by J. R. Ward
It was a text he'd sent a million times over the last couple of years. And in fact, he meant it. He was going to go see about the restaurant and the clubs--how they were functioning, if anyone needed anything.
That was exactly what he needed to do next. And exactly what would keep him from going to that damn cabin.
Time to head out.
With no one else around to play witness, he was free to dematerialize down to where he'd parked the BMW X5 that he and his brother had been sharing. A moment later, the Porsche was released through the side gate and he followed the leader at a discreet distance across the two-acre empty parking lot--as did Manny, in a conventional ambulance.
The entire way back to the Brotherhood compound, iAm had that picture of his brother and Selena in his mind, the pair of them dancing in the headlights like a pair of teenagers.
Too bad they were in a John Green novel.
How many more nights did they have, he wondered.
Shit, he felt morbid thinking like that, but there was a clock running here. With every hour that passed, it was more likely instead of less that Selena was going to collapse again.
And then what the fuck was he going to do with his brother?
Jesus Christ, Trez was going to be unmanageable.
With happy thoughts like that running through his head, he lost track of time, and before he was aware of having covered any distance at all, they were mounting the mhis-covered rise up to the mansion, Manny having broken off to head in the back way with the ambulance.
Hopefully, Selena was never going to know the precautions they were taking on her behalf.
It would have been a buzz kill. How could it not be.
iAm was careful to keep his distance as the last turn before the mansion approached, giving Trez time to get her inside. When he finally did pull into the courtyard, he went around the fountain and parked next to Rhage's GTO.
Which wasn't going to be out there much longer. The Brother always moved it into the garage during the winter months.
Manny's Porsche was at the base of the stairs, its top up, its key no doubt making its way back to the doctor so he could bring it to the training center's underground lot, too.
iAm shut the BMW off. Got out and locked it even though he didn't need to.
And stalled out.
Staring up at the sky, he watched the breath leaving his mouth drift off and disappear. That image of Trez and Selena dancing was like a dog with its fangs in his gray matter, the memory refusing to budge--and not, he was ashamed to admit, because he was thinking of everything his brother was in danger of losing or because he was stressing about how to peel the sad bastard off the pavement when things came to a bad conclusion.
Instead, he was wondering . . .
Shit, he was wondering what that felt like. To hold a female close to your body. Have her scent in your nose and your hands on her shoulders, her waist, her hips. He wanted to know what it was like to turn her face up to yours and--
Okay, he needed to pull back from all that.
Because none of it was happening for him. Not now. Not in a half hour if he went to that cabin. Not in a week or a month or a year from now--
As if on cue, a cold breeze came barreling by. Like the universe wanted to underscore all the cold and lonely he had going on.
The sound of the vestibule's outside door opening snapped him to attention. He liked Manny, but he didn't need the guy coming out to play musical cars and finding him--
It wasn't the good doctor.
Trez was coming out of the house. Jogging down the stone steps. Heading across the courtyard.
Shit.
iAm put his hand on his phone in case he needed to call . . . whoever the fuck. "Hey, is she all--"
He didn't get the "right" out.
His brother wrapped him up in a bear hug. "Thank you so much for tonight."
At first, iAm didn't know how to respond. He and his brother weren't huggers.
"I was so glad you were there. It meant everything to me."
iAm had to clear his throat. "I, ah . . ."
Trez just squeezed harder.
Cautiously, iAm put his arms around Trez. The movement felt all weird, but when he finally embraced the guy in return, he felt his brother shudder.
I'm sorry, man, he said in his head. I don't want any of this for you.
The cold wind continued to blow, and after a long moment, they stepped back.
Trez had ditched his jacket and he shoved his hands into the pockets of his slacks. "I got your text. I feel bad that I've just dumped everything on you."
"It's okay."
"It's not."
"Trez, you need to be with her and take care of your female. That's the most important thing. The rest of it is just conversation."
Those dark eyes focused on something above iAm's left shoulder. Or maybe whatever it was was above his ear.
"I seriously do not know why you're out here wasting time with me," iAm muttered.
"I want more for you than this."
"I happen to like my job at Sal's just fine."
His brother's stare locked on his. "That is not what I'm talking about, and you know it."
iAm joined the club with the fist-in-the-pocket routine. "Enough with the talk. Go to your female."
Trez was a hardheaded son of a bitch, capable of tremendous acts of hell-no. But iAm, as usual, got through to him.
The male turned around, but made it only halfway to the mansion's entrance before he stopped and looked over his shoulder.
"Don't waste all your life on me, okay." Trez shook his head. "I'm not worth it, and you're worth more than that."
iAm rolled his eyes. "Stop thinking. Start walking again."
"Ask yourself what's going to be left for you after I'm gone. If you're honest, I don't think you're going to like the answer any more than I do. And spare me the everything's-gonna-be-fines. Neither one of us is that naive."
"Why are you distracting yourself with this. Seriously, Trez."
"It's not a distraction. It's the kind of shit that eats you alive when you love someone."
On that note, Trez kept going, heading up the stone steps and disappearing through the vestibule's door.
iAm closed his eyes and sagged against the SUV. He didn't need that little monologue of his brother's in his head right now. He really didn't.
FIFTY-ONE
Selena's hands were stiff.
Standing at the counter in the Brotherhood's kitchen, she tried to open a can of Coke and found that her fingers refused to grip the tab right. Instead of pulling the metal lip free, they skipped over the top.
As all kinds of warnings went off in her head, she reined in the panic, and reminded herself that she'd spent three hours in the cold without any gloves on.
Making a couple of loose fists, she blew into them; then shook her arms. Cracked her knuckles. Tried not to start looking for other problems elsewhere in her body.
People who had her disease could still get minor-league frostbite.
She faced off at the can again, her heart pounding as she watched from a great distance while she approached the pop-top once more. She viewed her hands and fingers with dispassion, as if they were attached to someone else's wrists, moved by somebody else's brain.
Crack! Fizz!
She exhaled and had to steady herself on the granite.
"You okay?"
Covering up the relief, she smiled as Trez came in from the dining room. "Just getting some soda. I'm thirsty."
"How's your stomach?"
"Very well. How's yours?"
As he came up to her, she had the sense that he was hiding something from her as well. And it was a shock to discover that in spite of her big living-the-truth speech after she'd come out of the latest Arrest, she wanted him to keep his secret, just like she wanted to keep hers: They'd had such a wonderful night; the last thing she needed was to ruin it with heavy conversation that would just expose problems that cou
ldn't be solved, and questions that weren't going to be answered until it was too late.
"Tum's just fine."
She forced another smile. "Would you like to head upstairs?"
"That'd be great."
Picking up her soda, she took the palm he offered her and went out with him through the dining room and into the foyer. The house was essentially empty, the Brothers off working, Wrath seeing civilians, Beth and Marissa and Mary at Safe Place, Bella babysitting L.W. and Nalla up in the new nursery suite, the doggen attending to their duties.
All of this was going to continue, she thought, when she was gone. All of the doors opening and shutting, menus planned and consumed, people living their lives.
Dearest Virgin Scribe, she wanted to stay with them. She didn't want to go on to what might well be absolute nothingness, an utter unplugging of who she was and what mattered to her and how she thought and felt.
Gone. Nothing left.
She had been trained--no, programmed, really--to believe in the afterlife, and serve the Mother of the Race, and adhere to traditions she had neither established herself nor volunteered for. And she had done all of that without question.
Coming to the end of her life, she wished she had asked and challenged and had a voice.
So much wasted time.
As she started up the stairs with Trez, she found herself wondering why, if there was a Fade and people continued up there . . . why had the Scribe Virgin demanded that everything on Earth be recorded in the Sanctuary? Why all of those volumes and volumes of lives lived . . . if after death, the people still existed only in a different form?
You had to preserve only that which could be lost.
Her heart started to pound, a sudden terror taking hold--
"Oh, shit," Trez breathed.
Clearly, he'd read her mind. "I don't know what I'm thinking. It's probably just nonsense--"
He threw out his free hand for the banister and weaved.
"Trez! What's wrong?"
"Shit. Fuck." He looked over at her, but his eyes were unfocused. "Can you help me to the room? I can't see--"
"Dearest Virgin Scribe, let me get Doc Jane!"
"No, no, it's just a migraine." He steadied himself with help from her. "I don't have a lot of time. I have to get upstairs to a dark room and lie down."
"Let me call Doc Jane--"
"No, as you remember, I've gotten these all my life. I know what's coming. It's going to be hell for eight hours, but it can't really hurt me."
Selena tried to take as much of his weight as she could while they hobbled up to the second-story landing and then crossed over to the door to the third floor. His big body moved slowly, and at some point, he just gave up on his vision entirely, those eyes of his shutting.
Somehow, she got him up to his room and down on the bed.
"Dark is going to help," he said, putting his forearm over his face. "And could you bring a wastepaper basket over?"
Hustling around, she turned off all the lights except the one in the bathroom and made sure there was a receptacle right next to his head. "Do you want me to take your clothes off?"
"Okay. Yeah."
It was not exactly the experience she'd been banking on, but then again, her mood had gotten ruined even before this. And as she did the deed, she was oh, so careful with him, helping him with his jacket, then shucking his boots and socks, and doing away with his slacks.
"I'ma keep the shirt on. I just don't have the energy for it." He captured her hand and tugged her into a sit by his hip. "Not the way I'd planned on ending tonight."
She kissed his palm. "What else can I do for you?"
"Just let me lie here for the next six to eight hours. And don't worry, like I said, all of this, from the headache to the nausea, is normal. Unfortunately."
"What causes this?"
"Stress."
"Do you want me to call iAm?"
"Shit, no. He has too much on his plate already. Actually, I think he's why I got it."
"Is there something wrong with him?"
As Trez fell silent, she wanted to press, but he was ill.
"You don't have to go," he said.
"I don't want to disturb you."
"You won't." He rubbed her hand with his own, and his lips, which were the only part of his face showing, broke into a smile. "I love your hands. I've told you that, right? They're so smooth and soft . . . long fingers . . ."
As she stayed with him and he ran his fingertips from the inside of her wrist to the base of her fingers, she felt her panic melt away. Nothing felt strange in those joints anymore. So it definitely had been the cold.
A little later he let out a soft moan, his mouth flattening, his body tensing up. And then he began to swallow.
"I need you to go," he mumbled. "I'm sorry--I don't want you to see this. . . ."
"Are you sure--"
"Please. Now."
It was the last thing she wanted to do, but she got to her feet. "I'm in the house, okay? I'm not leaving. Call me if you--"
He jerked over onto his side and reached for the bucket. Pausing over the thing, he opened his eyes and pegged her with a frazzled stare. "You need to leave now."
"I love you," she said, rushing for the door. "I wish I could help."
She wasn't sure he'd even heard her as she slipped out, and just as she shut the door, the sounds of him retching made her wince.
For a split second, she thought she might camp out in the hall beyond his room. But then, as she debated where she was going to sit on the floor, she realized that she couldn't get her grip off the doorknob.
Her palm had frozen on the brass.
*
"Of course I am not quitting. Don't be daft."
As Assail addressed his cousins in the kitchen of his glass house, he was in a vicious mood--and sinking even deeper into anger upon Ehric's inquiry.
"But the King--"
"Has no right to interfere in matters of commerce flowing to humans." He conveniently avoided thinking or commenting upon the conflict-of-interest issue. "And I have no intention of complying with that order of his."
"So how do we proceed?"
"He will have us followed. That is what I would do were I he. I want the two of you to go activate the warning to my colleague. We'll suspend operations briefly and reconnoiter."
"Aye."
After the pair of them left, he stayed in his kitchen so that whatever Brothers had been stationed around his house would have him in plain view. Taking out his vial of cocaine, he discovered it was, once again, nearly empty, but at least there was enough to tide him over.
When he finished partaking, he went into his study on the other side of his home. It too had glass windows, and he turned on the desk lamp so that they could keep a good eye on him. Sitting down, he looked at the piles of papers he'd made. Investment accounts. Brokerage accounts. Monies in the U.S. and abroad.
Growing, growing, growing.
The fortune at his disposal had turned another corner about a month ago, the laundered money from the Caymans transferred into more legal accounts in the U.K. and Switzerland.
So much, and all of it accumulating interest, dividends, and appreciation.
When he had started in the business of drug dealing, shortly after he had come to America from the Old Country about a year ago, he had already been doing very well for himself even by his standards. Now, there was double that amount in his various accounts.
Picking up a random sheaf of papers, he looked at his month-end report. The daily one in his computer was even more recent.
In spite of his largesse, the idea that Wrath was getting in the way of his pursuits infuriated him to his marrow.
Just not for a reason he would admit to anyone.
Without this . . . he had nothing.
What had started as an extension of his European businesses had grown into his raison d'etre, the sole purpose he had in his life, the only drive that got him out of bed in the evening,
and dressed, and out the door.
To be fair, he'd always enjoyed making money.
But ever since last winter . . .
Cursing, he leaned back in his leather chair and put his head in his hand. Then without looking, he reached into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and took out his phone.
He had memorized Sola's number long ago.
But he hadn't called it. Not since she had moved away from Caldwell to Miami with her grandmother. Not since she had left here to get out of exactly the kind of criminal life he was leading.
Going into his phone, he went to the numerical dial pad. As he had so many times before, he punched in the sequence of ten numbers, one after another, his fingertip finding and following the pattern he knew by heart.
No, he hadn't called her. But on a regular basis he did this: ten numbers that were anything but random to him, punched into his phone . . . and cleared away without him having hit "send."
If the King took his livelihood away? Then he was going to have fucking nothing to do but stew in the fact that the one woman he wanted was utterly unobtainable.
Woman. Not female.
She was human, not vampire. Hell, she didn't even know that vampires existed.
And therein lay the catch. Even if he broke out of the drug dealing? It wasn't like he could go down to Miami, show up on her doorstep, and be all like, Hey! Let's pick up where we were!
Not going to happen--because sooner or later, his species was going to come out and then where were they going to be?
For some reason, the stillness and silence of his glass house sank in, reminding him exactly how alone he was--and would be if he stopped his drugging. Hell, his cousins were not going to be content with sitting around and mourning a female they were not in love with--he would lose them, too.
God, he was rather pathetic, wasn't he.
More to the point, what was he going to do?
With the cocaine sizzling in his veins, his brain made a sudden A + B = C calculation that was based on a totally . . . preposterous idea.
Which nonetheless offered him a rather stunning solution to all this.
Straightening in his seat, he frowned and looked around the room, his eyes going on a wander as his brain pick, pick, picked apart the plan. When he could find no fault, he cleared Sola's digits from the screen of his phone and dialed Ehric. When he got voice mail, he figured they were probably still dematerialized.
A second later, his phone rang and he answered, not bothering with a greeting. "Have you left the symbol for him yet?"