by J. R. Ward
The king played with his dog’s ear, rubbing his thumb on the soft, pale brown flap. The animal clearly liked the way it felt, and leaned into his master’s leg with a sigh.
“We have a medic,” Wrath said. “And a physician.”
“You don’t have Rehvenge’s shellan, though, do you.”
“My brothers,” Wrath called out abruptly. “Getcha asses in here.”
When the study doors opened wide, Ehlena stared over her shoulder, wondering whether she’d pushed it too far and was about to be “escorted” out of the mansion. Sure as hell, any one of the ten tremendous males who came in would be up to the task. She’d seen them all before at the clinic, except for the one with the blond-and-black hair, and she was not at all astonished to find that they were fully armed.
To her relief, they did not perform a cash-and-carry on her, but settled around the dainty, light blue room, filling the place up to the rafters. It seemed a little odd that Xhex did not look at any of them, staying focused on Wrath instead—although maybe that made sense. As hard-core as the Brothers were, the king was the only one whose opinion truly mattered.
Wrath looked around at his warriors, his wraparounds shielding his eyes so that there was no way to tell what he was thinking.
The silence was a killer, and Ehlena’s heart thundered in her ears.
At last, the king spoke. “Gentlemen, these lovely ladies want to make a trip up north. I’m prepared to let them go up there to bring Rehv home to us, but they’re not going in alone.”
The response was immediate from the Brothers.
“I’m in.”
“Sign me up.”
“When do we go.”
“About fucking time.”
“Oh, man, there’s a marathon of Beaches running tomorrow night. Can we go after ten so I can see it once all the way through?”
Everyone in the room turned to the blond-and-black haired guy, who was propped up in the corner, massive arms over his chest.
“What,” he said. “Look, it’s not Mary Tyler Moore, ’kay? So you can’t give me shit.”
Vishous, the one with the black glove on his hand, glared across the room. “It’s worse than Mary Tyler Moore. And to call you an idiot would be an insult to half-wits around the fucking world.”
“Are you kidding me? Bette Midler rocks. And I love the ocean. Sue me.”
Vishous glanced at the king. “You told me I could beat him. You promised.”
“As soon as you come home,” Wrath said as he got to his feet, “we’ll hang him up by his armpits in the gym and you can use him as a punching bag.”
“Thank you, baby Jesus.”
Blond-and-Black shook his head. “I swear, one of these days I’m just going to leave.”
As one, the Brothers all pointed at the open door and let silence speak for itself.
“You guys suck.”
“Okay, enough.” Wrath came around the desk and—
Ehlena sat up sharply. His palm was gripping the handle of a harness that went around the dog’s chest, and the king’s face was forward, his chin held high, so that he couldn’t have been looking at the floor at all.
He was blind. And not in the sense of being unable to see very clearly. Given the way he was now, he couldn’t see anything at all. When had this happened, she wondered. He’d appeared to have some vision when she’d last seen him.
Respect rolled through Ehlena’s chest as she and everyone else in the room looked up at him.
“This is going to be tricky,” Wrath said. “We need to send in enough fighters to provide both cover as well as search and rescue, but we don’t want to create more disturbance than absolutely necessary. I want two teams, with the second on standby. We’re also going to need car support in the event Rehvenge is incapacitated and we have to transport him back—”
“What are you talking about?” came a female voice from the doorway.
Ehlena glanced over her shoulder and recognized who it was: Bella, mate of the Brother Zsadist, who frequently helped with Safe Place patients. The female was standing between the ornate jambs with her young in her arms, her face drained of color, her eyes hollow.
“What about Rehvenge?” she demanded, voice rising. “What about my brother?”
As Ehlena started to connect the dots, Zsadist went to his shellan.
“I think you two need to talk,” Wrath said carefully. “In private.”
Z nodded and escorted his mate and young from the room. As the pair went down the hall, Bella’s voice could be heard still, her questions peppered with increasing panic.
And then there was a “What?!” that seemed to indicate a bomb had just been dropped on the poor female.
Ehlena stared down at the lovely blue carpet. God…she knew exactly what Bella was going through right at this moment. The ripples of shock, the recasting of what she knew, the feeling of betrayal.
Hard place to be in. Hard to get out of, too.
After a door shut and the voices were dimmed, Wrath looked around the room as if giving everyone a chance to measure his resolve.
“Tomorrow night is showdown, because there isn’t enough daylight left now to get a car up there.” The king nodded to Ehlena and Xhex. “You both are staying here until then.”
So that meant she was going? Thank the Virgin Scribe. As for the overday, she would have to call her father, but given that Lusie was in the house, she wasn’t worried about being gone. “No problem for me—”
“I have to go,” Xhex said tightly. “But I’ll be back at—”
“Not an invitation. You are staying here so that I know where you are and what you are doing. And if you’re worried about weapons, we have plenty of them—hell, we got a whole crateful off the lessers just last month. You want to do this? You’re under our roof until nightfall.”
It totally was obvious that the king didn’t trust Xhex, given the mandate and the way he smiled at her so fiercely.
“So what’s it going to be, sin-eater?” he said smoothly. “My way or the highway?”
“Fine,” Xhex shot back. “Whatever you want.”
“Always,” Wrath murmured. “Always.”
An hour later, Xhex stood with her arms out straight in front of her and her boots planted eighteen inches apart. In her hands was a SIG Sauer forty that reeked of baby powder, and she was squeezing off rounds at a man-shaped target twenty yards down the Brotherhood’s shooting range. In spite of the stench, the weapon was superlative, with a sweet kick and excellent aim.
While she put the gun through its paces, she could feel the males behind her staring hard. To their credit, it wasn’t at her ass.
Nah, the Brothers weren’t interested in her tail. None of them particularly liked her, although, given their expressions of grudging respect as she’d reloaded the gun, they were viewing her spot-on aim as an asset.
In the shooting stall next door, Ehlena was proving she hadn’t lied about being good with a gun. She’d chosen an autoloader with a little less firepower, which made sense, given that she didn’t have the upper-body strength that Xhex did. Her aim was awesome for an amateur, and what was more, she handled the weapon with the kind of quiet confidence that suggested she wouldn’t mistakenly cap someone’s knees.
Xhex took off her ear protection and turned around to the Brotherhood, keeping her weapon down by her thigh. “I’ll want to try the other one out, but the pair of these should do me just fine. And I want my knife back.”
The weapon had been taken from her before she and Ehlena had been driven to the mansion in that black Mercedes.
“You’ll have it,” someone said, “when you need it.”
Against her will, her eyes did a quick check of who was kibitzing. Same cast of muscle. Which meant John Matthew hadn’t sneaked in.
Given how big the Brotherhood’s compound seemed to be, she figured he could be anywhere, including the next town, for chrissakes: When the meeting in the king’s study had finished, he’d just walked out, and
she hadn’t seen him since.
Which was good. Right now she needed to be focused on what was looming over them all tomorrow night, not her crappy, castrated love life. Fortunately, everything seemed to be falling into place. She’d called iAm and Trez and left voice mails that she was taking a day off, and they’d phoned back saying it wasn’t a problem. No doubt they were going to check in with her again, but hopefully with the Brothers’ backing, she would be in and out of the colony before their babysitting impulses overwhelmed them.
Twenty minutes later, she finished trying out the other SIG and was not at all surprised when both guns were confiscated. The trip back to the mansion was long and tense, and she looked over at Ehlena to see how the other female was faring. It was hard not to approve of the resolute strength in that nurse’s face: Rehv’s female was going after her male, and nothing was going to get in her way.
Which was great…but the determination made Xhex twitchy nonetheless. She was willing to bet Muhrder had had the same kind of resolve in his eyes when he’d gone up to that colony to get her.
And look at how well that had gone.
Then again, true to his character he’d gone in rogue, without backup. At least she and Ehlena had been smart enough to get some serious-ass help, and one could only pray that made all the difference.
Back at the mansion, Xhex grabbed some food from the kitchen and was shown to a second-floor guest room that was down a long hall of statues.
Eat. Drink. Shower.
She left the light in the bath on because the room was unfamiliar, got into bed naked, and closed her eyes.
When the door opened some half an hour later, she was both shocked and unsurprised at the big shadow standing in the lee of the hallway light.
“You’re drunk,” she said.
John Matthew came inside without an invitation, and he locked the door without permission. He was indeed drunk, but that was not a news flash.
The fact that he was sexually aroused was also not front-page material.
As he put the bottle he was carrying down on the bureau, she knew his hands were headed for the fly of his jeans, and there were roughly a hundred thousand reasons why she should tell him to cut the shit and get the hell away from her.
Instead, Xhex tossed the duvet off her body and put her hands behind her head, her breasts tingling from the chill and so much more.
Of all the justifications for not doing what they were going to, there was one overriding reality that crumbled the foundations of healthy choice: By the end of tomorrow night, there was a chance one or both of them might not be coming home.
Even with the Brotherhood as support, going to the colony was a suicide mission—and she was willing to bet there were a lot of people having sex under the mansion’s roof right now. Sometimes you had to have a taste of life right before you knocked on the Grim Reaper’s front door.
John took off his jeans and his shirt and left his clothes right where they landed. As he came over to her, his body was magnificent in the glowing light, his cock hard and ready, his heavily muscled form everything a female would want in her bed.
But all that oh-yeah wasn’t what she focused on as he got up on the mattress and mounted her. She wanted to see his eyes.
No luck, though. His face was in shadow, the light from the bathroom coming from directly behind him. For a moment, she almost turned on the lamp next to them, but then realized she wouldn’t want to catch a load of the numb coldness that was no doubt in his stare.
She wasn’t going to get what she was looking for from this, Xhex thought. This was not going to be about living.
And she was right.
No prelude. No foreplay. She opened her legs and he pushed in and her body loosened and accepted him because of biology. As he fucked her, his head was by hers on the pillow, but it was turned away.
She didn’t come. He did. Four times.
When he rolled off her body and lay on his back, breathing heavily, her heart was thoroughly and completely broken: There had been a crack in the damn thing after she’d left him in her basement apartment, but with each pounding stroke he’d taken just now, more and more of it splintered and fell from the core of her.
A few minutes later, John got up, put his clothes back on, palmed his liquor bottle, and left.
As the door clicked shut, Xhex pulled the duvet over herself.
She did nothing to try to control the shakes that rattled her body, and didn’t attempt to stop herself from crying. Tears left both of her eyes at the far corners, slipping out and flowing over her temples. Some landed in her ears. Some eased down her neck and were absorbed by the pillow. Others clouded her vision, as if they didn’t want to leave home.
Feeling ridiculous, she put her hands to her face and captured them as best she could, wiping them on the duvet.
She cried for hours.
Alone.
SIXTY-SIX
The following evening, Lash was about fifteen miles south of Caldwell when he eased the Mercedes onto a dirt lane and turned off the sedan’s headlights. Driving slowly along a bumpy dirt lane, he used the rising moon to navigate, cutting through a scruffy, debrided cornfield.
“Get your weapons out,” he said.
In the passenger seat, Mr. D palmed his forty, and in the back, the pair of slayers cocked the shotguns they’d been given before Lash had taken them all out of town.
A hundred yards later, Lash hit the brakes and ran his gloved hand around the leather-wrapped steering wheel. The good thing about a big-ass black Mercedes was that when you got out of it you looked like a businessman, not a flashy drug thug. Plus you could fit your guard in the backseat.
“Let’s do this.”
In a synchronized punch, they popped the latches on their doors and got out, facing off across the snowy earth at another big-ass Mercedes.
Maroon AMG. Nice.
And Lash wasn’t the only one to bring guns-and-ammo accessories to the meeting. As all the AMG’s doors opened, three guys with forties and one who appeared to be unarmed got out.
Whereas the sedans suggested civility, or at least the appearance of it, all the men in them represented the violent side of the drug trade—which had fuck-all to do with calculators and offshore accounts and money laundering.
Lash approached the man who didn’t have a weapon with both his hands out of the pockets of his Joseph Abboud coat. As he came forward, he searched the mind of the South American importer, who, at least according to the drug dealer they had tortured for fun and profit, had sold bulk product to Rehvenge.
“You wanted to meet with me?” the guy said with an accent.
Lash put his hand into the breast pocket of his coat and smiled. “You are not Ricardo Benloise.” He glanced to the other Mercedes. “And I do not appreciate you and your boss fucking around with me. You tell that motherfucker to get out of the car now, or I’m walking—which means that he will not be doing business with the guy who cleared the decks in Caldwell and who will be servicing the market the Reverend used to handle.”
The human seemed nonplussed for a moment; then he glanced back at the three comrades who were standing behind him. After a moment, his eyes finally shifted to the maroon Mercedes and he subtly shook his head.
There was a pause and then the passenger-side door opened and a smaller, older man got out. He was impeccably dressed, his black coat fitting his slight shoulders perfectly, his glossy loafers leaving a shuffling path in the snow.
He came forward with total calmness, as if he were a thousand percent sure that his men could handle whatever happened.
“You will understand my caution,” Benloise said with an accent that seemed part French and part Latin American. “It is a good time to be of care.”
Lash removed his hand from his jacket, leaving his gun where it was. “You got nothing to worry about.”
“You sound very sure.”
“As I’m the one who’s been knocking off the competition, I am very sure.”
Figuring there was no time to waste, Lash laid it all out. “I want to move what the Reverend did in terms of volume, and I want to do it now. I have plenty of men and the territory is mine. What I need is a good, steady professional supplier of powder, and that’s why I wanted to meet with you. It’s simple, really. I’m stepping into the Reverend’s shoes, and as you were the one he worked with, I want to do business with you.”
The old man smiled. “Nothing is simple. But then, you are young and will discover that for yourself if you live long enough.”
“I’m going to be around for plenty of time. Trust me.”
“I do not trust anyone, even my family. And I’m afraid I don’t know what you are talking about. I am an importer of fine Colombian art, and I have no idea how you got my name or why you connected it to anything of an illegal nature.” The old man bowed slightly. “I bid you good evening and suggest that you find legitimate pursuits for your no doubt many talents.”
Lash frowned as Benloise returned to the AMG, leaving his men behind.
What the fuck? Unless this was going to turn into a lead shower…
As Lash went for his gun, he braced for a shoot-out…but no. The man who’d tried to pass himself off as Benloise just stepped forward and extended his hand.
“Nice to have met you.”
As Lash looked down, he saw there was something in the guy’s palm. A card.
Lash did the shake thing, took what he’d been given, and went back to his own Mercedes. As he got behind the wheel, he watched the AMG amble off down the lane, its tailpipe smoking in the cold.
He looked down at the card. It was a number.
“Whatchu got there, suh?” Mr. D asked.
“I think we might be in business.” He got out his cell phone and dialed, then put the car in gear and went in the opposite direction from Benloise’s crew.
Benloise picked up the call. “So much more comfortable to speak in a warm car, is it not?”
