The Wolf, page 18
“People in our business don’t ask questions. Maybe you should remember that golden rule.”
As he started walking away again, she said stridently, “I do need you. I do need your help. And thank you, for getting me out of that apartment in one piece. I’m not making sense, and I should probably just go to sleep—but, yeah. I didn’t mean to get on you.”
It took Lucan a moment to realize two things: One, he’d stopped moving. And two, he’d looked over his shoulder at her again.
As the human woman stared up at him, from that bed, she seemed so much smaller than he knew her to be when she was talking or on her feet. But then time wasn’t the only thing that was relative. Power was, too.
And she had some kind of power over him.
Of course, he didn’t like to admit this, just like she didn’t like the reminder that he had saved her. They were a pair, weren’t they. At least for the next twenty-four hours, take it or leave it.
“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” he muttered as he continued to the exit.
Funny, he wasn’t sure who he was talking to on that one.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The thing about knowing all kinds of shit about how vampire body systems worked… was that with the nitty-gritty details stuck in your head, the mystery was gone. You were aware of exactly what was happening when you were hungry. Tired. Had a twitch in your eyebrow, a tickle up your ass, a grumble in your stomach, an ache at your shoulder. There was a marching band of medical terminology inside your brain that had a song for every symptom and for every function both normal and abnormal.
So it was really fucking hard to just exist. Even if all the other pressing, incidental, and middle-of-the-road issues in your life receded in your mind, even if you closed your eyes, put noise-canceling headphones on, and floated in a tub of water calibrated to your precise body temperature… you still had the idle hum of your corpuscles to think about.
Sometimes, though, even the most rigorously logical of minds put down the gauntlet of thought, and went offline.
Now was one of these moments for Vishous.
As he lay on the latex-sheeted hospital bed, he was floating on a cloud, his body cotton candy. The inside of a good sofa cushion. Wonder Bread.
And his brain, his magnificent, complicated, PITA brain… was likewise, the integration complete.
He smiled.
Off in the distance, he could hear water running in a sink, but he didn’t worry about it. He didn’t worry about anything. He just was. With nothing teeing up his hair-trigger mind, no pain in his heart, no choking grip of the past threatening to suffocate him, he was able to be in the moment to such a degree that he became just another second clicking by, inseparable from the eternal instant.
Bliss.
Taking yet another deep breath, he opened his eyes and looked down his body. The bed was at a tilt, so he could see the bruising on his ankles and his wrists, the skin there bright red and inflamed. Likewise, all over his legs and his torso, patches of red dotted him like he was a leopard. And at his hips, his cock was in a well-used, exhausted deflation off to one side.
The cleanup was done, the blood and come washed away, the tools removed, the session over.
But it wasn’t like it had never happened. The pain had receded to a glow, like a banked fire to warm his hands by, something to cozy up to and relax beside, not anything that could ever, ever hurt him.
And that was true both for the shit on the outside of him… as well as what was on the inside.
All he knew was peace—which was what he had been after.
Jane came through the connecting door. She was dressed in surgical scrubs, her hair a mess, her face still flushed. As their eyes met, she paused and leaned against the jamb. Crossing her arms over her chest, she smiled slowly.
And that said it all, didn’t it.
When V extended his arm out to her, she came over. Bent over. Laid herself across his big-ass chest. Her lips were soft as they brushed the side of his neck, and his palm was slow over her back, and his heart was full, as was hers.
“Can you help me back to the Pit,” he asked after a little while. “I want to be in our bed.”
“Absolutely.”
Jane straightened and stroked his hair. Then she offered him her hands, and he pulled himself up and shifted his legs off the table.
That was when he saw the chair. Over by the door.
Butch actually had been here. And so had Marissa. Hadn’t they.
Unsure how he felt about that, V met Jane’s eyes. “I am…”
“Surrounded by people who love you,” she finished for him.
Yes, he thought. That was so true.
With a sense of feeling lucky, he put his bare feet on the tile and stood up. The next thing he knew, Jane was pulling a set of scrubs on him, top first, then the bottoms. He was stiff as he started for the way out, and his mate was right beside him, his arm looping across her shoulders so that she took some of his weight.
When she opened the door, he was hit with the characteristic smell of the training center: part cement, part shampoos and conditioners from the showers by the weight room, plus a whiff of far-off chlorine from the pool and a tinge of gunpowder from the shooting range.
The whole of it was beyond pleasant to breathe in.
It was… home.
As they started off at a slow rate, it was the best walk of his life, the pair of them bumping hips and shuffling along—well, he was the one doing the shuffling, Jane was strong as ever as she led him down to the office.
There was still nothing in his mind as they entered the underground tunnel. Continuing along, their pace stayed at a stroll, like they were in a city park, on a sunny day in the fall, just another pair of lovers perfectly in tune with each other. From time to time, he leaned over and kissed her forehead. Just ’cuz he wanted to. And halfway to the Pit, she reached over and entwined her fingers through his dangling dagger hand.
“I want to feel like this forever,” he murmured.
“How’s that?”
“At peace.” He kissed her above her brows again. “And grateful.”
Unfortunately, this rare feeling of relaxation wasn’t going to last. As powerful as it was, it was also fragile, incapable of surviving the punches of the real world. He was going to get maybe twelve hours like this—no more than that, though. Sooner than later, the texts would come from the field, and the IT shit in the household would resume, and then other crap would fall on his head. Gradually, the tension would seep back in, tightening the nape of his neck, stiffening his spine, shortening his temper. And then later, much later, something big-ish would happen. Like Butch running into his old partner again, or Wrath wanting to engage something other than a civilian at the Audience House, or fuck all only knew what.
And then he would be where he had been.
But as for now…
Even the prospect of returning to his touchy normal was nothing but a figment floating off on the periphery, not anything he had to worry about at the moment, just something he accepted as inevitable, but wasn’t going to dwell on.
When they came to the door to go up to the Pit, Jane punched in the code. The short stack of steps was rough on him, and he needed the little balustrade as well as Jane’s steady hand. Not that his reliance on either bothered him. And then he was cresting the rise and stepping into the shallow hall that ran between the bedrooms.
His and Jane’s. Butch and Marissa’s.
“V?”
The male voice down in the living area was yet another balm to his soul.
Jane rose up on her tiptoes and kissed him on the mouth. “You go hang for a bit, I’m heading to bed.”
“You worked hard tonight.”
“So did you.”
They smiled for a while. Then they kissed again, and said I love you without speaking a word: All it took was the eye contact—and yup, V was totally looking forward to coming down to their bedroom and easing between the sheets to find his shellan’s warm body.
But first, his roommate.
Limping down to the open area in front of the carriage house, he supposed he wanted to check to make sure everything was cool. Not because Butch didn’t know what V liked—hell, the cop had dipped his toe in those waters just before Jane came into the picture. But because… well, because.
V found the former cop on the leather couch, a Lagavulin in one hand, the Roku remote in the other, the TV shimmering with blue light in front of him. Butch was angled forward, one foot still on the coffee table, as if he had been aimlessly flipping through channels in a recline and had just sat up.
“Hey?” the guy said as he looked over.
“Hey. So…”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
Butch nodded. “Mm-hm.”
Just as V and Jane had shared a whole conversation in a glance, now he and Butch were talking in silence, too. All it took was that exchange of single syllables, ending in a proverbial doubleheader.
Hm’er, as was the case.
Butch had never been totally comfortable with what V needed from time to time. Jane, on the other hand, had become not only very comfortable, but also very damned good at going there with him.
Jesus, he loved that female.
But his roommate had always accepted him. Without any reservations.
And that was a kind of true love, wasn’t it.
As V went over to sit in the sofa’s other corner, he mostly kept the wincing to himself as his butt made contact with the cushions and accepted his weight. And then he let his head fall back against the padded rise behind his shoulders. After a nice, long siiiiiiiiigh, he put one, and then the other, of his bare feet up next to the cop’s. Beside him, Butch resumed his own sprawl.
While the TV continued to drone on, V focused on the images, the sound, the—
“Mystic Pizza?” he said.
“Whatever. It’s wicked classic.”
Vishous chuckled. And then they just sat there and watched Julia Roberts dump an entire load of manure into an old school Porsche.
“Man, I bet they never got the smell out of that car,” Butch murmured. “I mean, vacuuming only goes so far.”
“You don’t need an air freshener for a job like that. You need a lake to sink the bitch in.”
From out of the corner of his eye, V saw Butch’s arm flop onto the vacant cushion between them, the palm of his dagger hand laying flat.
Vishous’s own arm moved.
And as he laid his leather-gloved hand on his roommate’s bare one, the grip that held him was firm. Strong.
As permanent as anything mortal could be.
“You’ll always be the number one asshole in my life,” Butch said in a soft voice.
In any other circumstance, at any other time, V would have brushed the comment off. Instead, he squeezed hard.
Even in his post-session float, he couldn’t explain how important that reassurance was to him—and how special it was to be accepted for who he was by not only his mate, but his best friend and Marissa. As extreme as he needed to get every once in a while, it was a blessing to be embraced without exception… loved.
“And you will always be my roommate,” V murmured.
“We still ain’t datin’.”
Vishous laughed and rubbed his thumb back and forth over his eyebrow. “No, we ain’t.”
They continued to hold hands, and watch the movie, and sit side by side. It was so comfortable and simple; it was like they had done this all their lives. And the good news, V knew, was that they would be doing it…
… for the rest of their lives.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
As Rio went to get out of the bed, she was aware that she had a couple of different purposes for going vertical: She needed to go to the bathroom again—that was pretty clear—but there were other reasons to get up and move around, most of which were tied to the sense that she was running out of time. Luke had to know that she was a liability if she stuck around.
He was going to have to get her out of here.
So she had to learn what she could about the building, the operation, the people before she left.
Therefore, it was by force of will rather than actual strength that she got up on her feet and walked by the empty beds. When she arrived at the curtains that hung from the ceiling, she hesitated.
“Hello,” said a hoarse voice from inside the draping.
She cleared her throat. “Hi.”
When there was nothing else from the other patient, she glanced over her shoulder to the door that led into that long hall with the light bulbs. “Do you need anything?”
As if she could find something other than trouble in this place she did not know and did not belong in?
“No. Thank you.”
Such a rasp. The kind that meant death was prowling around his bedsprings.
“What are you doing,” the patient said. “Here.”
She found herself wanting to answer him. Maybe it was the veil that separated them—and not the one that was hanging in front of her face. The man on the other side was not long for the world, whereas she had just come through her trials to survive once again.
At least she assumed she was going to get herself out of all of this alive.
“I don’t know,” she murmured. “What I’m doing here.”
“You don’t belong.”
“No, I don’t.” Rio snapped out of the thrall she could feel herself falling into. “I’m just visiting.”
“People do not visit here.”
“I… I have to go.”
When there was only silence, she turned away. Stumbled away. As she got to the door, she fumbled to open it.
Rio gasped and jumped back.
Out in the hall, sitting with his arms on his bent knees and his forehead on his arms, Luke was like a sentry who had fallen asleep at his post—
He came instantly to attention.
“Hi,” she said. Then she lifted her hand. Like that would explain something… that didn’t have her using him to get information that would put him in jail.
Although why should she care about double-crossing a criminal?
“Leaving so soon?” He stretched his arms over his head and rolled his heavy chest out. “The accommodations not working for you?”
“Actually, that bed is not bad at all.”
“How’s your concussion?”
“Better. Any idea what time it is?”
“I can’t take you back to Caldwell yet. It’s still light out.” As she frowned, he shrugged. “We’re discreet in these parts, what can I say. And I’d think you’d also want to keep your head down.”
“All things considered, I think we can both agree I haven’t been taking very good care of my noggin lately. If I were a supervisor, I’d be fired for negligence by now.”
He actually smiled a little at that.
Rio went across and sat down next to him. As she put her knees to her chest, she didn’t want to mirror his position so she rerouted her legs, stretching them out in front of herself.
“So how much do you know about concussions?” she asked.
“They hurt, but you can sleep ’em off. And I’d say you’re following that medical advice nicely.”
“Trying to, at least. But yeah… did you know they can cause personality changes.”
“Really? Like what—wait, is this where you make an excuse for being bitchy after I saved you. Three times?”
“Oh, my God, you read minds.” She pulled back a little and put her hands over her heart. “Or you’re just really intuitive. P.S., is this working?”
His eyes returned to her and she could tell by his tight lips that he was trying not to smile. “Three is not my favorite number, you know.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not divisible by anything but itself and one.”
“So you’re an even man.”
“I am.”
Rio fiddled with the loose shirt she was wearing. In the back of her mind, she realized that she still had on the one that had been cut—and a claw of remembered terror came back.
But she had no time for that kind of stuff.
“You didn’t answer my question,” she murmured.
“Was there one?”
“Is my charm offensive working?”
Luke looked down the hall. Both ways. “I’m lying out here like a guard dog, aren’t I? And that was even before you started this non-apology strategy.”
“Non-apology? Come on, I have head trauma. Cut me some slack.”
“Apologies generally include the word ‘sorry.’ ”
“I knew I forgot something.” She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry that I was rude.”
“You’re forgiven.”
“Great. And does this mean, provided I lose the attitude, you might be willing to save me again?” She put her hand out. “Not that I’m looking to find myself in danger again or to be rescued by anyone but myself.”
He laughed a little. “You know, that last one does not surprise me in the slightest.”
“I’m an independent woman—”
“I know. For example, you didn’t realize I was out here and you were ready to leave on your own.”
“No, I didn’t know where you were exactly, but I was very aware you were still”—she motioned around—“in the vicinity of where this is. And I wanted to go to the bathroom.”
After a moment, he nodded. “Okay.”
Well, crap, she thought. Neither one of them could truly trust the other.
And then she realized the silence had gotten stony. “So what can I do to pay you back for saving me?”
* * *
Lucan blinked at where his mind went as Rio tossed out that inquiry. Then he glanced up and down the corridor again because he had to do something with his eyes that did not involve her lips.
“Nothing. Protection’s a free service offered to females who are tough as nails.”
“That’s gallant of you.”
“Not really. It’s because I’m lazy and self-interested. If you’re a hard-ass, I don’t have to be a hero that often. Damsels in distress are a fuck ton of work.”
