by J. R. Ward
The shellan blinked a couple of times. “Of course you are. I mean, thank you.”
“Can I start you with a cocktail?” Do you need to see my ID so you know I’m not a missing person? “Or perhaps the menu?”
The woman’s smile was sad for a reason that Therese couldn’t begin to guess at. “I’d love a glass of white wine. And what did you say your name is?”
CHAPTER SIX
shAdoWs was every club in America. You had dark corners, random lasers, booming music, and plenty of booze. The sex and drugs were BYO, and for the most part, Trez left his clientele alone on those fronts. There were two reasons for this: One, the less you hassled them, the more often they came back and dropped their cash, and two, he really didn’t give a shit—and that had been true well before he had loved and lost his queen.
Staring down at the churning crowd from his second-floor office, he watched them through the kind of one-way glass that psychologists used to monitor the interviews of insane people. And this made sense. The men and women below, stimulated and stimulating each other, were not on the normal bandwidth, and that was why they came to his establishment. Most of them were young, but they were all out of college if they had gone to one, the twenty-one-year-old age requirement for drinking in New York weeding out the underclassmen. Most had low-level jobs, ones that were above menial but not by much. Most were renters in bunches of two and three. Most had STDs or were going to get them as soon as they jumped into the one-night stand pool on the dance floor.
All of them were desperate for a break from the stress in their lives.
Yeah, ’cuz there was nothing like getting away from your mistakes by making new ones.
Trez should know. After his two decades of being a pimp and an enforcer in Caldwell, nothing had changed, just the faces on those young bodies and maybe some of the politics. And for a long time, he had been down there with them, and not only in terms of security or sales of sex or drugs. He too had partaken of the women and the females. It had been a nice distraction, whether it was the sex workers who he provided a safe environment for or the women who came to dance and see what they could pull. He had always been a sure thing, and not just at the club. Everywhere. He had had sex with real estate agents, lawyers, tax accountants, personal trainers, landscapers, laundresses, mechanics, hairdressers…
And in spite of that track record, as he looked over the crowd, he saw nothing of interest. There were plenty of good-looking women down there, most of them half dressed and double-jointed, with willingness written all over them. But to him they were another species, and not just because they were mostly human. He’d no more have sex with them than he would a wolfen or a mailbox.
Letting go of his sex addiction had been easy. Letting go of what had taken its place, his Selena, was impossible.
Down below, the crowd’s random pattern of grinding abruptly shifted and found a cohesion that rarely happened, bodies packing in tight to clear a path. Someone had come into the club and was walking through the cram of people—and whoever they were, folks were getting out of their way in a hurry, parting like the Red Sea of Fuckboys and Casual Lays.
Trez recognized the figure immediately. Then again, like anyone else on the Eastern seaboard wore a floor-length sable coat indoors, and carried a walking cane that doubled as a weapon? Rehvenge was back in his element, strolling through the club like he owned it, his Mohawk and his amethyst eyes nothing that any of the clubbers had ever seen the likes of before, the aura of don’t-fuck-with-me exactly the kind of thing their survival instincts recognized as a cue to skidoo.
Trez backed off from the glass wall and went to the door to his office. As he left and proceeded down the stairs, he couldn’t think of why his old boss was doing an out-and-about, especially in a club. Rehv had staged his own death a couple of years ago in a spectacular explosion, wiping out the identity he’d cultivated as a drug dealer and club owner on the scene. Why the resurrection?
Down on the floor, Trez came around the base of the staircase as Rehv broke through the last of the congregation.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Trez murmured as they met face-to-face.
Rehvenge was not merely your average vampire. He was a symphath, and not just a Joe Schmoe one. He was king of the territory, ruler of a subspecies that made sociopaths look like family-focused nurturers. So yes, he was as dangerous as he looked.
“My man,” Rehv said as they hugged it out, clapping each other on the back.
“What brings you into the riffraff?”
Rehvenge looked around. “Just checking the scene.”
“Bullshit.”
The smile that came over that slightly evil face was hard. “Am I not welcome here?”
“You know that’s not the case.” Trez nodded at the crowd, most of whom were checking out the symphath with barely disguised fascination—and God only knew how many phones that were discreetly sneaking pics or a video. “You’re catching a lot of views, that’s all. The cost-benefit analysis usually isn’t there for you.”
“They won’t remember me.”
“Not without your help, they won’t.”
“I’ll handle it.” Rehv nodded at the back stairs. “You got time to talk?”
“Depends on the subject.”
“Good, I appreciate you making the time.”
Rehv walked past him, like whatever conversation Trez was probably going to want to avoid had been booked on the social calendar with a Sharpie.
Great. Fucking fantastic.
As Trez followed the leader, he remembered the way things had been, Rehv in charge, Trez and iAm’s job to keep the fucker alive as he had done his dirty business with the Princess. Talk about bumping uglies. God, those had been horrible nights, Rehv going up there to that cabin in the woods with satchels of rubies bought with the money he made from drug sales and the clubs, the male turning those precious stones over before he had to give his own body to that damn bitch. Trez had always followed in the ether, staying hidden, so that after it was done, he could scrape Rehv up off the dirty floor and help him home. The male had always been so sick, the contact with that Princess making him ill, and not just because he despised the female and hated himself even more for doing what he had to. She’d been poison to him. Literally.
Instantly, Trez thought of iAm, lying through his teeth about being okay.
Maybe it was good that Rehv had come. Maybe the symphath knew what the hell was going on with his brother. iAm had always been the quiet one, and him finding his love with maichen hadn’t loosened his lips. But Rehv had been known to get things out of the guy—whether iAm liked it or not. That was the problem with symphaths. Hiding anything from them was a losing game.
Back inside the office, Trez felt a little weird sitting behind the desk. For so long, Rehv had been the one in charge. Yet he seemed perfectly comfortable to be on the subordinate side of things.
“So,” his former boss said, “how you doing?”
Trez narrowed his eyes. “Isn’t this about iAm?”
“iAm? Why, what’s going on with him?”
“So you haven’t come because of him.” When Rehv slowly shook his head and didn’t go any further, Trez wanted to curse. “All right, so let’s play pin the tail on the meddler. Who put you up to this? Was it my brother?”
Maybe that was why iAm had been distracted at the restaurant.
And as Trez entertained an image of himself at that traffic light, contemplating suicide in the new car that had done nothing to elevate his mood, he refused to think that his brother might have reason to worry. After all, Trez’s life was his own to destroy, goddamn it. No one else was welcome at that table.
When Rehv just shook his head again, Trez considered other likely whistle-blowers. “Oh, so it was Mary, huh. I mean, she’s the resident therapist, although I haven’t been around her enough—wait, it was Xhex? Really?”
He would have assumed his head of security was too much of a hard-ass to pull in reinforcements if
she was worried about him. She was more the type to get up in his face and not move. But was he so bad off that even she was daunted by the idea of talking to him—
“No, it was Beth.” Trez slapped his thigh. “It was because of movie night last week. She wanted me to come and asked me twice. I didn’t show and she looked worried. Or maybe it was more like upset.”
“Is Beth upset with you?”
“So it was her.”
“The Queen has said nothing to me. I don’t know whether she’s worried or not.”
Trez looked away, mentally reviewing the household cast of characters. Well, shit. The only people he could rule out were the doggen. Fritz and his staff would never be so presumptuous as to suggest so much as a wardrobe change to someone they served, much less form a consensus on a person’s mental stability. Or lack thereof.
“Look,” he gritted out. “Will you just get on with it? No offense, but I got business to take care of.”
Not really, the club ran itself. He had to play what cards he had, however.
As the silence stretched out, Trez took an inventory of his former boss. Rehv’s purple eyes were utterly level, the color reminding Trez of Rhage’s GTO. And between that huge body, and all that fur, the chair that ordinarily was perfectly big enough for anyone who sat in it looked like dollhouse furniture. Worse, as the king of the symphaths just sat there, batting his walking stick back and forth between his knees, his white suit and white shirt like he’d worn the storm indoors, the male seemed content to ride out the bad weather. Until, like, August.
“What.” Trez sat forward and fiddled with two accounts payable reports. “Can we just get this over with.”
“Ehlena says hi.”
“And you came all this way to tell me?”
“Well, not everything has to be on text. Have you heard about the privacy concerns going around? Smartphones are evil.”
“Fuck you,” Trez said in an exhausted voice. “No offense.”
Rehv got to his feet and strolled over to the glass wall, that sable coat flaring out behind him, the glittering cane flashing in the dim lights from overhead. As Trez watched his old friend, he realized it had been so long since he had hung out with the male. Both of their lives had changed so much, although only Rehv’s for the better.
“You know I’m still on the dopamine, right?” Rehv said as he angled his sight downward toward the dance floor.
Trez swiveled his chair around so he could face the male. “I hadn’t really thought about it one way or the other.”
I’ve been too busy playing out what drowning would be like, he added to himself. Shit gets so hectic during this human Christmas season, dontcha know.
But as he considered his former boss, he supposed the guy had to still be on the sauce, so to speak. Symphaths were known to get into things like other people’s emotions, and never in a good way, never in a therapeutic, supportive fashion, more like a shove-you-off-your-ledge way. They were a subspecies that you didn’t want to show your underbelly to, although the prejudice they’d been subjected to hadn’t been right, either.
When Rehv had been out in the world more, he’d taken dopamine as a way to regulate himself so that his bad side stayed under wraps and his true identity remained hidden. It had been the only way for him to seem like he was just the same as everyone else. And after he was mated? Apparently, he kept on using the stuff.
Trez shrugged. “I guess I am a little surprised you’re still dosing. I mean, everyone knows what you are. Everyone who matters, that is.”
And more than that, he had forged a political alliance with Wrath. He was super safe.
“It goes deeper than suppressing my identity,” Rehv murmured. “My instincts are much more controllable now, it’s true. My love for Ehlena is responsible for that. So are my relationships with Wrath and the Brotherhood. I am what I am, however, and if I’m going to live my fullest life with my shellan and allies, I want to be able to focus on things other than just curtailing my difficult side.”
“Okay.”
Trez ground his molars. He had no idea where this was going, and the fact that he didn’t really care seemed like one more thing to add to his long list of losses. He and Rehv went way too far back for him to push the guy out, especially as Trez couldn’t remember when they had sat down together last. Grief changed your priorities, however.
He thought of sitting in his BMW, out in the cold, getting buried in snow.
“So I was talking to my Ehlena,” Rehv continued, “about some pharmaceutical options for you.”
Trez jerked forward. “Excuse me?”
“I wanted to see if you could get some help.” Rehv’s amethyst eyes swung over. “To see if you can find some relief, as I have.”
An irrational anger curled in Trez’s gut. “I’m not a symphath.”
“You’re suffering.”
“My shellan fucking died. You think I should be throwing a party?”
“I know where you’ve been going,” Rehv said calmly.
“To work, here, every night. Yeah. So—”
“In your mind.” Rehv touched the center of his chest. “Symphath, remember? I can read your grid. You’re getting worse and not better—”
Trez burst to his feet and headed for the exit, opening the door. “I gotta get back to work. Thanks for stopping by. Tell Ehlena hi—”
The door slammed shut on him, the knob ripped from his hand, the lights flickering throughout the office.
In a low, evil voice, Rehv said, “Sit the fuck down. This conversation is not a two-way.”
Trez pivoted around. His former employer, one of his best friends, was looming beside the desk, his purple eyes flashing, the tremendous bulk of his body seeming to have gotten even bigger. It was a reminder that even though the big bastard was a happily mated male who had settled down, Rehv was still the kind of force you didn’t want to cross.
“I know where you’ve been going,” Rehv said in that symphath voice. “Down by the river. I know what you think about when you’re behind the wheel of your car. I can see your emotional grid collapsing, and I am very well aware of your sudden fondness for cold fucking water.”
Well, Trez thought. Put like that, what could he say? Disneyland?
Rehv pointed his cane at Trez. “Do you think I have any interest in living the rest of my nights in regret after I know all this and do nothing? Huh? You think that’s a burden I want to strap on and carry around with me until I die?”
Trez cursed and paced around. On his second trip back and forth to the bathroom, he found himself wishing his office was big as a football field.
“In light of the way I use dopamine,” Rehv continued, “I went to Ehlena and asked her if there was anything that could help you. An antidepressant. Or what I’m on. I don’t fucking know. I don’t know how it works. She said you should come talk to her and Jane—”
“No!” Trez put his hands up to his head and prayed he didn’t get another one of his migraines. Holding in the urge to scream was a helluva trigger. “I’m not going on some kind of drug—”
“—to see what your options are.” Rehv raised his voice, talking right over the protests. “And get an assessment. They may be able to help you.”
Trez sat his ass down on the sofa because he didn’t trust himself not to try to push Rehv through the glass behind the desk. Then again, there was no possibility of him pulling a sneak attack. That symphath sonofabitch no doubt knew he had switched from suicidal to homicidal, and there was only one other bag of carbon-based molecules in the room to target that impulse on.
“Listen to me,” Rehv said in a softer voice. “All those nights I had to go up to that cabin, you were with me. You were there. You protected me and you saved my life too many times to count.”
“I owed you,” Trez countered bitterly. “I was servicing my debt.”
“That wasn’t all there was to it. And don’t lie just because you’re pissed at me for calling you on your shit. I can read you
r grid.”
“Please stop saying that.”
“It’s the truth.”
“I know and that’s why I don’t want to hear it.” Trez looked over. “I get that you think you’re helping, and thanks for that. But I just want some privacy, okay?”
“So you can kill yourself in peace?”
“It’s my life to take,” he said roughly. “You have your own life and it’s a good one. You’ll get over it.”
Rehv’s brows came down hard. “Like you’re getting over Selena so well? How’s that party you’re throwing, to borrow your phrase?”
“She was my shellan. I was just a friend to you.”
“Bullshit. You’re my family. You’re iAm’s blooded brother. And you’re also family to a whole shitload of people who would suffer like hell if anything happened to you. And cut the shit with the past tense, asshole. You’re still breathing—at least until I choke some sense into you.”
Trez held that purple stare, which was every bit as angry as he himself was feeling, and as he considered where they were both at, he was really glad they hadn’t taken out their weapons. Yet.
Except then he laughed… or Jesus, maybe it was more of a giggle.
And the levity came from God only knew where. Someplace even deeper than his grief, he supposed. But as the totally inappropriate sound came up his tight throat, he didn’t have a chance in hell of keeping it in.
“You have such a way with interventions,” Trez said as he tried to cough himself back to being serious. “I mean, there’s tough love, and then there’s the symphath version of it. Did you just call me an asshole while you’re trying to get me not to shoot myself in the head?”
Rehv’s smile was slow. “I never promised I was good at interpersonal stuff.”
“Let me tell you, you’re straight-up awful at it. I believe you also just threatened me with bodily harm.”
“I would have sent Mary, who’s a professional, but you would have given her a hug and then tossed her out.”
“True.”
“So you’re left dealing with me. Sorry, not sorry.”