by J. R. Ward
"Son of a bitch!" Two Tone tore after her, following the ripping and tearing sounds as she went seriously off-road. Switching his flashlight to his left hand, he fumbled to get his gun out.
Not how this should be going down. Not in the slightest.
The bitch was fast as hell, and as he lumbered after her, he knew she was going to outrun him--and the last phone call he wanted to make to the boss was, "Oh, hey, I lost your project."
He could end up being the next person taken into the "cabin."
Discharging his weapon was the only shot he had. Ha-ha.
Skidding himself to a halt, he latched onto a birch tree, upped his muzzle, and started pumping off rounds, the shots echoing through the early dawn.
There was a higher-pitched curse--and then the sounds of running ceased. In their place? A concentrated rustling, like she was writhing on the ground.
"Fuckin' A," he panted as he jogged forward.
If it was a terminal wound, he was screwed nearly as badly as if she'd gotten away.
The flashlight skipped around the landscape as he closed the distance, highlighting trunks and branches, underbrush, the snowed-up ground.
And then there she was. Facedown in the needles, gripping one knee to her chest. Except he wasn't falling for it. God only knew what else she had up her sleeve.
"Get up or I'll shoot you again." He put a fresh clip into the butt of his gun. "Get the fuck up."
Moaning. Rolling.
He pulled the trigger and put a bullet into the ground right by her head. "Stand up or the next is through your skull."
The woman pushed herself off the ground. Debris hung from her black clothes and parka, and her dark hair was fuzzed up. He didn't bother rating her on his fuck scale. First and foremost was getting her into the secured location.
"Hands up," he ordered, training his weapon at the center of her chest. "Walk."
Her limp was bad, and he could smell the blood as he fell in behind her. No more sprinting for her.
It took them four times as long to get back to the car, and when they did, he found Phil still on the ground and not moving. Breath was going in and out of his open mouth, however, the subtle wheezing sounds suggesting that the pain was all-consuming.
As they passed, Two Tone checked out that face. Oh ... shit ... third-degree burns all over, and one of those eyes was not coming back. Except the bastard was probably going to live.
Right?
Fucking great. But he'd deal with that later.
When the pair of them came up to the door, he knew he needed to retain control of this situation.
With a quick move, he grabbed the back of her neck and slammed her headfirst into those hard-ass panels.
This time, as she slumped to the ground, he knew she wasn't coming up for air for a while. But he still gave her a chance to twitch it out before he put his gun away, pressed his thumb into the fingerprint reader, and opened the way in.
Flicking the lights on, he took hold of her armpits and dragged her inside. After locking them in together, he pulled her across the concrete to the stairwell ... and then carried her down into the basement below.
There were three cells filling out the lower level, just like the ones on TV with iron bars, concrete floors, and stainless-steel pallets for beds. The toilets were functional not for the comfort of the prisoner(s), but for the boss's sensitive nose. No windows.
Two Tone didn't take a deep breath until he had her in the first of them and had locked the door.
Before he went aboveground to confirm capture with home base, put the camo tarp over the Crown Vic and deal with Phil, he went to the cell next door and urinated for what felt like an hour and a half. Zipping up, he stepped out and looked at the stained wall across from him.
The pair of shackles that hung from the two sets of steel chains were going to get used soon.
Complications with Phil aside, he almost felt sorry for the bitch.
EIGHT
Later that morning, an uppercut came flying at Wrath from the left, and in spite of the whistle it made traveling through the air, he couldn't respond in time: The knuckles nailed him square on the jaw and the crack rang his idiot bell, his head ripping around, blood flying out of his mouth.
It felt fucking great.
After another nightmare throne-al session with Saxton--seven to ten more hours of his life he was never getting back--he'd gone up to his and Beth's private quarters. Sex had been the only thing on his mind, the only release that was going to save the planet from his rotten mood.
His mate had been not just asleep, but passed out cold.
He'd lasted about an hour staring at the ceiling before hitting up Payne and telling her to meet him here in the training center's gym.
Like Rhage had always said, sex or fighting to take the burn down. Sex was out, so there ya go.
Harnessing the energy from the impact, he went with the momentum and redirected it into a kick that creamed his opponent in the side, throwing her off balance and sending her reeling. No to-the-mat for V's sister, though. Her landing was light and quick as a cat's, and he knew she had plans for him.
Triangulating the rushes of air, the scent of the female fighter, and the sound of her bare feet coming at him with a louder cadence, he knew she was approaching front-on in a crouch. Bracing himself, he sank into his thighs and loved the feel of his muscles tightening up and securing his two-hundred-seventy-pound body in the upright position. Tucking his elbows in, he waited for her to get in range and then punched outward. With her reflexes and the advantage of sight, she dodged the affront and dipped down to come up and cable him around his waist.
Payne didn't hit like a girl, whether it was with her fists or her feet or her entire body. She was more like an SUV, and as much as his ball sac would have preferred otherwise, she got him but good.
With a curse, he ass-over-elbowed and back-flatted like a little bitch. Not gonna stay that way, however.
And that turned out to be a problem.
As he fell into thin air, he was reminded of the way he'd yard-saled off the bed at the loft--and his inner ignition switch got tripped: True aggression came out--in the blink of an eye, this was not about training or keeping up his skills or getting some exercise. The war instinct was unleashed between him and his sparring partner.
With a growl that reverberated throughout the gym, he caught Payne's upper arms in a punishing grip and turned her tables, ripping her off him and slamming her facedown into the mats.
She was a solid female, well muscled and deadly--but she was no match for his strength and size--especially as he straddled her and snaked his arm around her neck. With her throat in the crook of his elbow, he locked his free hand on his thick wrist and leaned back into the choke hold.
Lessers. Enemies. Tragic deaths that changed the course of his life--and others'.
Distance from his mate. Sexual frustration. Suspicion Beth was keeping something from him.
Chronic frustration that downshifted quickly into an anxiety load that never left him.
Fear. Unacknowledged, well buried, and poisonous.
Self-hatred.
Against the dark backdrop of his blindness, everything went white, rage taking over when it had no place to go. And the effect was to give him far greater power than his muscles and bones already had: Even as Payne's fingernails bit into his forearm and she struggled in the manner of a death throe, nothing registered.
He wanted to kill. And he was going to--
"Wrath!"
As with Payne's defense, whoever was yelling his name didn't matter to him. He was locked on this path of murder, all sense of what was happening lost to the--
Someone else came and started yanking at him as that name-hollering thing got louder.
Beneath him, Payne was submitting, the fight slowly leaving her body, that eternal stillness exactly what the rage in him wanted. A little longer was all it would take. A little more pressure. A little--
A loud,
repetitive noise sounded right in front of his face. Over and over and over again, like a bass drum, the beats perfectly spaced. The only thing that changed was the volume.
It increased.
Or maybe it was gradually cutting through his fury.
Wrath frowned as the racket continued. Lifting his head, he stopped squeezing so hard for a moment.
George.
His beloved, docile golden retriever was directly in his grille, barking loud as a shotgun, sure as if he were demanding that Wrath cease and desist right this moment.
All at once, the reality of what he was doing flooded into him.
What the fuck was wrong with him?
Wrath released his hold, but he didn't have a chance to jump free. Whoever was pulling at his shoulders took over, tearing his heavy weight off the female fighter.
As he landed on the mat on his back, the retching and heaving breaths of his opponent mixed with the curses of whoever else was with them--as well as a soft whimpering.
"What the fuck are you thinking!" Now someone else was in his face. "You nearly killed her!"
Putting his hands up to his head, a cold sweat bloomed over every square inch of him. "I didn't know..." he heard himself say. "I had no idea--"
"Did you think she could breathe like that!" It was Doc Jane. Of course--she was down in the clinic and must have heard the barking or ...
And iAm was with them. He could sense the Shadow even though the guy was as usual not saying much.
"I'm sorry--Payne ... I'm sorry."
Dear God, what had he done?
He abhorred violence against females. The problem was, when he was sparring with Payne, he didn't think of V's sister as one. She was an opponent, nothing more, nothing less--and he'd had the bruises and even a broken bone or two to show that when it came to her, no quarter was asked for nor given.
"Shit. Payne..." He reached out into the empty air, smelling the remnants of her fear as well as the scent that came with impending death. "Payne--"
"It's okay," the female said hoarsely. "Honest."
Doc Jane muttered a number of foul things.
"This is between me and him," Payne ordered her sister-in-law. "This is not your--"
As a round of coughing cut her off, Jane snapped, "When he nearly strangles you, it sure as hell is my problem!"
"He was going to let me go--"
"Is that why you were turning blue?"
"I was not--"
"His arm is bleeding onto the mat. You telling me your fingernails didn't do that?"
Payne caught her breath. "It's fighting, not Go Fish!"
Doc Jane lowered her voice. "Does your brother know exactly how far this is going?"
As Wrath added his own cursing to the fruit salad of F-words, Payne growled, "You are not to tell Vishous about this--"
"Give me a good goddamn reason why and maybe I'll consider it. Otherwise, no one tells me what I can and cannot say to my own goddamn husband. Not you, not him--"
Wrath was sure she was shooting a glare his way.
"--and certainly never concerning a fucking safety issue about a member of his family!"
The silence that followed was marked by rising aggression. And then Payne barked, "How many bones have you set on the King? How many stitches? Last week you thought I'd dislocated his shoulder--and at no point did you feel the need to run to his shellan and report it. Did you. Did you?"
"This is different."
"Because I'm female? Excuse me--maybe you'd like to meet my eyes when you use that double standard, Doc?"
Christ, it was as if his mood had infected both of them. Then again, his actions had started all this. Fuck ...
Rubbing his face, he listened to them go back and forth. "She's right."
That shut them both up.
"I wasn't going to stop." He got to his feet. "So I will tell V and we are never doing this again--"
"Don't you dare," the fighter spat before falling into another series of coughs. As soon as she recovered, she went back to being in his face. "Don't you fucking dare disrespect me--I come here to fight with you to keep my own skills up. If you took advantage of a weakness, that is my fault, not yours."
"So you think I was just being hard on you?" he asked grimly.
"Of course. And I hadn't tapped out yet--"
"Do you think for a second that would have gotten through to me."
A fissure of fear charged the molecules around the female.
"And that is why we will never do this again." He turned in the direction of Doc Jane. "But she's also right. This is not your business, so stay out of it."
"The hell I--"
"Not a request, Jane. An order. And I'll go see V as soon as I'm out of the shower."
"You can be a real prick, you know that, Your Highness."
"And a murderer. Don't forget that one."
He started off in the direction of the door, not bothering to take George's halter handle. When his trajectory got off, the dog course-corrected him by getting in the way and steering him to the proper exit.
"Locker room," he grunted when they entered the concrete corridor.
George, familiar with either the word or the postworkout ritual, helped him navigate down the hall, his paws clipping along across the bald floor.
Thank God the training center was a ghost town this time of day. The last thing he wanted was to run into anybody.
With the Brothers sleeping, the extensive underground complex was empty, from the gym and its equipment rooms, to the gun range and classrooms, to the Olympic-size swimming pool and the office that ran everything--as well as Doc Jane and Manny's operating rooms and recovery suites.
Although Payne had almost been a patient.
Shit.
Running his hand down the wall, he stopped when he got to an inset doorway. "You wanna wait here?" he asked George.
Going by the jangling of the collar and the bony tha-bump, the golden decided to sit out shower time which was fairly typical--not a big fan of hot and humid because of that long coat of his.
Pushing his way in, Wrath was able to orient well. Thanks to the closed-in acoustics and all the tile, things were easy to navigate by sound--and habit. Also, spaces that he'd spent a lot of time in back when he'd had some of his sight were so much easier to handle on his own.
Fuck. If that dog hadn't stopped him just now?
Wrath sagged back against the slick walls, letting his head hang loose. Jesus Christ.
Scrubbing his face, his brain played tricks on him, flashing images of what the aftermath would have been like.
The moan that rose up his throat sounded like a foghorn. His brother's sister. A fighter he respected. Ruined.
He owed that dog. As usual.
Stripping off his sweaty muscle shirt, he let it flop onto the floor as he shucked his nylon board shorts. Using his hand on the wall once again, he walked forward and knew when he got into the shower room because of the way the floor sloped. The faucet cranks were lined up on three sides and he zeroed in on them, feeling the slick circular drains under his bare feet.
Picking one at random, he turned on the water and braced himself against the cold rush that hit him square in the face.
God, that surge of anger. It was a familiar octane--but not anything he wanted back in his life again. That unholy burn had sustained him all those years between when his parents had been killed and when he'd met and mated Beth. He'd thought it was gone for good.
"Fuck," he bit out.
Closing his eyes, he braced his palms by the showerhead and leaned into the heavy roping of his arms. His nasty mood made his head feel like it had a set of helicopter blades on it--and they were about two rotations short of separating his skull from the rest of his body.
God ... damn.
He'd never thought about it before, but "insanity" was largely a hypothetical concept to the sane; a derogative slur to slam someone you didn't respect; a descriptor applied to inappropriate behavior.
/> Standing in the shower, he realized that true insanity had nothing to do with PMS or "hitting the wall" or going on a bender and trashing a hotel room before you passed out. It wasn't driving crazy or robbing a bank or temporarily taking your temper out on an inanimate object.
It was the removal of the world around you, a good-bye to sensation and awareness that was like a video camera manipulation--your internal shit got zoomed in and everything else, your mate, your job, your community, your health and well-being, went not just out of reach ... but out of existence.
And the scariest part? This in-between when you had one foot in reality and the other in your own personal, living-breathing purgatory--and you could feel the former slip, slip, slippin' away--
From out of nowhere, Wrath's equilibrium went haywire, the whole world tilting on its axis to the point where he wasn't sure whether he'd fallen back or not.
But then he felt a sharp blade right under his chin, and realized that someone had grabbed hold of his hair.
"At this moment in time," came the hiss in his ear, "we know two things. But only one of them is a game changer."
NINE
This was a bad migraine.
As iAm cracked the door to his brother's room, the poor bastard's suffering stained the very air, making it hard to breathe--and even see properly.
Then again, everything was dark by design.
"Trez?"
The moaned answer was nothing good, a combination of wounded animal and sore throat from throwing up. iAm lifted his wrist into the light streaming in from behind and cursed at his Piaget. By this time, the SOB should have been solidly in recovery, his body digging itself out of the headache hole that had swallowed him.
Not the case.
"You want something for your stomach?"
Mumble, mumble, groan, mumble?
"Okay, I'm sure they've got some."
Mumble, moan, moan. Mutter, mutter.
"Yeah, that, too. You want some Milanos?"
Mmmmmmmmmoan.
"Roger that."
iAm shut the door and walked back to the stairs that took him down to the juncture between the hall of statues and the second-story foyer. Like the rest of the house, everything was silent as a tomb, but as he hit the grand staircase, his chef's nose picked up the subtle scents of First Meal being cooked in the kitchen wing.
The closer he got to the hub of doggen, the more his own stomach got to talking. Logical. After he'd finished making the Bolognese, he'd checked on his brother and then gone to the gym for hours.