by J. R. Ward
“Have you ever tried to get those removed?” Doc Jane said softly.
“They can’t be removed,” he said briskly, dropping his hand. “The ink has salt in it. It’s permanent.”
“But have you ever tried? There are lasers now that—”
“I’d better go take care of this cut so I can finish here.” He grabbed another paper towel. “I’ll need some gauze and tape—”
“I have that in my bag.” She turned to go over to the table. “I have everything—”
“No, thanks, I’ll take care of it myself.”
Doc Jane stared up at him, her eyes clear. “I don’t care if you’re independent. But stupidity I won’t stand for. We clear? That bench has your name on it.”
If she’d been one of his brothers, he would have bared his fangs and hissed at her. But he couldn’t do that to Doc Jane, and not just because she was a female. Thing was, there was nothing to push back at with her. She was just objective medical opinion.
“We clear?” she prompted, utterly unimpressed by how fierce he had to be looking.
“Yeah. I hear you.”
“Good.”
“He has these nightmares. . . . God, the nightmares.”
Bella leaned down and stuffed the dirty diaper into the bin. On the way back up, she snagged another Huggies from under the dressing table and brought out the talc and the baby wipes. Palming Nalla’s ankles, she hipped up her daughter’s little butt, did a fast-and-dash sweep with the cloth, sprinkled some powder, then slid the fresh diaper into place.
From across the nursery, Phury’s voice was low. “Nightmares about being a blood slave?”
“Has to be it.” She put Nalla’s clean bottom down and taped up the sides of the Huggies. “Because he won’t talk to me about it.”
“Has he been eating? Feeding?”
Bella shook her head as she did up the snaps on Nalla’s onesie. The thing was pastel pink and had a white skull and crossbones appliquéd on it. “Not much on the food and no on feeding. It’s like . . . I don’t know, the day she was born, he seemed so amazed and engaged and happy. But then some kind of switch was triggered and he just closed up. It’s almost as bad as it was in the beginning.” She stared down at Nalla, who was patting at the pattern on her little chest. “I’m sorry I asked you to come down here. . . . I just don’t know what else to do.”
“I’m glad you did. I’m always there for you both, you know that.”
Cradling Nalla on her shoulder, she turned around. Phury was leaning against the creamy wall of the nursery, his huge body breaking up the pattern of hand-painted bunnies and squirrels and fawns.
“I don’t want to put you in an awkward position. Or take you away from Cormia unnecessarily.”
“You haven’t.” He shook his head, his multicolored hair gleaming. “If I’m quiet, it’s because I’m trying to think of what the best thing to do is. Talking with him isn’t always the solution.”
“True. But I’m running out of both ideas and patience.” Bella went over and sat in the rocker, repositioning the young in her arms.
Nalla’s brilliant yellow eyes stared up out of her angelic little face, and recognition was in her stare. She knew exactly who was with her . . . and who wasn’t. The awareness had come in the last week or so. And changed everything.
“He won’t hold her, Phury. He won’t even pick her up.”
“Are you serious?”
Bella’s tears made her daughter’s face wavy. “Damn it, when is this postpartum depression going to lift? I well up at almost nothing.”
“Wait, not even once? He hasn’t gotten her out of the crib or—”
“He won’t touch her. Crap, will you hand me a frickin’ tissue.” When the Kleenex box got in range, she snapped one free and pressed it to her eyes. “I’m such a mess. All I can think about is Nalla going through her whole life wondering why her father doesn’t love her.” She cursed softly as more tears came. “Okay, this is ridiculous.”
“It’s not ridiculous,” he said. “It’s really not.”
Phury knelt down, keeping the tissues front and center. Absurdly, Bella noticed that the box had the picture of an alley of leafy trees with a lovely dirt road stretching off into the distance. On either side, flowering bushes with magenta blooms made the maples look like they were wearing tulle ballet skirts.
She imagined walking down the dirt road . . . to a place that was far better than where she was now.
She took another tissue. “The thing is, I grew up without a father, but at least I had Rehvenge. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a dad who was alive but dead to you.” With a little cooing sound, Nalla yawned wide and snuffled, rubbing her face with the back of her fist. “Look at her. She’s so innocent. And she responds to love so well . . . I mean . . . Oh, for God’s sake, I’m going to buy stock in Kleenex.”
With a disgusted noise she flipped another tissue free. To avoid looking at Phury as she blotted, she let her eyes wander around the cheery room that had been a walk-in closet before the birth. Now it was all about the young, all about family, with the pine rocker Fritz had hand-made, and the matching dressing table, and the crib that was still festooned with multicolored bows.
When her stare landed on the low-slung bookcase with all its big, flat books, she felt even worse. She and the other Brothers were the ones who read to Nalla, who settled the young on a lap and unfolded shiny covers and spoke rhyming words.
It was never her father, even though Z had learned to read almost a year ago.
“He doesn’t refer to her as his daughter. It’s my daughter. To him, she’s mine, not ours.”
Phury made a disgusted sound. “FYI, I’m trying to resist the urge to pound him out right now.”
“It’s not his fault. I mean, after all he went through . . . I should have expected this, I guess.” She cleared her throat. “I mean, this whole pregnancy thing wasn’t planned, and I wonder . . . maybe he resents me and regrets her?”
“You’re his miracle. You know you are.”
She took more tissues and shook her head. “But it’s not just me anymore. And I won’t raise her here if he can’t come to terms with the two of us. . . . I will leave him.”
“Whoa, I think that’s a little premature—”
“She’s beginning to recognize folks, Phury. She’s starting to understand she’s being shut out. And he’s had three months to get used to the idea. Over time, he’s gotten worse, not better.”
As Phury cursed, she lifted her eyes to the brilliant yellow stare of her hellren’s twin. God, that citrine color was what shone out of her daughter’s face as well, so there was no looking at Nalla without thinking of her father. And yet . . .
“Seriously,” she said, “what’s this all going to be like a year from now? There is nothing more lonely than sleeping next to someone you’re missing as if they were gone. Or having that as a father.”
Nalla reached up with her fat hand and grabbed onto one of the tissues.
“I didn’t know you were here.”
Bella’s eyes shot to the doorway. Zsadist was standing in it, a tray in his hands bearing salad and a pitcher of lemonade. There was a white bandage on his left hand and a whole lot of don’t-ask on his face.
Looming there, on the verge of the nursery, he was exactly as she had fallen in love and mated him: a gigantic male with a skull trim and a scar down his face and slave bands at his wrists and neck and nipple rings that showed through his tight black T-shirt.
She thought of him the first time she’d seen him, punching a bag down in the training center’s gym. He’d been viciously fast on his feet, his fists flying faster than her eye could track, the bag being driven back from the beating. And then, without even a pause, he’d unsheathed a black dagger from his chest holster and stabbed the thing he’d been pounding, ripping the blade through the bag’s leather flesh, the stuffing falling free like the internal organs of a lesser.
She’d come to learn that th
e fierce fighter wasn’t all there was to him. Those hands of his had great kindness in them as well. And that ruined face with its distorted upper lip had smiled and looked at her with love.
“I came down to see Wrath,” Phury said, getting to his feet.
Z’s eyes flicked to the Kleenex box his twin held, then went to the wad of tissues in Bella’s hand. “Did you.”
As he came in and put the tray down on the bureau where Nalla’s clothes were kept, he didn’t look at his daughter. She, however, knew he was in the room. The young turned her face in his direction, her unfocused eyes pleading, her chubby little arms reaching for him.
Z stepped back out into the hall. “Have a good meeting. I’m going out hunting.”
“I’ll walk you to the door,” Phury said.
“No time. Later.” Z’s eyes met Bella’s for a moment. “I love you.”
Bella hugged Nalla closer to her heart. “I love you, too. Be safe.”
He nodded once and then he was gone.
TWO
As Zsadist came awake in a panic, he tried to calm his breathing and figure out where he was, but his eyes weren’t much help. Everything was dark . . . he was enveloped in a dense, cold blackness that, no matter how hard he strained his vision, he couldn’t see through. He could have been in a bedroom, out in a field . . . in a cell.
He’d come out of sleep like this many, many times. For a hundred years as a blood slave, he’d woken up in a panicked blindness and wondered what was going to be done to him and by whom. After he was free? Nightmares caused him to do the same thing.
In both cases it was such bullshit. When he’d been the Mistress’s property, worrying about the who and the what and the when hadn’t helped him. The abuse was inevitable whether he was faceup or facedown on the bedding platform: He was used until she and her studs were sated; then he was left to lie degraded and leaking, alone in his prison.
And now, with the bad dreams? Waking up in the same terror he’d been in as a slave just validated the past horrors his subconscious insisted on burping up.
At least . . . he thought he was dreaming.
True panic hit him as he wondered which dark owned him. Was it the dark of the cell? Or the dark of his bedroom with Bella? He didn’t know. Both looked the same when there were no visual clues to decipher and only the sound of his pounding heart in his ears.
Solution? He’d try to move his arms and legs. If they were unchained, if they were not shackled, it was just a case of being caught in his mind’s choke hold once again, the past reaching out through the graveyard dirt of his memories and grabbing him with bony hands. As long as he could shift his arms and legs through clean sheets, he was okay.
Right. Move his arms and legs.
His arms. His legs. Needed to move.
Move.
Oh, God . . . damn you, move.
His limbs didn’t budge, and in the paralysis of his body the clawed truth ripped through him. He was in the damp darkness of the Mistress’s cell, chained on his back, thick iron cuffs keeping him on the bedding platform. She and her lovers would be coming for him again, and they would do to him whatever they wanted, staining his skin, soiling the inside of him.
He moaned, the pathetic sound vibrating up from his chest and breaching his mouth like it was relieved to be free of him. Bella was the dream. He lived in the nightmare.
Bella was the dream. . . .
The footsteps approached from the hidden stairwell that ran down from the Mistress’s bedroom, the sound echoing, getting louder. And there were more than one set on the stone steps.
With an animal’s horror, his muscles grabbed and pulled against his skeleton, fighting desperately to get loose from the dirty binding of flesh that was about to be fondled and invaded and used. Sweat broke out on his face, and his stomach seized, bile marshaling an assault up his esophagus to the base of his tongue—
Someone was crying.
No . . . wailing.
A young’s cry sounded out from the far corner of the cell.
His fight stalled while he wondered what an infant was doing in this place. The Mistress had no offspring, nor had she been pregnant during the years he had been owned by her—
No . . . wait . . . he had brought the young here. It was his young who cried—and the Mistress was going to find the infant. She was going to find the infant and . . . Oh, God.
This was his fault. He had brought the young here.
Get the young out. Get the young—
I curled his fists and punched his elbows into the bedding platform, heaving with every ounce of strength he had. The power came from more than his body; it was born of his will. With a massive surge, he . . .
. . . got absolutely nowhere. The shackles cut through his wrists and his ankles down to his bones, slicing through his skin so that blood mixed with his cold sweat.
As the door opened, the young was crying and he couldn’t save her. The Mistress was going to—
Light poured over him, rocketing him into true consciousness.
He was off his mated bed like he’d been bootlicked by a Chevy, landing in a fighting stance with fists up at his chest, shoulders drawn in steel knots, thighs ready to spring.
Bella slowly eased back from the lamp she’d turned on, as if she didn’t want to spook him.
He looked around the bedroom. There was, as usual, no one to fight, but he’d woken everyone up. In the corner, Nalla was in her crib crying, and he’d scared the ever-loving shit out of his shellan. Again.
There was no Mistress. None of her consorts. No cell or chains stretching him out on a bedding platform.
No young in his cell with him.
Bella slipped out of bed and went over to the crib, scooping up a red-faced and screaming Nalla. The daughter, however, would have nothing of the comfort offered. The young held its little chubby arms straight out for Zsadist, wailing for its father, tears streaming.
Bella waited for a moment, as if she were hoping this time would be different and he would go over and take the child into his arms and comfort the infant who so clearly wanted him.
Z backed away until his shoulder blades hit the far wall, tucking his arms around his chest.
Bella turned and whispered to her darling one as she went into the adjoining nursery. The door muffled the daughter’s whimpering as it slid shut.
Z let himself slide down until his ass hit the floor. “Fuck.”
He rubbed his skull trim back and forth, then let both hands hang off his knees. After a moment, he realized he was sitting as he had back in the cell, his back against the corner facing the door, his knees up, his naked body shivering.
He looked at the slave bands around his wrists. The black was so dense in his skin, so solid, it was like the iron cuffs he’d once worn.
After God only knew how long, the door to the nursery slid open and Bella came back with the young. Nalla was asleep again, but as Bella laid her out in the crib, it was with care, as if a bomb were about to go off at any moment.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly, rubbing his wrists.
Bella put on a dressing gown and went to the door that led out into the hall. With her hand on the knob, she looked back at him, her eyes remote. “I can’t say this is okay anymore.”
“I’m really sorry about the dreams—”
“I’m talking about Nalla. I can’t say that your shunning her is all right . . . that I understand, that it’s going to get better and I’ll be patient. The fact is, she is your child as well as mine, and it kills me to see you pulling away from her. I know what you went through, and I don’t want to be callous, but . . . everything’s different for me now. I need to think in terms of what’s good for her, and having a father who won’t even touch her? That’s not it.”
Z flexed open both his hands and stared at his palms, trying to imagine picking the young up.
The slave bands seemed huge to him. Huge . . . and contagious.
The word wasn’t won’t, he thought. I
t was can’t.
The thing was if he did comfort Nalla and play with her and read to her, it would mean she had him for a father, and his legacy was nothing you wanted to saddle a young with. Bella’s born daughter deserved better than that.
“I need you to decide what you want to do,” Bella said. “If you can’t be her father, I’m leaving you. I know that sounds harsh, but . . . I have to think of what’s best for her. I love you and I will always love you, but it’s not about me anymore.”
For a moment, he didn’t think he’d heard right. Leaving him?
Bella stepped out into the hall of statues. “I’m going to go grab something to eat. Don’t worry about her—I’ll be right back.”
She closed the door behind her without a sound.
When night fell about two hours later, the way that door had shut so quietly was still banging around Z’s head.
Standing in front of his closet full of black shirts and leathers and shitkickers, he sought his inner intentions, chasing them around the maze of his emotions.
Sure, he wanted to overcome the head fuck with his daughter. Of course he did.
It was just insurmountable: What had been done to him might have been in the past, but all he had to do was look at his wrists to see that he was still dirtied by it all—and he didn’t want that kind of shit anywhere near Nalla. He’d had the same problem with Bella in the beginning of their relationship, and had managed to get over it with his shellan, but the implications were more grave with the young: Z was the corporeal embodiment of the kind of cruelty that existed in the world. He didn’t want his daughter to know that such depths of depravity existed, much less expose her to their aftereffects.
Fuck.
What the hell was he going to do when she got to be old enough to look up into his face and ask him why he was scarred and how he’d gotten that way? What would he do when she wanted to know why he had black bands on his skin? What was her uncle Phury going to reply when she asked him why he was missing a leg?
Z dragged on a shirt and a pair of leathers, then pulled on his chest holster of daggers and opened the gun closet. As he took out a pair of SIG Sauer forties, he checked them quickly. He used to palm nines—shit, he used to fight with nothing but his bare hands. Ever since Bella had come into his life, however, he’d been more careful.
