’d returned from his first meeting with Payne, he’d known it was going to be a tough road ahead, but it had been longer and steeper than he’d thought.
The two biggest problems were that he hated having to rely so much on Beth and his brothers, and he found relearning simple things was curiously exhausting. Like…for fuck’s sake, making toast for himself was now a production. He’d tried it again yesterday and succeeded in breaking the glass dish the butter was kept on. Which naturally had taken him forever to clean up.
Still, the idea of using a dog to get around was…too much.
Mary’s voice eased across the room with the vocal equivalent of an ambling, nonthreatening gait. “Fritz has been trained to handle the dog, and together he and I are prepared to work with you and George. There’s a two-week trial period, after which, if you don’t like it or it isn’t working, we can return the animal. There is no obligation here, Wrath.”
He was about to tell them to take the dog away when he heard a soft whine and more of that jingle.
“No, George,” Mary said. “You can’t go over to him.”
“He wants to come to me?”
“We’ve trained him using a shirt of yours. He knows your smell.”
There was a long, long period of silence, and then Wrath shook his head. “I don’t know if I’m a dog person. Besides, what about Boo—”
“He’s right here,” Beth said. “He’s sitting next to George. He came downstairs as soon as the dog entered the house, and he hasn’t left George’s side since. I think they kind of like each other.”
Damn it, even the cat wasn’t on his side.
More silence.
Wrath slowly sheathed his dagger and took two wide steps to the left so he could clear the desk. Walking forward, he stopped in the center of the study.
George whimpered a little, and there was that quiet ringing of a harness again.
“Let him come to me,” Wrath said darkly, feeling as if he were getting squeezed and not liking it in the slightest.
He heard the animal approach, the padding of paws and the chinking of the collar moving closer, and then…
A velvet-soft muzzle nudged at his palm, and a rasping tongue licked quickly over his skin. Then the dog ducked under his hand and eased up against his thigh.
The ears were silky and warm, the nap of the animal’s fur curling slightly.
It was a large dog with a big, boxy head. “What kind is he?”
“A golden retriever. Fritz was the one who picked him.”
The doggen spoke up from the door, as if he were afraid of entering the room, given how tense things were. “I thought it was the perfect breed, sire.”
Wrath felt along the dog’s flanks, finding the harness that went around his chest and the handle that the blind person would hold on to. “What can he do?”
Mary spoke up. “Anything you need. He can learn the layout of the house, and if you give him the comman
d to take you to the library, he will. He can help you get around the kitchen, answer the phone, find objects. He’s a brilliant animal, and if you two are a fit, you and he can be as independent as I know you want to be.”
Frickin’ female. She knew exactly what had been bothering him. But was an animal the answer?
George whined softly, as if he desperately wanted the job.
Wrath let go of the dog and stepped back as his whole body started to shake. “I don’t know if I can do this,” he said in a hoarse voice. “I don’t know if I can…be blind.”
Beth cleared her throat a little, as if she were choking up because he was.
After a moment, Mary, in her kind, firm way, said the hard thing that needed to be said: “Wrath, you are blind.”
The unspoken so-deal-with-it resonated in his head, throwing a spotlight on the reality he’d been limping through. Sure, he’d stopped waking up every day hoping his vision would come back, and he’d been fighting with Payne and making love to his shellan so he didn’t feel physically weak, and he’d also been working and keeping up with the king shit and all that. But none of it meant things were fantastic: He was hobbling around, running into shit, dropping crap…clinging to his shellan—who hadn’t been out of the house for a month because of him…using his brothers to get him places…being the kind of burden he resented.
Giving this dog a chance didn’t mean that he was all gung ho about being sightless, he told himself. But it might help him get around on his own.
Wrath turned so that he and George were facing the same direction, then stepped in close to the dog. Leaning to the side, he found the handle and clasped it.
“Now what do we do?”
After a shocked silence, as if he’d surprised the shit out of his peanut gallery, there was some discussion and demonstration, only a quarter of which he heard and absorbed. Evidently, though, it was enough to go with, because he and George were soon taking a trip around the study.
The handle had to be adjusted up to its limit so that Wrath didn’t have to list to the side to hold on, and the dog was much better at the whole deal than his charge was. But after a while, the two of them headed out of the study and down the hall. Next trip was hitting the grand staircase and coming back up.
Alone.
When Wrath returned to his office, he faced the group that had gathered—and it was now a big one, as each of his brothers, as well as Lassiter, had apparently joined Beth and Fritz and Mary. Wrath caught the scent of each of them…and there was a fuckload of hope and worry in the breeze as well.
He couldn’t blame them for the way they felt, but he didn’t like the attention. “How’d you pick the breed, Fritz?” he said, because he needed to fill the silence and there was no reason to ignore the pink elephant in the room.
Or the blond dog, as it were.
The old butler’s voice quavered, as if he, along with everyone else, were struggling with emotion. “I, ah…I chose him…” The doggen cleared his throat. “I chose him over the Labradors because he sheds more.”
Wrath’s blind eyes blinked. “Why would that be a good thing?”
“Because your staff enjoys vacuuming. I thought this would be a lovely gift for them.”
“Oh, right…of course.” Wrath chuckled a little, and then started to laugh. As the others joined in, some of the tension drained out of the room. “Why didn’t I think of that.”
Beth came over and kissed him. “We’ll just see how you feel, okay?”
Wrath stroked George’s head. “Yeah. Okay.” He raised his voice. “Enough of the kibitzing. Who’s on deck tonight for fighting? V, I need a financial report. Is John still passed out drunk in his bed? Tohr, I’m going to want you to contact the remaining families within the glymera and see if we can get any trainees to come back….”
As Wrath barked out orders, it was good to have answers coming back at him and people moving around to sit and Fritz leaving to clean up after First Meal and Beth settling into Tohr’s old chair.
“Oh, and I’m going to have to have something else to sit on,” he said as he and George went behind the desk.
“Wow, you dusted that bitch, didn’t you,” Rhage drawled.
“I can make you something?” V suggested. “I’m good at carving.”
“How about a Barcalounger?” Butch cut in.
“You want this chair?” Beth offered.
“If someone can just grab me that wing thing over in the corner by the fireplace?” Wrath said.
When Phury brought it over, Wrath sat down and pulled the chair forward—only to smash both his knees into the desk drawer.
“Okay, that had to hurt,” Rhage muttered.
“We need something shorter,” someone else said.
“This’ll be fine,” Wrath bit out tightly, taking his palm off George’s handle and rubbing the twin pains. “I don’t care what I sit in.”
As the Brotherhood got down to business, he found himself putting his hand on the dog’s big head and stroking the soft fur…playing with an ear…dipping down and finding the long waves that flowed from the animal’s broad, strong chest.
Not that any of that meant he was keeping the the animal, of course.
It just felt nice, was all.
SIXTY-THREE
The following evening, Ehlena watched as her new friend, Roff the locksmith, drilled the holy hell out of the wall safe. The whine of his high-powered tool stung her ears, and the sharp smell of heated metal reminded her of the floor sanitizers that had been used in Havers’s clinic. The sense that she was getting something—anything—done, however, made up for all of that.
“Almost finished,” the locksmith called out over the din.
“Take your time,” she yelled back.
It had become a personal thing between her and the safe, and that sucker was getting opened tonight come hell or high water. After looking all around the master bedroom with the help of the staff, and even going through Montrag’s clothes, which had been creepy, she’d phoned the locksmith and was now enjoying the sight of that drill head disappearing farther and farther into metal.
Ultimately, she didn’t care what was inside the damn thing, but what was critical was getting past the roadblock of not having the combination—and it was a relief to feel like herself again. She’d always been one to push through the hard stuff…much like that drill.
“I’m in,” Roff said, retracting his tool. “Finally! Come have a look.”
As the whine slowed into silence and the male took a breather, she went over and opened the panel. Inside was dark as midnight.
“Remember,” Roff said as he began to pack up, “we had to cut the electricity and the circuit that tied it to the security system. There’s usually a light that comes on.”
“Right.” She peered in anyway. It was just like a cave. “Thank you so much.”
“If you’d like me to find you a replacement, I can?”
Her father had always had safes, some of them in walls, a couple down in the cellar that had been as big and heavy as cars. “I guess…we’ll need one.”
Roff glanced around at the study and then smiled at her. “Yes, madam. I think you will. I’ll take care of you, though. Make sure you get what you need.”
She turned and put her hand out. “You have been very kind.”
He flushed from the collar of his coveralls up to his dark hairline. “Madam…you have been very nice to work for.”
Ehlena saw him to the grand front door and then went back to the study with a flashlight she’d gotten from the butler.
Clicking the beam on, she peered into the safe. Files. Loads of files. Some flat leather cases she recognized from when her mother’s jewels had still been around. More documents. Stock certificates. Bundles of cash. Two accounting ledgers.
Moving a side table over, she emptied everything out, making piles. When she got to the very back, she found a lockbox that she had to grunt in order to lift.
It took her about three
hours to go through the paperwork, and when she was done, she was absolutely stunned.
Montrag and his father had been the corporate equivalent of mobsters.
Rising from the chair she’d tucked her butt into, she went up to the bedroom she used and pulled open the drawer of the antique bureau she’d put her clothes in. Her father’s manuscript was held with a simple rubber band, which she snapped free with a flick of the hand. Leafing through the pages…she found the description of the business deal that had changed everything for her family.
Ehlena took the manuscript page downstairs to the documents and ledgers from the safe. Going through the set of books that recorded hundreds of transactions for business interests, real estate, and other investments, she found one that matched the date, dollar amounts, and subject matter that had been listed by her father.
It was there. Montrag’s father had been the one who’d double-crossed hers, and the son had been in on it.
Letting herself fall back in the chair, she took a long hard look at the study.
Karma was indeed a bitch, wasn’t it.
Ehlena went back to the ledgers to see if there were any other people in the glymera who had been taken advantage of. There hadn’t been, not since Montrag and his father had ruined her family, and she had to wonder if they’d moved toward human dealings to decrease the likelihood of being discovered as crooks and swindlers within the race.
She glanced down at the lockbox.
As this was clearly the night for airing dirty laundry, she picked the thing up. It wasn’t secured by a combination lock, but a key one.
Looking over her shoulder, she stared at the desk.
Five minutes later, after having successfully pried open the secret compartment in the lower drawer, she took the key she’d found the night before back to the lockbox. She had no doubt it was going to open the thing.
And it did.
Reaching inside, she found only one document, and as she unfurled the thick, creamy pages, she had exactly the same sense she’d had when she’d first talked to Rehvenge on the phone and he’d asked her, Ehlena, are you there?
