Lover At Last tbdb-11

by J. R. Ward

  “Would you care to review the documentation?” the solicitor asked him.

  As if he could, Xcor thought grimly. Indeed, one had to wonder what this learned male would think if he knew the decision maker in all this was an illiterate.

  “I am persuaded.” He got up, thinking mayhap a stretch would cure whate’er ailed him. “And I believe this information should be shared with members of the Council.”

  “I have sufficient contacts to call the princeps together.”

  Xcor went over to a window and looked out, letting his instincts roam. Was it the Brotherhood?

  “Do that,” he said with distraction as that hum in his gut increased, creating an urgency he found impossible to ignore….

  His Chosen.

  His Chosen had breached the compound and was close by—

  “I must needs go,” he said in a rush as he headed for the door. “Throe, you wrap up here.”

  There was a certain commotion behind him, conversation sprouting up from the pair of males in his wake—about which he cared naught. Breaking out through the front entrance, he regarded the farmland around him….

  And located her signal.

  Between one heartbeat and the next, he was gone, his body and will drawn to his female sure as a dying thief to redemption.

  * * *

  At the Iron Mask downtown, Qhuinn went over to the bar and parked it on one of the leather-topped stools. All around, the music was pounding, and sweat and sex were already curling into the hot air, making him feel claustrophobic.

  Or maybe that was just his headspace.

  “Haven’t seen you in a while.” The bartender, a nice-looking female with a rack and a half, slid a napkin in front of him. “Same as usual?”

  “Double.”

  “You got it.”

  As he waited for his Herradura Selección Suprema to arrive, he could feel the eyes of the humans in the club lingering on him.

  Come out? Like I’m gay…

  You fuck men! What the good goddamn do you think it means!

  Shaking his head, he really could have used a break: That happy little exchange had been banging around his head, just underneath the surface of his consciousness, ever since shit had gone down a week ago. On the whole, he’d done an outstanding job of sublimation…unfortunately, that winning streak appeared to be over. As his tequila arrived and he downed one shot glass, and then the other, he knew that there were no other distractions he could bring into play, no more putting the introspection off.

  Oddly—or maybe not so oddly—he thought of his brother. He still hadn’t shared anything with Luchas about the young. It all felt too tenuous: Even though the pregnancy was hanging in and continuing to look good, it just seemed like an extra layer of drama the guy didn’t need at this point.

  And he most certainly hadn’t mentioned anything about his sex life or Blay. For one thing, his brother was still a virgin—or at least, that had been Qhuinn’s understanding: The glymera were far more restrictive about what females could do before mating, and certainly if Luchas had banged a female casually, it would have been tolerated as long as he didn’t hook up with her long-term. But all of Luchas’s feedings after his transition had been witnessed, so there had been no opportunity there, and the guy’s nights had been heavily scheduled with learning and studying and chaperoned social events. No chance there.

  Somehow going into all the shit Qhuinn had done didn’t seem appropriate. It also, in Blay’s words, wasn’t that interesting.

  Qhuinn scrubbed his face. “Two more?” he called out.

  As the bartender hopped right on that, he thought, damn it, he’d assumed the sex he’d had with Blay had been really interesting. And Blay hadn’t seemed bored when it was happening….

  Whatever. Back to Luchas. In all those bedside chats he’d been having with his brother, females hadn’t come up—and males certainly weren’t on the menu. Back before the raids, Luchas had been hetero like their father—which was to say strictly the female you were mated to in the missionary position on your birthday and maybe once a year after a festival.

  Males, females, men, women, in various combinations, sometimes in public, rarely in a bed at home? Not something Luchas had any frame of reference for.

  When Herraduras three and four were slid in front of him, he nodded a thank-you.

  Reaching down deep, even though he hated that expression as well as what it meant, he tried to see if there was anything else in and among his reticence to talk to the remaining member of his family about his life. Any shame. Embarrassment. Hell, maybe a little rebellious gotcha that he didn’t want to inflict on his crippled brother…

  Qhuinn squirmed in his own clothes.

  Well. What do you know.

  If he was brutally honest? Yeah, he was a bit tetchy. But it was on the level of not wanting to be looked at funny for yet another reason…as his conservative, probably-virgin of a brother would no doubt do if he was told about the males and the men.

  That was it.

  Yup. That was all.

  I don’t know how to explain it. I just see myself with a female long-term.

  He’d said that to Blay a while ago, and had meant every word—

  Some kind of emotion curled up inside his gut, twisting things down there, rearranging his bowel and his liver.

  He told himself it was the hooch.

  The sudden fear he felt suggested otherwise.

  Qhuinn swallowed his third shot in hopes of getting rid of the sensation. And the fourth. And meanwhile, the faces and breasts and sexes of the many females and women he’d fucked flashed through his mind—

  “No,” he said out loud. “Nope. No.”

  Oh, God…

  “No.”

  As the guy next to him gave him a weird look, he shut up.

  Wiping his face, he was tempted to order more to drink, but held off. Something seismic was trying desperately to break through; he could feel it trembling around the foundation of his psyche.

  You don’t know who you are, and that’s always been your problem.

  Fuck. If he got more tequila, if he kept swallowing, if he stayed his avoidance course, what Blay had said about him was always going to be true. The trouble was, he didn’t want to know. He just really fucking didn’t want…to…know….

  Jesus, not here. Not now. Not…ever.

  Cursing under his breath, he felt the geyser of realization start to really bubble, a loud-and-clear from the middle of his chest threatening to break out—and he knew that once it was free, he was never going to get it back underground again.

  Damn it. The only person he wanted to talk to about this wasn’t speaking to him.

  He guessed he was going to have to man up and deal with it on his own.

  On some level, the idea that he was…well, you know, as his mother would have said…shouldn’t have affected him. He was stronger than the glymera’s condescension, and, shit, he lived in an environment where whether you were gay or straight, it didn’t matter: Long as you could handle yourself in the field and you weren’t a total asshole, the Brotherhood was down with you. Look at V’s sexual history, for fuck’s sake. Black candles used as something other than a light source in the dark? Hell, just being into males was a cakewalk compared to that stuff.

  Plus, he did not live in his parents’ house anymore. That was not his life.

  That was not his life.

  That was not his life.

  And yet even as he told himself that over and over again, the past that no longer existed was right behind him, staring over his shoulder…judging and finding him not just wanting, not simply inferior, but utterly and completely unworthy.

  It was like phantom limb pain: The gangrene was gone, the infection cut out, the amputation complete…but the horrible sensations remained. Still hurt like a bitch. Still crippled him sure as a limp.

  All those women…all those females…what was the true nature of sexuality, he wondered suddenly. What counted as attract
ion? Because he’d wanted to fuck them, and he had. He’d picked them up in clubs and bars, hell, even that store in the mall where they’d gone to get John Matthew some real clothes after his transition.

  He’d chosen the women, singled them from the crowd, applied some kind of data screen that had weeded out some and highlighted others. He’d had them blow him. He’d sucked them off. He’d ridden them from behind, from the side, from in front. He’d grabbed their breasts.

  He’d done all of that by choice.

  Had it been different with the guys? And even if it had been, did he have to label himself at all?

  And if he didn’t slap a definition on himself, did that mean he wasn’t something that his parents, who were goddamn dead and who had hated him anyway, hadn’t approved of?

  As the questions fired through his brain, pelting him with precisely the kind of self-analysis he had always stabbed out of his thought processes, he came to an even more shocking realization.

  As important as all that shit was, as Christopher Columbus as he was getting, none of it came close to the most critical issue.

  Not in the fucking slightest.

  The real problem that he discovered made all that crap look like a walk in the park.

  SEVENTY-NINE

  Assail did not condone swearing. In his mind, it was common and unnecessary. That being said, he’d had a shitty fucking week.

  Down in the cellar of his house, in the vault, he and the twins had just finished organizing the haul for the last few days: Bills were stacked in bundles that had been through the counter, banded, and then sorted according to denomination—and the total was impressive, even by his standards.

  All told, they had about two hundred thousand dollars.

  The Fore-lesser and his merry band of slayers had been doing excellent work.

  You’d think he’d be happy.

  Not so.

  In fact, he’d been a miserable fucking son of a bitch—and the reason for the bad humor just made him crankier.

  “Go to Benloise,” he told the twins. “Get the next batch of cocaine and come back here to separate it.”

  The twins were masters at cutting the stuff with additives and parceling it out into Baggies, and that was a good thing. The slayers were moving three times what had been sold before.

  “Then make the delivery.” Assail checked his watch. “It’s set for three a.m., so you should have enough time.”

  Getting up from the table, he stretched his arms over his head and arched his back. His body had been stiff lately, and he knew why: Being in a constant state of low-level arousal had tightened up the muscles in his thighs and his shoulders, among other physical aspects…which had been utterly resistant to self-regulation.

  After years of not particularly caring for tending to his own erections, he’d fallen into a rut of pleasuring himself.

  And all it seemed to do was underscore what he was not getting.

  For the last week, he’d waited for Marisol to get in touch with him, expecting the phone to ring, and not because some unknown had shown up at her door again. The woman had wanted him as much as he had her, and surely that would lead to a reunion. It had not, however. And the fact that she had exhibited the kind of restraint he was struggling with, made him question not only his self-control, but his very sanity.

  Indeed, he feared he was going to crack before she did.

  Taking his leave, he went up the stairs and into the kitchen. The first thing he did was go over to his phone, in case she had called or in the event that Audi of hers had finally moved after seven nights of going nowhere fast: The damn thing had been parked in front of that house since he’d paid his visit, as if she mayhap knew he’d put a tracer on it.

  Checking the screen, he saw that someone had called him, but it was a number that was not in his contact list.

  And there was a voice mail.

  He was not interested in fielding some human’s mis-dials, but as there was a chance it was a lesser breaking protocol, he knew he had to listen to the message.

  As he accessed it, he walked in the direction of his humidor. He’d been smoking a lot lately, and probably doing too much coke. Which was painfully counter-intuitive—if one was already twitchy and frustrated, adding stimulants to that internal chemistry was gasoline to a fire—

  “Hola. This is Sola’s grandmother. I am trying to reach…an Assail…please?” Assail stopped dead in the middle of his living room. “Please call me back now? Thank you—”

  With a feeling of dread, he cut the message off and hit Call Back.

  One ring. Two rings—

  “¿Hola?”

  Indeed, he didn’t know her name. “This is Assail, madam. Are you all right?”

  “No, no—I am not. I found your number on her bedside table so I call. There is something wrong.”

  He gripped his iPhone hard. “Tell me.”

  “She is gone. She came home, but then she leave out the door right after she arrived—I hear her go? Except all of her things, her backpack, her car, it is all here. I was sleeping and I hear downstairs, someone is moving. I call out her name and no one answered—then I hear this hard noise—loud sound—and so I come down. The front door is open, and I fear she has been taken—I do no know what to do. She always told me, we do not call the police. I do not know—”

  “Shh, it is all right. You did the correct thing. I’m coming directly.”

  Assail ran to the front door without bothering to communicate with the twins; nothing was on his mind except getting over to that little house as fast as he could.

  A second was all it took to dematerialize, and as he resumed form in the front yard, he thought that of all the scenarios he’d run through in his mind for coming back, this was not it.

  As the grandmother reported, the Audi was parked on the street at the end of the walkway. Just where it had been. But what was of note? There was a scramble of messy footfalls disturbing the snow, the trail crossing the lawn to the street in a diagonal pattern.

  She’s been kidnapped, Assail thought.

  Goddamn it.

  Jogging up the squat steps, he hit the doorbell and stamped his feet. The idea that someone had taken his female—

  The door opened and the woman on the other side was visibly shaken. And then she seemed further taken aback as she took him in with her eyes. “You are…Assail?”

  “Yes. Please let me in, madam, and I shall be of aid to you.”

  “You are not the man who came before.”

  “Not that you saw, madam. Now, please, let me in.”

  As Marisol’s grandmother stepped aside, she lamented, “Oh, I do not know where she is. Mãe de Deus, she is gone, gone….”

  He glanced around the tidy little living room, and then stalked out into the kitchen to look at the back door. Intact. Opening it wide, he leaned out. No footprints other than those he’d left a week ago. Closing things back up and locking the dead bolt, he returned to her grandmother.

  “You were upstairs?”

  “Sí. In the bed. As I said, I was asleep. I hear her come in, but I was half-awake. Then I hear…that sound, of someone falling. I say I come down, then the front door opens.”

  “Did you see a car drive off?”

  “Sí. But it was very far away, and the license plate—nothing.”

  “How long ago?”

  “I called you fifteen, maybe twenty minutes after. I went to her room and looked around—that is where I found the napkin with your number on it.”

  “Has anyone called?”

  “No one.”

  He checked his watch, and then grew concerned about how pale the elderly woman was. “Here, madam, sit down.”

  As he settled her onto the floral couch in the living room, she took out a dainty handkerchief and pressed it to her eyes. “She is my life.”

  Assail tried to remember how humans addressed their superiors. “Mrs.—ah, Mrs….”

  “Carvalho. My husband was Brazilian. I am Yese
nia Carvalho.”

  “Mrs. Carvalho, I need to ask you some questions.”

  “Can you help me? My granddaughter is—”

  “Look into my eyes.” When the woman did, he said in a low voice, “There is nothing I will not do to bring her back. Do you understand what I’m saying.”

  As he sent his intention out into the air between him, Mrs. Carvalho’s eyes narrowed. Then, after a moment, she calmed and nodded once—as if she approved of his means, though there was a good chance they were going to be violent. “What do you need to know?”

  “Is there anyone you can think of who would want to hurt her?”

  “She is a good girl. She works at an office nights. She keeps to herself.”

  So Marisol hadn’t told her grandmother anything about what she really did. This was good. “Does she have any assets?”

  “Money, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “We are simple people.” She eyed his handmade, tailored clothes. “We have nothing but this house.”

  Somehow he doubted that, even though he knew little of his woman’s life: He found it hard to believe she hadn’t made some cash doing what she did—and she certainly didn’t have to pay taxes on the kind of income she’d been bringing in from the likes of Benloise.

  But he feared that a ransom call was not going to be forthcoming.

  “I do not know what to do.”

  “Mrs. Carvalho, I do not want you to worry.” He got to his feet. “I shall handle this promptly.”

  Her eyes narrowed again, belying an intelligence that made him think of her granddaughter. “You know who did this, do you?”

  Assail bowed low as a measure of respect. “I shall bring her back to you.”

  The question was how many people he was going to have to kill to get that done—and whether Marisol herself was going to be alive at the end of it.

  The mere thought of bodily harm to that woman had him growling in his throat, his fangs descending, the civilized part of him shedding as the skin from a cobra.

  Whilst Assail left the modest house, he had a feeling what this was all about, and if he was right? Even just twenty minutes into the kidnapping, he might well be too late.