by J. R. Ward
He toweled off on the way to the bed and shot under the mink duvet as fast as he could.
Just as he was yanking the covers up to his throat, his phone beeped. Another voice mail.
Fucking Grand Central with his phone tonight.
Checking his missed calls, he found the latest was from his mother, and he sat up quickly, even though the vertical shift meant his chest went bare. Lady that she was, she never called, not wanting to “interrupt his work.”
He hit some buttons, put in his password, and got ready to delete the wrong number’s confused message which would come up first.
“Your call from 518-blah-blah-blah…” He hit the pound key to shoot past the ID shit and got ready to punch seven to get rid of the thing.
His finger was on the way down just as a female voice said, “Hi, I—”
That voice…that voice was…Ehlena?
“Fuck!”
Voice mail was inexorable, however, and didn’t give a shit that a message from her was the last thing he’d choose to erase. As he cursed, the system churned on until he heard his mother’s soft voice in the Old Language.
“Greetings, dearest son, I hope you fare well. Please excuse the intrusion, but I was wondering if you might stop by the house for a moment over the next couple of days? There is a matter about which I must speak to you. I love you. Good-bye, mine blooded firstborn.”
Rehv frowned. So formal, the verbal equivalent of a thoughtful note written in her beautiful hand, but the request was out of character, and that gave it an urgency. Except he was screwed—bad choice of words. Tomorrow evening was a no-go because of his “date,” so it would have to be the night after, assuming he was well enough.
He called the house, and when one of her doggen picked up, he told the maid he’d be there Wednesday night as soon as the sun went down.
“Sire, if I may,” the servant said. “Verily, I am glad you are coming.”
“What’s going on?” When there was a long pause, his inner chill got worse. “Talk to me.”
“She is…” The voice on the other end grew rough. “She is as lovely as ever, but we are all glad you are coming. If you will excuse me, I shall deliver your message.”
The line went dead. In the back of his mind, he had a sense as to what it was, but he studiously ignored the conviction. He just couldn’t go there. Absolutely couldn’t.
Besides, maybe it was nothing. Paranoia, after all, was a side effect of too much dopamine, and God knew he was doing more than his fair share. He would go to the safe house as soon as he was able, and she would be fine—Wait, the winter solstice. That had to be what it was. No doubt she wanted to plan festivities that included Bella and Z and the young, as it would be Nalla’s first solstice ritual, and his mother took that kind of thing very seriously. She might live on this side, but the Chosen traditions she had been born into were still very much a part of her.
That was totally it.
Relieved, he put Ehlena’s number into his addy book and hit her back.
All he could think about as the phone rang, aside from, Pick up, pick up, pick up, was that he hoped like hell she was okay. Which was nuts. Like she would ever call him if she were in trouble?
So why had she—
“Hello?”
The sound of her voice in his ear did something the hot shower, the mink throw, and the eighty-degree ambient air temperature couldn’t. Warmth spread out from his chest, beating back the numbness and the cold, suffusing him with…life.
He extinguished the lights so he could concentrate all he had on her.
“Rehvenge?” she said after a moment.
He eased back down onto his pillows and smiled in the dark. “Hi.”
TWELVE
There’s blood on your shirt…and—oh, God—your pant leg. Wrath, what happened?”
Standing in his study at the Brotherhood mansion, facing his beloved shellan, Wrath pulled the two halves of his biker jacket more tightly across his chest, and thought, well, at least he’d washed the lesser blood from his hands.
Beth’s voice dropped. “How much of what I’m looking at is yours.”
She was as beautiful as she had always been to him, the one female he wanted, the only mate for him. In her jeans and her black turtleneck, with her dark hair down around her shoulders, she was the most attractive thing he’d ever seen. Still.
“Wrath.”
“Not all of it.” The cut on his shoulder had no doubt leaked all over his wife-beater, but he’d held the civilian male to his chest as well, so the male’s blood had no doubt mixed with his own.
Unable to keep still, he walked around the study, going from the desk to the windows and back. The rug his shitkickers crossed was blue, gray, and cream, an Aubusson whose colors matched the pale blue walls and whose curvilinear swirls played off the delicate Louis XIV furniture, fixtures, and swirly moldings.
He’d never really appreciated the decor. And he didn’t start now.
“Wrath…how did it get there.” Beth’s hard tone told him she knew the answer already, but was hoping there was another explanation.
Manning up, he turned to face the love of his life across the expanse of the frilly-ass room. “I’m fighting again.”
“You’re what?”
“I’m fighting.”
As Beth went silent, he was glad the study door was closed. He saw the math she was doing in her head and knew the sum of what she was pulling together added up to one and only one thing: She was thinking about all those “nights up north” with Phury and the Chosen. All those times he’d worn long-sleeved, bruise-hiding shirts to bed because he had “a chill.” All the “I’m limping because I worked out too hard” excuses.
“You’re fighting.” She plugged her hands into the pockets of her jeans, and even though he couldn’t see a hell of a lot, he knew damn well that black turtleneck was a perfect complement to her stare. “Just to clarify. Is this as in, you’re going to start fighting. Or have been fighting.”
That was a rhetorical, but clearly she wanted him to present the full lie. “Have been. For the last couple of months.”
Anger and hurt rolled off her, spilling toward him, smelling to him of scorched wood and burned plastic.
“Look, Beth, I have to—”
“You have to be honest with me,” she said sharply. “That’s what you have to do.”
“I didn’t expect to be going out for more than a month or two—”
“A month or two! How the hell long—” She cleared her throat and lowered her voice. “How long have you been doing this?”
When he told her, she went quiet again. Then, “Since August? August.”
He wished she would let loose with her temper. Yell at him. Call him a cocksucker. “I’m sorry. I…Shit, I’m really sorry.”
She didn’t say anything else, and the scent of her emotions drifted away, dispersed by the hot air blowing up through the heating vents on the floor. Out in the hall, a doggen was vacuuming, the sound of the carpet attachment whirring up and back, up and back. In the silence between them, that normal, everyday sound was something he clung to—the kind of thing you heard all the time and rarely noticed because you were busy dealing with paperwork, or distracted by the fact that you were peckish, or trying to decide whether you wanted to decompress by watching TV or hitting the gym…. It was a safe sound.
And during this devastating moment in his mating, he hung on to the Dyson’s lullaby with a death grip, wondering if he was ever going to be lucky enough to ignore it again.
“It never occurred to me…” She cleared her throat once more. “It never occurred to me that there was something you couldn’t talk to me about. I’ve always assumed that you were telling me…everything you could.”
As she stopped talking, he was chilled to the bone. Her voice was now the one she used to answer wrong numbers on the phone: She addressed him as if he were a stranger, without warmth or particular interest.
“Look, Beth, I have
to be out there. I have to—”
She shook her head and raised her hand to stop him. “This isn’t about you fighting.”
Beth stared up at him for a heartbeat. Then she turned and went for the double doors.
“Beth.” Was that strangled croak his voice?
“No, leave me alone. I need some space.”
“Beth, listen, we don’t have enough fighters in the field—”
“It’s not the fighting!” She wheeled around and faced off at him. “You lied to me. Lied. And not just once, but for four months straight.”
Wrath wanted to argue, to defend himself, to point out that he’d lost track of time, that those 120 nights and days had flown by at the speed of light, that all he’d been doing was putting one foot in front of the other in front of the first, going minute by minute, hour by hour, trying to keep the race afloat, trying to keep the lessers back. He hadn’t meant it to go on for so long. He hadn’t set out to deceive her for that long.
“Just answer me one thing,” she said. “One thing. And it had better be the truth or, so help me, God, I’m going to…” She put her palm to her mouth, catching a soft sob in her gentle hand. “Honestly, Wrath…did you honestly think you were going to stop? In your heart, did you truly think you were going to—”
He swallowed hard as her words choked off.
Wrath took a deep breath. In the course of his life, he had been wounded many, many times. But nothing, no pain ever inflicted upon him, hurt a fraction of what answering her felt like.
“No.” He inhaled again. “No, I don’t think…I was going to stop.”
“Who talked to you tonight. Who was the one who made you decide to tell me.”
“Vishous.”
“I should have known. He’s probably the only person other than Tohr who could have….” Beth crossed her arms around herself, and he would have given his dagger hand to have him being the one holding her. “Your being out there fighting scares the shit out of me, but you forget something…. I mated you without knowing that the king isn’t supposed to be in the field. I was prepared to stand by you even though it terrified me…because fighting in this war is in your nature and in your blood. You fool—” Her voice cracked. “You fool, I would have let you do it. But instead—”
“Beth—”
She cut him off. “Remember that night you went out at the beginning of the summer? When you stepped in to save Z and then stayed downtown and fought with the others?”
He sure as hell did. When he’d come back home, he’d chased her up the stairs and they’d had sex on the rug in the second-floor sitting room. A number of times. He’d kept the cutoffs he’d ripped from her hips as a souvenir.
Jesus…come to think of it…that was the last time they had been together.
“You told me only for one night,” she said. “One night. Only. You swore to it, and I trusted you.”
“Shit…I’m sorry.”
“Four months.” She shook her head, her gorgeous dark hair swinging around her shoulders, catching the light so beautifully even his piss-poor eyes registered its glory. “You know what hurts the most? That the Brothers knew and I didn’t. I’ve always accepted this secret-society stuff, understood that there are things I can’t know—”
“They didn’t have a clue either.” Okay, Butch had known, but there was no reason to throw him under the bus. “V only found out tonight.”
She wobbled, steadying herself against the pale blue walls. “You’ve been going out alone?”
“Yes.” He reached out for her arm, but she tore it away from him. “Beth—”
She yanked open the door. “Don’t touch me.”
The thing clapped shut behind her.
Rage at himself had Wrath spinning toward his desk, and the instant he saw all the papers, all the requests, all the complaints, all the problems, it was like someone hooked jumper cables up to his shoulder blades and hit him with a charge. He shot forward, swept his arms across the top, and sent the shit flying everywhere.
As papers fluttered down like snow, he took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes, a headache spearing into his frontal lobe. Robbed of breath, he stumbled around, finding his chair by feel and collapsing into the damn thing. With a ragged grunt, he let his head fall back. These stress headaches were becoming a daily occurrence lately, wiping him out and lingering like a flu that refused to be cured.
Beth. His Beth…
When he heard a knock, he gave the f-word a workout.
The knock came again.
“What,” he barked.
Rhage put his head around the jamb, then froze. “Ah…”
“What.”
“Yeah, well…Ah, going by the door slamming—and, wow, the stiff wind that clearly just blew by your desk—do you still want to meet with us?”
Oh, God…how was he going to get through another one of these conversations.
Then again, maybe he should have thought about that before he’d decided to lie to his nearest and dearest.
“My lord?” Rhage’s voice became gentle. “Do you want to see the Brotherhood?”
No. “Yes.”
“You need Phury on speakerphone?”
“Yeah. Listen, I don’t want the boys in this meeting. Blay, John, Qhuinn…they’re not invited.”
“Figured. Hey, how about I help you clean up?”
Wrath looked down at the carpet of paperwork. “I’ll deal with it.”
Hollywood proved he had half a brain by not offering again or pulling an are-you-sure. He just ducked out and shut the door.
Across the way, the grandfather clock in the corner tolled. It was yet another familiar sound Wrath didn’t hear on a regular basis, but now, as he sat alone in the study, the chimes rang out as if they were broadcast over concert speakers.
He dropped his hands onto the arms of the spindly, fragile chair, and they dwarfed the supports. The piece of furniture was more on the scale of something a female would perch on to take off her stockings at the end of the night.
It was not a throne. Which was why he used it.
He hadn’t wanted to accept the crown on many levels, having been king by birthright but not inclination or actuality for three hundred years. But then Beth had come along and things had changed and he’d finally gone to the Scribe Virgin.
That had been two years ago. Two springs and two summers and two autumns and two winters.
He’d had great plans back then, in the beginning. Great, wonderful plans for bringing the Brotherhood together, getting everyone under one roof, consolidating forces, shoring up against the Lessening Society. Winning.
Saving.
Reclaiming.
Instead, the glymera had been slaughtered. More civilians were dead. And there were even fewer Brothers.
They hadn’t made progress. They’d lost ground.
Rhage poked his head in again. “We’re all still out here.”
“Goddamn it, I told you I needed some—”
The grandfather clock chimed again, and as Wrath listened to the number of beats, he realized he’d been sitting by himself for an hour.
He rubbed his aching eyes. “Give me another minute.”
“Whatever you need, my lord. Just take your time.”
THIRTEEN
As Rehvenge’s hi came through the phone, Ehlena sat up from the pillow she’d been lying against and swallowed back a holy crap… except then she wondered why she was so surprised. She’d called him, and the textbook way people handled those kind of things was…well, hey, they called you back. Wow.
“Hi,” she said.
“I didn’t answer your call only because I didn’t know the number.”
Man, his voice was sexy. Deep. Low. Like a male’s should be.
In the silence that followed, she thought, and she had called him why? Oh, right. “I wanted to follow up about your appointment. When I did your discharge papers, I noticed that you received nothing for your arm.”
“Ah.”
>
The pause that followed was one she couldn’t interpret. Maybe he was pissed she was interfering? “I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
“Do you do this with patients a lot?”
“Yes,” she lied.
“Havers know you’re checking his work?”
“Did he even look at your veins?”
Rehvenge’s laugh was low. “I would rather you had called for a different reason.”
“I don’t understand,” she said tightly.
“What? That someone might want to have something to do with you outside of work? You’re not blind. You’ve seen yourself in mirrors. And surely you know you’re smart, so it’s not all just pretty window dressing.”
As far as she was concerned, he was speaking in a foreign language. “I don’t understand why you’re not taking care of yourself.”
“Hmmm.” He laughed softly, and she felt the purr as well as heard it in her ear. “Oh…so maybe this is a pretense just so I can see you again.”
“Look, the only reason I called was—”
“Because you needed an excuse. You shut me down in the exam room, but really wanted to talk to me. So you called about my arm to get me on the phone. And now you have me.” That voice dropped even lower. “Do I get to pick what you do with me?”
She stayed quiet. Until he said, “Hello?”
“Are you finished? Or do you want to run around in circles a little longer, reading into what I’m doing here?”
There was a beat of silence, and then he broke out in a rich baritone belly laugh. “I knew there was more than one reason I liked you.”
She refused to be charmed. And was anyway. “I called about your arm. Period. My father’s nurse just left, and she and I were talking about his…”