Lover Avenged

SIXTY-FIVE

Okay, here’s the deal, George. You see these fuckers? They’re trouble, straight-up trouble. I know we’ve done this a couple of times, but let’s not get cocky.”

As Wrath tapped the bottom step of the mansion’s staircase with his shitkicker, he pictured the stretch of red-carpeted on-your-ass going all the way up from the foyer to the second floor. “Good news is? You can see what you’re doing. Bad news is? I go down and there’s a risk I might take you with me. Not what we’re looking for.”

He absently stroked the dog’s head. “Shall we?”

He gave the forward signal and started stepping up. George stuck right with him, the dog’s slight roll of the shoulder transmitted through the handle as they ascended. At the top, George paused.

“Study,” Wrath said.

Together, they walked straight ahead. When the dog stopped again, Wrath oriented himself by the sound of the crackling in the fireplace and was able to walk with the dog over to the desk. As soon as he sat down in the new chair, George took a seat as well, right next to him.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Vishous said from the doorway.

“Tough shit.”

“Tell me you want us in with you.”

Wrath ran his hand down George’s flank. God, the dog’s fur was soft. “Not at first.”

“You sure?” Wrath let his raised eyebrow speak for itself. “Yeah, okay. Fine. But I’m going to be right outside the door the whole time.”

And V wasn’t going to be alone, no doubt. When the call to Bella’s phone had come through in the middle of Last Meal, it had been a surprise: Everyone who could have been hitting her up was in the room. She’d answered the ring, and after a long silence, Wrath had heard a chair get pushed back and soft footsteps approach him.

“It’s for you,” she had said in a tremulous voice. “It’s…Xhex.”

Five minutes later, he’d agreed to see Rehvenge’s second in command, and though nothing specific had been discussed, it didn’t take a genius to figure out why the female had called and what she was going to want. After all, Wrath wasn’t just king, he was gatekeeper to the Brotherhood.

Who all thought Wrath was nuts to see her, but that was the great thing about being the ruler of the race: You could do what you wanted.

Down below, the vestibule’s door opened and Fritz’s voice echoed up as he escorted the two guests into the mansion. The old butler was not alone as he came in with the females, having himself been escorted by Rhage and Butch when he took the Mercedes out for the pickup.

Voices and many feet came up the stairs.

George tensed, his haunches pulling up, his breathing changing subtly.

“It’s okay, my man,” Wrath murmured to him. “We’re cool.”

The dog eased immediately, which made Wrath look over at the animal even though he couldn’t see anything. Something about that unconditional trust was…very nice.

The knock on the door brought his head back around. “Enter.”

His first sense of Xhex and Ehlena was that they emitted grim purpose. His second was that Ehlena, who was on the right, was particularly nervous.

Going by the slight shifting of clothes, he imagined they were bowing to him, and the pair of “Your Highness” es that came his way confirmed the intuition.

“Take a seat,” he said. “And I want everyone else out of this room.”

None of his brothers dared to throw out a grumble, because the protocol button had been punched: If they were around outsiders, they treated him as their sovereign lord and king. Which meant no fucking around and no insubordination.

Maybe they needed visitors more often in the fucking house.

When the doors were shut, Wrath said, “Tell me why you’re here.”

In the pause that followed, he imagined the females were probably looking back and forth at each other to decide who went first.

“Let me guess,” he cut in. “Rehvenge is alive, and you want to get him out of the shithole.”

As Wrath, son of Wrath, spoke, Ehlena wasn’t at all surprised the king knew what they’d come for. Sitting on the other side of a delicate and lovely desk, he was exactly what she remembered from when he’d nearly plowed her down back at the clinic: both cruel and smart, a leader in his physical and mental prime.

This was a male who knew how the real world worked. And was used to having the kind of muscle you needed to get hard things done.

“Yes, my lord,” she said. “That’s what we want.”

His black wraparounds shifted over to her. “So you’re the nurse from Havers’s clinic. Who turned out to be Montrag’s kin.”

“I am, yes.”

“Mind if I ask how you got involved in this sitch?”

“It’s personal.”

“Ah.” The king nodded. “Got it.”

Xhex spoke up, her voice grave and respectful. “He did a good thing for you. Rehvenge did a very good thing for you.”

“You don’t have to remind me. It’s the reason you two are sitting here in my home.”

Ehlena glanced over at Xhex, trying to read in the female’s face what they were referring to. She got nothing. Not a surprise.

“Here’s my question,” Wrath said. “We bring him back, how are we going to get around the e-mail that came in to us? He said it was nothing, but clearly he lied. Someone from up north threatened to ID your boy, and if he gets loose…that trigger’s going to be pulled.”

Xhex spoke up. “I will personally guarantee that the individual who made that threat will not be able to use a laptop after I’m through with her.”

“Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice.”

As the king smiled and drawled out the word, he leaned to the side and seemed to be stroking…With a start, Ehlena realized there was a golden retriever seated next to him, the dog’s head just barely peeking up over the top of the desk. Wow. Odd choice of breed, in a way, as the king’s companion was as kind-looking and approachable as its owner was not-and yet Wrath was gentle with the animal, his big, broad palm moving down its back slowly.

“Is that the only hole that needs to be plugged in his identity?” the king asked. “If that leak is eliminated are there any other parties who could threaten to expose him?”

“Montrag is good and dead,” Xhex murmured. “And I can’t think of anyone else who would know. Of course, the symphath king could come after him, but you can stop that. Rehv is one of your subjects as well.”

“Damn fucking straight, and let’s hear it for the whole ‘possession is nine-tenths of the law’ thing.” Wrath’s smile returned briefly. “Besides, the leader of the symphaths is not going to want to fuck with me, because if I get testy, I could take away his happy little home up there in freeze-your-nuts-off territory. He’s under my privilege, as they used to say in the Old Country, which means he rules only because I let him.”

“So are we going to do this?” Xhex asked.

There was a long silence, and as they waited for the king to speak, Ehlena looked around the pretty, French-inspired room to avoid Wrath’s eyes. She didn’t want him to know how anxious she was, and was afraid her face reflected weakness: She was totally out of her element here, sitting before the race’s leader, presenting a plan that involved going into the very heart of an incredibly dark place. But she couldn’t risk his doubting her or excluding her, because no matter how nervous she was, she wasn’t backing down. Fear didn’t mean you turned away from a goal. Hell, if she believed that, her father would be institutionalized right now, and she might well have ended up as her mother had.

Doing the right thing was scary sometimes, but her heart had taken her here to this place and was going to carry her through…whatever came next, and whatever it took to get Rehvenge out.

Ehlena…are you there?

Yes, she sure as hell was.

“Couple of things,” Wrath said as he shifted around with a wince, like he had a fighting injury. “The king up there-he’s not going to like us coming onto his turf and walking off with one of his own.”

“With all due respect,” Xhex cut in, “Rehv’s uncle can go fuck himself.”

Ehlena’s brows popped up. Rehvenge was the nephew of the king?

Wrath shrugged. “I happen to agree, but my point is, there’s going to be conflict. Armed conflict.”

“I’m good with that,” Xhex said evenly, like they were talking about nothing more than what movie to go see. “Very good.”

Ehlena felt the need to interject herself into the conversation. “And so am I.” As the king’s shoulders stiffened, she tried not to be too forceful, because the last thing they needed was to get booted out the door for disrespect. “I mean, I would expect nothing more, and I’m prepared for it.”

“You’re prepared for it? No offense, but a civilian hanger-on is not a good thing if there’s going to be fighting.”

“With all due respect,” she echoed Xhex’s words, “I’m going.”

“Even if it means I pull my men out?”

“Yes.” There was a long inhale, as if the king were thinking of how to shut her down nicely. “You don’t understand, my lord. That’s my…”

“Your what?”

On impulse, to give her position some added weight, she said, “That is my hellren.” In her peripheral vision, she caught Xhex’s head whipping around toward her, but she’d jumped into the pool and couldn’t get any wetter. “That’s my mate and…he fed from me a month ago. If they’ve hidden him, I can find him. Also, if they’ve done what they”-oh, Jesus-“probably have to him, he’s going to need medical attention. And I’m going to give it to him.”

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.