Lover Avenged

THIRTY-ONE

Inside his pitch-dark bathroom, Rehvenge banged into one of the marble walls, tripped across the marble floor, and ricocheted off the marble counter. His body was alive, sensation tingling through him, the pain of nailing his hip registering, the sawing breath in his lungs causing a burn, his heart thumping against his sternum.

He dropped the satin duvet, willed the lights on, and looked down.

His cock was stiff and thick, the tip glossy and ready to penetrate.

Holy…shit.

He glanced around. His vision was normal, the bathroom’s colors black and steel and white, with the edge of the Jacuzzi rising up from the floor, its depth obvious. And yet even though nothing was flat or ruby red, his senses were utterly alive, his blood heated and thundering in his veins, his skin ready to be touched, the orgasm in the shaft of his erection screaming to get free.

He’d totally bonded with Ehlena.

And that meant-at least in this moment, when he was so desperate to have sex with her-his vampire side was winning out over the symphath part of him.

His need for her triumphed over the darkness in him.

It had to be the bonding hormones, he thought. Bonding hormones that had shifted his internal chemistry.

In recognizing his new reality, there was no soaring joy, no sense of triumph, no impulse to throw himself on top of her and pump away hard. All he could do was stare down at his cock and think of where it had been last. What he’d done with it…and with the rest of his body.

Rehvenge wanted to snap the fucking thing off.

No way in hell was he sharing that with Ehlena. Except…he couldn’t go back out there like this.

Rehv grabbed his arousal in his broad hand and stroked himself. Oh…fuck…that was good…

He thought of going down on Ehlena, of having her warmth in his mouth and down the back of his throat. He saw her spread thighs and her glistening softness and his fingers slipping in and out as she moaned and rocked her-

His balls tightened up hard as fists, and the small of his back rippled in a wave, and that disgusting barb of his triggered even though it had nothing to grab onto. A roar threatened to come up out of his throat, but he held it in by biting his lip until he tasted blood.

Rehv came all over his hand and kept working his sex anyway, propping himself on the counter. He orgasmed again and again, messing up the mirror and the sinks, and still needing more-as if his body hadn’t released in, like, five hundred years.

When the storm finally passed, he realized…shit, he was draped against the wall, face shoved in hard to the marble, shoulders sagging, thighs twitching like there were jumper cables hooked up to his toes.

With shaky hands, he cleaned things up using one of the towels that was folded neatly on a rack, wiping off the counter and the glass and the sink. Then he flipped free another one and washed his hands and his cock and his stomach and his legs, because he’d gotten himself as dirty as the fucking bathroom.

When he finally reached for the doorknob, after what must have been nearly an hour, he half expected Ehlena to be gone, and he wouldn’t blame her: A female whom he had essentially made love to offers him her vein and he runs like a pussy into the bathroom and locks himself in.

Because he gets a hard-on.

Jesus Christ. This evening, which hadn’t even started out so well, had turned into a sixteen-car pileup on the road to relationshipville.

Rehv braced himself and opened the door.

As light spilled into the bedroom, Ehlena sat up in the sheets, her face worried…and completely nonjudgmental. There was no condemnation, no calculation as if she were looking for what would make him feel even worse. Just honest-to-God concern.

“Are you okay?”

Well, wasn’t that the question.

Rehvenge dropped his head and for the first time wanted to unburden everything to another person. Even with Xhex, who had been through more than he had, he had no interest in doing the sharing shit. But with Ehlena’s toffee-colored eyes so wide and warm in her lovely, perfect face, he wanted to confess every single dirty, shitty, scheming, mean, nasty thing he’d ever done.

Just to be honest.

Yeah, but if he dumped his life out on the table, where would that leave her? In a position of having to report him as a symphath and likely fearing for her very life. Great outcome. Perfect.

“I wish I were different,” he said, which was as close as he could get to speaking the truth that would separate them forever. “I wish I were a different male.”

“I don’t.”

That was because she didn’t know him. Not truly. And yet he couldn’t handle the idea of never seeing her after this night they’d had together.

Or that she would be terrified of him.

“If I asked you to come here again,” he said, “and let me be with you, would you?”

There was no hesitation. “Yes.”

“Even if things couldn’t be…normal…between us? Sexually speaking.”

“Yes.”

He frowned. “This is going to come out wrong…”

“Which is fine, because I’ve already put my foot in it with you back at the clinic. We’ll just be even.”

Rehv had to smile, but the expression didn’t stick. “I have to know…why. Why would you come back.”

Ehlena lay back down against the pillows and, in a slow sweep, moved her hand up over the satin sheet that covered her stomach. “I have only one answer to that, but I don’t think it’s going to be what you want to hear.”

The cold numbness, which was returning as the remnants of those orgasms he’d had dissipated, sped up its reclamation of his body.

Please let it not be pity, he thought. “Tell me.”

She was quiet for a long while, her stare shifting out toward the blinking, glowing view of Caldwell’s two halves.

“You ask me why I would come back?” she said softly. “And the only answer I have is…how could I not.” Her eyes flipped to his. “It doesn’t make sense to me on some level, but then, feelings don’t make sense, do they? And they don’t have to. Tonight…you gave me things I not only haven’t had for a long time, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt.” She shook her head. “I wrapped up a body yesterday…a body of someone my own age, a body of someone who likely as not had headed out of his house the evening he was killed with no clue that it was his last night. I don’t know where this”-she gestured back and forth between them-“thing with us is going. Maybe it’s just a night or two. Maybe it’s a month. Maybe it’s longer than can be measured by a decade. All I know is, life is too short not to come back here and be with you like this again. Life is just too short, and I like being with you too much for me to give a crap about anything other than having another moment like this.”

Rehvenge’s chest swelled as he stared at her. “Ehlena?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t take this the wrong way.”

She drew in a deep breath and he saw her bare shoulders tighten. “Okay. I’ll try not to.”

“You keep showing up here? Being who you are?” There was a pause. “I’m going to fall in love with you.”

John found Xhex’s place easily enough because it was only ten blocks from ZeroSum. Even still, the neighborhood might as well have been in a different zip code entirely. The brownstones on the street were elegant and old-world, with the curlicue shit around all the bay windows making him think they were Victorian-although how he knew that with such surety he hadn’t a clue.

Hers wasn’t a whole building, but a basement apartment in one particularly attractive walk-up. Underneath the stone stairs that led up from the sidewalk there was an alcove, and he slipped in and used the key on a strange copper-colored lock. A light came on as he stepped through, and he saw nothing exciting: Red-washed floor made of stone slabs. Whitewashed walls made of concrete blocks. At the far end there was another door with another odd lock.

He’d expected Xhex to live someplace exotic and filled with weapons.

And plenty of French stockings and stillies.

But that was fantasy for you.

Down at the far end of the hallway, he opened the other door and more lights flared. The room beyond was windowless and empty except for a bed, and the nondecor was no surprise, considering what the basement hall was like. There was a bathroom across the way, but no kitchen, no phone, no TV. The only color in the room came from the floor of old-fashioned pine boards that were finished to a fresh honey glow. Walls were whitewashed, like the corridor, but made of brick.

The air was surprisingly fresh, but then he saw the vents. Three of them.

John took off his leather jacket and laid it out on the floor. Then he removed his boots, keeping his thick black socks on.

In the bathroom, he used the toilet and splashed his face with water.

No towels. He used the tail ends of his heavy black shirt.

Stretching out on the bed, he kept his weapons on, although not because he was afraid of Xhex.

God, maybe that made him stupid. The first thing he had been taught in the Brotherhood’s training program was that you never trusted symphaths, and here he was, risking his life by staying in the home of one-likely through the day, without having told anyone where he was.

Yet it was exactly what he needed.

When night fell again, he was going to decide what to do. He didn’t want out of the war-he liked fighting too much. It felt…right, and on more than just a defend-the-species kind of level. It felt like it was what he was supposed to be doing, what he had been born and bred to do.

But he wasn’t sure he could go back to the mansion and live there.

After a while, the lights went off when he didn’t move, and he just stared into the darkness. As he lay on the bed with his head on one of the two rather stiff pillows, he realized it was the first time he had been truly alone since he’d been picked up from his shitty apartment by Tohr in that big-ass black Range Rover.

With total clarity, he remembered what it had been like to live in that hellhole of a studio in not the wrong part of town, but the downright dangerous section of Caldie. He’d been terrified every night because he’d been scrawny and weak and defenseless, drinking only Ensure because of his bad gut, weighing less than a vacuum cleaner. The door that had separated him from the drug users and the prostitutes and the rats that were the size of donkeys had seemed thin as paper.

He had wanted to do good in the world. Still did.

He had wanted to fall in love and be with a woman. Still did.

He had wanted to find a family, have a mother and a father, be a part of a clan.

Didn’t anymore.

John was beginning to understand that emotions in the heart were like tendons in the body. You could pull them and pull them and pull them and feel the pain of the distortion and the stretching…and up to a point, the joint would still function and the limb would bend and support weight and remain useful after the stress was off. But it wasn’t an infinite kind of thing.

He’d snapped. And he was damn sure there was no emotional equivalent of arthroscopic surgery.

To help ease his mind into rest so he didn’t drive himself nuts, he concentrated on what was going on around him. The room was quiet, except for the heat blower, but that didn’t make much noise. And the building was empty above him, with no sounds of anyone moving around.

Closing his eyes, he felt safer than he probably should have.

Then again, he was used to being on his own. The time he’d spent with Tohr and Wellsie and then with the Brotherhood was an anomaly. He’d been born in that bus stop alone, and he’d been alone in the orphanage even as he’d been surrounded by an ever-shuffling deck of kids. And then he’d been out in the world by himself.

He’d been brutalized and gotten over it without help. Been sick and healed himself. Made his way as best he could and done an okay job of it.

Time to get back to basics.

And the core of himself.

That time with Wellsie and Tohr…and the Brothers…was like a failed experiment-something that had seemed to have potential, but that, ultimately, was a failure.