The Beloved, page 35
The fact that it was in an aristocrat was a surprise, although that was the way life was. Revelations came, for the good and the bad. How you reacted was a measure of your character—and he loved his son enough to give him what Wrath knew in his marrow was the right kind of bodyguard.
“Vishous, you’ll follow up with the inking.” Not a request. “Have a good evening, you two.”
Before he left, he wanted to hug his son. But he was learning that L.W. wasn’t about the clinches. That was fine. They’d had that one embrace up in the study of the mansion when Wrath had come back to the planet. That was enough for now.
It was going to have to be enough.
On his command, George led him back through the break room, the golden brushing against his thigh to take him around furniture and other objects. Behind him, the shitkickers of the Brotherhood were a quiet chant of strength, the powerful bodies in his wake falling into line out of both devotion and duty.
As someone jumped ahead and opened the door for him, Wrath turned to the right out of muscle memory. Except they didn’t live in the mansion anymore, so there was no need to hit the tunnel.
He stopped and pivoted to face his private guard. As he flared his nostrils, he separated the individual scents, filing them in his mind, picturing what he knew his brothers looked like.
He thought of his time with Lassiter up above. And the message that as much as a King might want to go into the field and go hands-on with the enemy, the throne needed to be filled—and it was. By the right male for the job.
He’d never expected that angel to be an asset. But yeah, he definitely thought the Scribe Virgin had chosen her successor well. The holder of that position was supposed to be the counselor to the King—and who knew the angel had common sense after all?
“You okay?” Tohr asked quietly.
All at once, the conviction that things were falling into place after a long period of painful discord made him take a deep, easy breath.
“It’s good to be back,” Wrath said.
There was a short silence. And then a rumbling vibration that moved the air.
The Black Dagger Brotherhood’s war cry exploded in the corridor, the voices of the males around him swearing, once again, their loyalty to the King they loved and the species they served.
United, as one.
Fearless, as always.
Behind the Wrath who stood before them… forevermore.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Evan used the tunnel a little before midnight.
And his strides had purpose in them as they’d taken him away from the office building.
He was in the same clothes he’d been wearing during the melee—and then afterward, when the trainer had taken the last part of who he had once been from him. The shirt showed the damage that had been done, but his skin had reknitted. And as for any bullet wounds? They were all healed, the punctures closed as if they had never been.
He guessed that the lead slugs were still in him. He didn’t know where and didn’t think about it anymore as he walked forward through the steel-encased chute.
After Lash had left him in that other basement, he’d dragged himself out and found the car, then gone back to Mickey’s apartment to take care of the dead woman on the chair. After releasing her from her binds, he’d wrapped her in his cousin’s comforter and cradled her in his arms like she was just really sick and needed a doctor.
Except there had been no explanation to nosy humans required. The back stairs had been empty and he’d sat the body up in the front seat of Mickey’s beater, belting her in. With grim resolve, he’d driven out to the sticks and dumped her in the old quarry.
As the splash resounded and her bloated body floated to the surface, she had stared up at him as he’d stood on the lip of the thirty-foot drop.
She’d called him stupid for not weighing her down.
“I want you to be found,” he’d shouted at her. “Your husband’s gotta know.”
It had been as he’d turned around and walked back into the forest—once again heading out to the car he’d parked on the side of a country road—that the pieces had started to fall together. And the fight last night was the key to everything coming together.
Uncle’s favorite enforcer was a vampire.
Nathaniel was the enemy.
The signs had been there all along, Evan just hadn’t noticed them, because who screened members of Uncle’s inner circle for being another fucking species? Especially when you didn’t even know there was one threaded throughout the shadows of the human world.
But the clues were so obvious now: The enforcer had never been seen during the daytime—not unusual, given his line of work, but he’d even failed to show at a couple of the family’s funerals. Stupid move, if he wanted to advance. He’d also rarely left Caldwell—and if he did, it was only to NYC or Boston—something that suggested he had other business in the zip code… or couldn’t be exposed to daylight during travel. He was capable of things no one else had ever gotten away with. A one hundred percent success rate over a decade? Never a police investigation, never in the news, not one complication with a human?
No girlfriends or wives. No associates. Never hung out with the others.
No ambition, either. He just wanted to kill.
On balance, what were the chances a human acted like that? None. There were a hundred people in the organization and nobody was like that bastard.
But now that he knew for sure vampires existed, and he’d seen them in action… what were the chances one had infiltrated Uncle’s ranks and was just looking for targets like he was practicing at a range—
Evan stopped, and looked around.
What was that buzzing sound…?
“Just a fly,” he muttered as he kept going.
When he got to the end of the tunnel, he entered the code that he still didn’t consciously know on the pad, and emerged into the shitty apartment.
He was greeted by a gun in his face.
Man, that woman was looking rough. The head wound he’d given her was still festering, but there were other holes in her now, including one at the side of her neck that seemed like it should be fatal. If she were alive in the first place.
“Where the fuck you go,” she snapped.
There was black oil all over the floor, hers—and from the bedroom behind, two other females appeared. Both were sporting injuries, too, just not as dire, and he recognized the one on the left from the night before. He’d seen her in the middle of all the fighting.
“I’m here to deliver on my promise,” he said.
Those strangely colored eyes narrowed on him and before the woman he’d stolen from could speak, he glanced at the pair in the doorway.
“I have a vampire for you.” And he didn’t care who killed it. “No one knows where he lives but me. He’s been in the human world, that’s how I ran into him, and I didn’t guess what he was back then. I’m sure now, though. I can deliver a kill to you that will get the master’s attention—and that’s what you want, right. When you go to those meetings and you stand in the crowd, you picture yourself more important than you are now. And how does that happen? You prove yourself.”
It was the Mickey syndrome. They were all just like his cousin—and he certainly wasn’t going to bring up how Mickey had ended up.
Not that he cared what happened to these three. As long as he could bring Nathaniel’s body to Uncle—and then kill that old bastard himself, that was all that mattered.
That gun slowly lowered. “Tell me more,” the woman growled.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Nalla felt lighter as she re-formed next to Nate’s log cabin, her corporeal body floating like snow falling when the flakes were big and happy and there was no wind, just spin, spin, spin. In fact, she all but skipped to the front door—and there her male was, opening things up, holding his arms out.
She squealed as she jumped into him and was caught, and oh yeah, he was solid as a mountain—and the way his mouth found hers? It was like they’d been separated for thirty years instead of three hours.
But time was relative, wasn’t it.
They kissed their way backwards through the door and all the way down the stairs, and as they flopped on the bed, the over-day bag she’d brought with her got tossed aside in favor of all kinds of clothes disappearing. And then she was naked and stretched out, and he was naked and poised over her.
Except he didn’t mount her.
“Look at you,” he said as the scent of his bonding flooded her senses. “You know something…”
“What?” she said.
“A female like you needs to be worshipped.”
Nate backed up, and pulled her down with him so that her lower legs were hanging off the end of the bed. When he knelt before her, she knew what was coming, and thankfully, she was already flat on her back.
Because the thought of where he was going with that mouth of his? Her legs went weak.
“I want to taste you,” he murmured as he parted her thighs.
As she moaned, his lips were a soft brushing on the inside of her knee, and the higher the butterfly kisses went, the more antsy and desperate she got, and the more she wanted him to keep her in this aching anticipation. She was writhing as he finally sealed his mouth on her sex, and the explosion of sensation as hot and wet met hot and wet was so intense, she orgasmed right against his lips.
Which going by his growl of satisfaction was clearly what he’d intended.
With his hands reaching up and capturing her breasts, he stayed where he was, penetrating her with his tongue, making her feel so good that she forgot where she was—while she knew exactly who she was with.
When he finally eased back, he wiped his hand across his chin and mouth, then licked up his own palm. After that, it was on. Still holding her thighs wide, he went into her sex with his erection, spearing her in a powerful thrust that made her cry out.
The rhythm was relentless, his face tight with harsh lines of need as he rode her. To keep from being pushed down the bed, she wrapped her legs around him and linked her ankles behind his ass. All she could do was hold on, her hands fisting the covers, a slapping sound rising up from where he pumped into her core. Looming over her, in a magnificent display, she watched his full-body tattoo move over his muscles as they flexed and released to the beat of his wild movements.
The vines and the snakes and the clouds were alive.
For a moment, what she knew about the tattoo—its origins and purpose—threatened to pull her out of the moment. But his past was going to be with them always, and she’d meant what she’d said. She hated it, yet she wasn’t afraid of it.
And she was sticking with her male.
Squeezing her eyes shut, Nalla reconnected with her body and felt another release coming for her. She didn’t fight it. She let the pulses go through her and grip his shaft and head—which was when he started coming, his arousal kicking, deep inside her pelvis.
For all the times they’d made love, this was different.
Maybe it was the way she knew she felt. Maybe it was something she sensed on his side. It didn’t matter. Whatever it was… was right.
Suddenly, he was pulling out and breaking free of the cage of her legs. For a split second, she was confused—
Nate fisted his shaft and pumped himself hard, his ejaculations angled right at her core. As the hot jets hit her sensitive flesh, she arched up and started to orgasm again—and he didn’t stop. With a punishing grip, he kept working himself until she was dripping, and then he went up her stomach and even marked her breasts, too.
As those dark spices of his flooded his private quarters, and her body was claimed in the most ancient and primal of ways, she felt whole as she never had before.
Satisfied as she’d never imagined.
Happy… as she’d never dreamed.
But then love will do that to a person—and, God, she was so glad she took a chance and went out to that club that night.
Bitty had been right, after all.
* * *
This time when a beam of red light came through Bitty’s office window at Safe Place, she knew exactly what it was. Jumping up from her chair, she all but fell out of her window as she threw open the sash.
Except she didn’t need to worry. There was someone down there to catch her.
“Hi,” she said breathlessly.
L.W. looked up at her, and once again, the glow from the house bathed him in soft yellow light, as if his whole body had a halo. Tonight he wasn’t wearing black leather or weapons, and she had a thought that he had come to her first, just as he had gotten out of the clinic.
“I made it through,” he said. “The surgery.”
She put her hand at the base of her throat. “Thank you for letting me know.”
“See? I told you it was going to be fine. Manny’s a genius with a steak knife.”
Shooting him a look, she continued, “I’m sure that wasn’t what he used. Stay there, I’m coming down.”
She didn’t give him a chance to “yeah, sure, fine” it. Grabbing her coat, she ripped out of her office and tore down the stairs. Someone called to her to check about all the noise, but she waved them off with some scramble of syllables.
Out on the lawn, she shoved her arms into her coat as she skated and slipped in the snow. Somehow, she managed to stay on her feet, but there was no making like she wasn’t an out-of-control race car.
It was as she shot around the corner of the house that she realized she’d made a mistake, bringing her own outerwear with her: No excuse for him to give her his jacket, damn it—
L.W. turned toward her. He had scrubs on his lower body, no shirt or fleece on his chest, and a puffy white ski jacket that made his black hair in its braid and his tattoos even more obvious: because casual wear on a deadly fighter wasn’t something you saw every night.
“You really are okay,” she said. Like a lameass.
For a moment, they just stood face to face, her looking up, him looking down, the winter air crisp and cold in contrast to how warm she felt in her heart, her body.
You are my future, she thought. You are the reason I went out that night, and you are the person I want to stay in with.
One of Resolve2Evolve’s main tenets came back to her: Be open to new possibilities, for new roads present themselves first as breaks in the trees, then as paths and trails… until finally, the highway runs out to the horizon, taking you to places you never dreamed.
“So you’re working tonight, huh,” he said.
“Yes. I’m—yes, I am.” What the hell was she babbling about. “We’re down a person.”
“I’m surprised Nalla isn’t here. Heard she works all the time.”
“I don’t think she’s coming here anytime soon.” As he arched a brow, she shrugged sadly. “Well, for one, she’s assigned to Luchas House. But more to the point, she’s not going to want to be around me.”
L.W. tilted his head to the side. “Why? I thought you guys were best friends.”
Flushing—because who knew he’d tracked anything about her life—Bitty glanced up at her office window and thought about the time Nalla had corralled the other staff and filled the little space with biodegradable “packing poopoos,” as she’d called the cardboard peanuts.
They’d filmed Bitty’s reaction as she’d opened the door and the Saran Wrap seal they’d created had broken. The whole thing had gone on loop for the holiday party that year, and God knew she’d never laughed so hard in her life. But now it hurt to think about.
Just like the female’s words had hurt.
“That’s more a used-to-be kind of thing,” she said in a rough voice.
“Since when?”
“Oh, a couple of nights. It doesn’t matter.” She cleared her throat. “People go their separate ways.”
“And sometimes people meet, don’t they.” As L.W.’s eyes became hooded, he focused on her mouth. But then he seemed to pull himself back. “Nalla’s still your friend, though.”
“How would you know?” Bitty put her hand out, but hesitated before touching even the sleeve of his parka. “And I don’t mean to sound defensive. It’s an honest question because I really don’t know what to do about it all.”
“Nah, it’s good.” L.W.’s eyes scanned the area like he was looking for targets. Then brought his stare back to her as if he’d found none. “Shuli told me she laid down the law with his buddies about you when we were all at Bathe.”
Bitty frowned. “The law?”
“Those assholes were fucking idiots to her. Making bets they could bag her, being rude—they’re a bunch of pricks, getting drunk and feeling like they own the world because they can pay for anything they want. When you got there, she told them if they tried the shit they did to her with you, she’d wear their balls for earrings.” He shook himself. “ ’Scuse my French. I mean… issue an existential correction.”
Bitty popped her brows. “She did that? Really?”
“I don’t know what happened between you two, but she’s still looking out for you. For real.”
Glancing down, Bitty closed her eyes. “So that was why she rushed over that table at them.”
“Pretty much, I’m guessing. I’ve never seen her do that before—not that I know shit. I don’t hang out, usually.”
“Neither do I.” She looked at him again. “But I don’t know, I might be willing to turn over a new leaf.”
“Oh, yeah?” That one dark brow lifted again, and he looked so much like his father, it was impossible not to make the connection to the King. “Tell me more.”
“I don’t know, I think work-life balance is important.” She pictured that social media star, parading around a purple stage. “And I get off tonight at two a.m. Lot of hours before dawn comes at that time.”
L.W.’s smile was slow and a little cocky, but why wouldn’t he be arrogant? He was a powerful force for the species in the field, and one day, the throne was going to be his.
Except then memories of the vision came back to her—and brought with them a chill that had nothing to do with the air temperature.
