In the Heart of Darkness

by Reinke, Sara

  IN THE HEART OF DARKNESS

  Book Nine in The Brethren Series

  by Sara Reinke

  Edited by Andria Whitson

  Published by Bloodhorse Press at Smashwords

  Copyright 2014 Sara Reinke

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Lady Gaga’s rich, purring voice boomed out from towering speakers strategically placed throughout the hotel ballroom, which had been set up to serve as a make-shift nightclub. As the bass kicked in, heavy and pounding, it shuddered through the walls and floorboards in rhythmic tandem with a flurry of strobe lights and revolving, rotating lasers. A huge catwalk stage, nearly the length of the entire room, exploded into life, the floor illuminating in a dazzling array of rainbow shades. A parade of more than three dozen men, all dressed in sparkling, glitter-adorned bikinis, towering neon-colored wigs, treacherously spiked stilettos, sequined evening gowns split from hem to groin, and more, burst through velveteen drapes, stomping and strutting to the beat.

  “Wait for me!” Mason screamed to Jaime, trying to make himself heard over the din of music, and sudden, uproarious cheers of approval from the jam-packed dance floor. Jaime was ahead of him in the parade line but paused now, letting other dancers shrug and shuffle past him.

  “Come on, ya bitch!” he yelled back.

  Mason teetered forward, dressed like a Las Vegas showgirl with a gold, scarlet and white feather headpiece that towered above him a good three feet, plus matching pasties on his nipples, satin gloves up to his biceps and gold platform go-go boots.

  He was drunk. Make that shit-faced. It was close to midnight, and by that point, he’d downed at least three large bottles of Courvoisier all by himself—all since dinner. That didn’t count the seemingly endless parade of shots and assorted cocktails Jaime kept ordering and pushing on him. He’d already puked once, less than five minutes earlier, in fact, right before they’d announced the cattle call over the loud speakers, and Jaime had decided they both needed to get their asses on stage.

  “I’m going to fall!” Mason screamed at him as they stood under the bright, hot glare of spot lights. Jaime was busy grinding against a stripper pole and lip-syncing along with Mother Monster, and either didn’t hear him or chose to ignore him. Mason clapped his hands around the brass pole as well, if only to make sure he had something solid and anchored to the ground to keep him from pitching, exposed ass over elbows, into the throng of clubgoers.

  “Isn’t this great!” Jaime howled, his mouth stretched in a grin that threatened to split his rouge-smeared cheeks. He loved Lady Gaga, had in fact, copied her outfit meticulously from the dance sequences in the video for “Born this Way,” down to the stringy blond wig with fringe bangs he currently sported.

  “Yeah,” Mason yelled back, even though he didn’t think it was great. He’d stopped having fun about an hour ago, right about the time all of the liquor had started disagreeing with his normally stalwart constitution. He could still taste the bitter aftertaste of vomit in his mouth. His makeup was ruined, his bright lipstick smeared, his mascara and thickly painted eyeliner smutched and running. Jaime had tried to help him touch it all up after he’d been sick, but there hadn’t been much time for they had to go on stage, and frankly, Jaime was so drunk himself, it had been a sad case of the blind leading the cosmetically lame.

  The guy next to him—dressed like either Marilyn Monroe in the ubiquitous pink dress and platinum wig, a la “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” or Madonna, circa the “Material Girl” video—plowed gracelessly into him while dancing. Mason stumbled, feeling himself nearly topple sideways in his ridiculous shoes.

  I’m going to break my fucking neck in these things!

  He was a tall man by the grace of birth; in the boots, he was nearly a full head above his normal height. It had been his observation, the view from up there wasn’t much better.

  “We’ve got to start doing drag!” Jaime screamed, still dry humping the pole.

  That they had gone to this, their inaugural drag event, in the first place had been his idea. The Third Annual Get-Your-Gay-On Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Celebration was being hosted at the luxurious La Couronne Hotel in the heart of Miami, and Jaime had insisted they attend.

  It’ll be fun, he’d told Mason, and Mason had been about half-drunk anyway to have not only agreed, but to have footed the bill for their travel expenses and outlandish costumes. Not to mention all of the food and liquor Jaime kept guzzling.

  “I’m going to be sick,” Mason said, as his stomach did another queasy flip-flop. Jaime shook his head, cupping his hand to his ear, and Mason leaned toward him, screaming: “I’m going to puke again, Jaime!”

  Jaime rolled his eyes, but turned loose of the pole. Hooking his arm around Mason’s waist, he began to help him stagger his way back through the dance line toward the backstage area.

  “You’re a drag, not a queen, you know,” he said into Mason’s ear.

  They barely made it off the stage. Mason couldn’t even flounder his way into the nearest bathroom before he felt his gut heave. Grabbing the first trash can he could find, he doubled over and retched. Jaime kept his arm around him so that he didn’t fall over in his godforsaken boots, but bounced his hips back and forth the whole time, singing along with Lady Gaga.

  I wasn’t ‘born this way,’ Mason thought miserably, blinking down at the thin puddle of frothy emesis he’d managed to choke up. He felt ashamed of himself, his drunken stupor, his inebriated clumsiness, the entire disgrace of his attire, his smeared makeup and puke breath. I was not born to wear high-heeled boots and a G-string. Jesus Christ, I’m two hundred and forty-seven years old. What the fuck was I thinking?

  “I want to go back to the room,” he croaked to Jaime.

  “What?” Jaime blinked at him, pouting. “Are you kidding? It’s early!”

  “Just help me,” Mason said, spitting out a mouthful of lingering bile. He felt shaky and weak, his vision swimming, his head spinning, his ears ringing. “Please, Jaime…”

  Jaime rolled his eyes, but didn’t offer any further protest or complaint. “Okay, honey,” he said. Leaning over, he planted a loud, sloppy kiss on Mason’s cheek. “I need some more cash anyway. Let’s go.”

  The song wrapped up, Lady Gaga’s voice trailing off into vibrato eternity, as Jaime led him back out on the main club floor. Mason stumbled along behind him, holding on fiercely to his hand, as Jaime forged a path through the crowd. “Back off, girls,” he kept hollering, laughing the whole time, as if having a ball. “I’ve got one sick bitch coming through!”

  The party was being hosted in the grand ballroom of the hotel. Mason had secured a penthouse suite for him and Jaime for the weekend. Since he was the principal investor in Triumvirate Trust, the firm that owned La Couronne, he’d had no tro
uble in doing so, and at no charge. As Jaime led him out the doors of the ballroom, out of the thick, stifling heat of more than four hundred dancing, grinding, gyrating bodies, Mason ducked his head, as much to try and hide his face as breathe in the cooler, fresher air more deeply. The last thing he needed was for someone with whom he was acquainted on a business level to see him, even though he felt fairly sure there was no way in hell anyone—even in his own family—would recognize him in his current state of dress, or un-dress, as it were.

  Helping to promote the event were a gaggle of professional drag queens, stationed at the perimeter of the party entrance. They were gorgeous, their makeup and outfits impeccable, their wigs exquisitely coiffed, their chests taped to produce impressively realistic cleavage through the plunging necklines of their gowns.

  “Leaving so soon, darlings?” one of them called out as Jaime dragged Mason past.

  “I’ve got a stick in the mud,” Jaime called back, still sporting that shit-eating grin, his laugh growing shriller—and in Mason’s opinion, more grating—by the moment. He hoisted Mason’s arm aloft as if announcing the winner in a boxing match. “My little monster is ready for beddy-bye!”

  The professional queens all tittered at this, and laughing, Jaime shoved Mason ahead of him, slapping him on the ass cheek—conveniently exposed in his sequined thong bikini bottoms—as he staggered.

  * * *

  When they reached their room on the penthouse floor, Mason staggered for the bed. Ripping off the feathered headdress—along with half his scalp, from the feel of things—he collapsed face-first onto the duvet with a low, miserable groan.

  “I swear, if I wasn’t such a lady…the things I could do to you right now.” Jaime remarked, clasping Mason’s hips between his hands and grinding his crotch suggestively, playfully against his ass.

  “Don’t,” Mason moaned, trying vainly to push him away.

  “Oh, come on,” Jaime said, again slapping him on the buttock, this time hard enough to sting. “You’re no fun at all, you know that?”

  Mason had left his wallet on the bedside table, and he watched blearily out of the corner of his eye as Jaime plucked out all of the cash—fifteen crisp, new $100 bills. Thankfully they’d been together long enough for Mason to be well-versed with the younger man’s modus operandi by now, and earlier he’d locked his credit cards away in the room safe—without sharing the access code with Jaime.

  “I’m going down to the Roxxxy Andrews show,” Jaime said. “I probably won’t be back until pretty late.” Leaning over, he planted a loud, wet kiss on Mason’s cheek. “Don’t wait up for me, honey.”

  “I won’t,” Mason murmured, but it didn’t matter because Jaime was gone, sashaying toward the hotel room door and letting it slam hard enough behind him to leave Mason grimacing, the sharp sound reverberating in his poor, aching skull. He was alone but that was nothing new. Even with Jaime in the room—lying right next to him, for Christ’s sake—Mason felt only the overwhelming weight of loneliness. He wanted to call home…only the Lake Tahoe compound felt no more like home than the sparsely decorated house he owned in the Hollywood Hills. His brother Tristan was still on the mend, no longer comatose, and just now beginning to walk again, but still relatively helpless and fragile. And their father, Michel…

  Mason closed his eyes against the sudden sting of unbidden tears. Goddamn it, he thought, because he’d promised himself he wouldn’t do this anymore. He’d promised himself he’d be stronger somehow, if only for Tristan, because the news of Michel’s murder had devastated him, nearly undoing all of the weeks of hard-fought—and even harder-won—recuperation he’d made following a ruthless assault suffered at the hands—and mind—of Jean Luc Davenant.

  “My fault,” Tristan had wept, crumpling headlong into Mason’s shoulder and shuddering with the force of his anguished sobs. “This…is all my fault! It wouldn’t have happened if…if it hadn’t been…for me…!”

  Mason had held him in a fierce embrace, his own tears spilling. “No, mon lapin,” he’d breathed to his brother, trying to offer him even a modicum of the comfort he himself had been unable to find. “None of this is because of you. It’s not your fault.”

  It’s mine.

  Rolling over, Mason pawed clumsily for his phone on the bedside table near his wallet. It took nearly a full minute’s concerted effort to focus his gaze and find a phone number from among his list of contacts.

  After Michel had died, he’d called Andrew Taylor, a former lover, over and over in various stages of drunken despair. Andrew had played for the Nevada Mustangs, a minor league baseball team Mason partially owned. He’d transferred to another team in Texas, and with that, their short-lived but intensely passionate fling had concluded. In more ways than one.

  “Mason, you can’t keep calling me like this,” Andrew had told him at last, having weathered more than a dozen drunk-dials or hang-ups at all hours of the day and night. “I told you before—I’m so sorry about your father. I wish there was more I could say or do. But I…I’m with someone now. I’ve moved on. I can’t be there for you, not like you want…not like you need. I’m sorry…but you just…” He’d sighed. “You need to stop, okay?”

  Mason’s humiliation in the wake of that phone call, his utter and abject despair, had been the catalyst that had prompted his trip to Miami with Jaime. He’d lost himself to a booze-induced haze of misery, and now he realized he was reaping the heartbreaking results.

  He was alone.

  He couldn’t call Tristan. He couldn’t call Andrew. But, he remembered suddenly, there was someone he could still try; someone who had, in the end, been there for him—to both his surprise and immeasurable gratitude.

  After a long moment and nearly a half-dozen rings, he heard her voice on the other end of the line, a hoarse growl: “Dr. Averay.”

  Even now, after so many years, it still somewhat surprised him to hear this. Despite the passage of time, and everything that had come and gone between them, on some unconscious level, Mason still expected her to go by his name—the name they’d shared when she’d been his wife. Edith Averay had never remarried, not in the nearly 200 years since their parting, and even though his romantic interests had always laid elsewhere—and with the opposite sex—Mason had always considered this to be a great, goddamn shame.

  “Hey, Edi,” he said, his voice slurring. “It’s me…it’s Mason. I was just…I’m sorry to call so late but I…I was just…”

  “Mason?” He heard a shuffling sound, then a series of clunks and bangs as she moved around, most likely sitting up in bed. “Are you okay?”

  What could he say to that? No, Edi, I’m not okay. I’m so far from okay, I can’t even see it on the horizon anymore. I’m drunk and lonely, and I just…I wanted…I needed to hear a friendly voice.

  “Are you hurt?” she asked, sounding worried now—and more than a little frightened. He’d scared her, he realized to his shame; the last time he’d called her in the middle of the night, it had been to tell her of Michel’s murder. “Is Tristan okay? Has something happened?”

  “No, I…I’m fine,” he murmured, a pathetic lie, because he was lying in bed, half a continent away from home, made up like a blow-up doll, with feathers on his head, pasties glued to his nipples and a scrap of sequined fabric stuck between his ass cheeks. “Tristan’s fine. Everyone’s fine…everything is just…”

  His voice faltered and he drew his hand to his face. The tears he’d been biting back, but that the booze had coaxed forward, finally started to fall. With a soft gasp, he began to weep, shuddering in the bed with the phone clasped to his ear.

  “Oh, honey,” Edi said. She’d come to his father’s funeral, had stood beside him throughout both the wake and the service, holding his hand—hell, holding him together. Everything about the funeral seemed distant and foggy to the best of his recollection; most of the time since had likewise passed for him in a dim haze. He’d tried to put on a brave face because the entire clan had turned to him; he wa
s Michel’s heir, their leader now, and he was expected to be strong, if not for himself, then for all of them.

  “I’m sorry,” Mason wept.

  “It’s alright,” she said. Then, after a moment: “You’ve been drinking.”

  It was a statement, not an inquiry, and he knew the answer was obvious from the quality of his voice.

  “Where are you?” Edi asked.

  “Miami,” he replied. “I…I wanted to get away for a little while…try to clear my head of things…”

  He didn’t mention that it had been Jaime’s idea to come to Florida; Jaime’s enthusiastic suggestion that they attend the LGBT festival. Jaime had wanted to try out the corporate jet that Mason, as his father’s successor as CEO of Pharmaceux, now had at his exclusive disposal. He’d also wanted to try out the bank account Mason now had exclusive access to, thanks to Michel’s will. These, too, were modi operandi that Mason had come to both recognize and expect from his flamboyant, barely legal lover.

  Jaime didn’t care about him, only his money, but that was fine by Mason. He hadn’t hooked up with Jaime with any thoughts of emotional intimacy. He’d been a warm body to lie beside for the past year; someone to fuck, and Mason had told himself he needed that, nothing more. But now…

  “It’s really late, honey,” Edi said, snapping his mind from the bleary fog of drunken distraction.

  “I know.” He nodded even though she couldn’t see him. “I’m sorry.”

  “We both need some sleep. Let me call you back tomorrow when I’m more awake…and you’re sober.”

  Mason continued nodding like a bobble-headed doll. “I’m sorry.”

  “Stop saying that,” she said, and the sound of her voice lent itself to a sad sort of smile. In his mind, he could nearly see her, the corners of her mouth tugging reluctantly up, and in his mind, he recalled just such a smile, just such a tone, from more than two hundred years earlier.