The Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8

by J. R. Ward

  Marissa appeared on the back stoop and shut the door behind herself. Butch’s shellan and Wrath’s former blood mate looked typically professional in her black slacks and jacket, her blond hair twisted into an elegant chignon, her scent like the ocean.

  “Beth just left,” she said as he walked over to her.

  “She go back home?”

  “Redd Avenue.”

  Wrath stiffened. “What the…Why’s she over there?” Shit, his shellan out alone in Caldwell? “You mean at her old apartment?”

  Marissa nodded. “I think she wanted to go back to where things started.”

  “Is she alone?”

  “As far as I know.”

  “Jesus Christ, she’s already been abducted once,” he snapped. As Marissa recoiled, he cursed himself. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m not real rational right now.”

  After a moment, Marissa smiled. “This is going to sound bad, but I’m glad you’re frantic. You deserve to be.”

  “Yeah, I was a shit. Big-time.”

  Marissa tilted her head up to the sky. “On that note, a word of advice when you go over to her.”

  “Hit me.”

  Her perfect face leveled again, and as she refocused on him, her voice grew rueful. “Try not to be angry. You look like an ogre when you’re pissed, and right now, Beth needs to be reminded of why she should let her guard down around you, not why she shouldn’t.”

  “Good point.”

  “Be well, my lord.”

  He nodded to her with a quick bob of the head and dematerialized directly to the Redd Avenue address where Beth had had an apartment when they’d first met. As he went, he got a good goddamn taste of what his shellan had to deal with every night he was out in the city. Dearest Virgin Scribe, how did she deal with the fear? The idea that everything might not be all right? The fact that there was more danger to be found out where he was than safety?

  As he took form in front of the apartment building, he thought of the night he had gone to find her after her father’s death. He’d been a reluctant, unsuitable savior, tasked by his friend’s last will and testament to see her through her transition—when she hadn’t even known what she was.

  His first approach hadn’t gone well, but the second time he’d tried to talk to her? That had gone very well.

  God, he wanted to be with her again like that. Naked skin on naked skin, moving together, him deep inside of her, marking her as his.

  But that was a long way off, assuming it ever even happened again.

  Wrath walked around to the backyard; his shitkickers were quiet, his shadow large on the frosty ground beneath his feet.

  Beth was huddled on a rickety picnic table he’d once sat on himself, and she was staring into the apartment straight ahead just as he had when he’d come for her. Cold wind blew her dark hair around, making it seem as if she were underwater and swimming amid strong currents.

  His scent must have carried over to her, because her head snapped around. As she looked at him, she sat up straighter and kept her arms locked around the North Face parka he’d bought her.

  “What are you doing here?” she said.

  “Marissa told me where you were.” He glanced at the apartment’s sliding glass door, then back at her. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Ah…okay. That’s fine.” She shuffled over a little as he came to her. “I wasn’t going to be here long.”

  “No?”

  “I was going to come see you. I wasn’t sure when you were going out to fight and thought maybe there was time before…But then, I don’t know, I…”

  As she let the sentence drift, he got up on the table beside her, the supports squeaking as the thing accepted his heft. He wanted to put an arm around her, but hung back and hoped the parka was doing its job to keep her warm enough.

  In the silence, words buzzed in his head, all of them of the apologetic variety, all of them bullshit. He’d already said he was sorry, and she knew he meant it, and it was going to be a long time before he stopped wishing there were more he could do to make it up to her.

  On this cold night, as they sat suspended between their past and their future, all he could do was sit with her and stare at the darkened windows of the apartment she had once lived in…back before fate had put them together.

  “I don’t remember being especially happy in there,” she said softly.

  “No?”

  She swept her hand across her face, clearing wisps of hair from her eyes. “I didn’t like coming home from work and being there alone. Thank God for Boo. Without that cat? I mean, TV only does so much for a person.”

  He hated that she had been on her own. “So you don’t wish you could go back?”

  “Christ, no.”

  Wrath exhaled. “I’m glad.”

  “I was working for that leering asshole, Dick, at the paper, doing the jobs of three people, getting nowhere because I was a young woman and the good old boys didn’t have a club—they were in a cabal.” She shook her head. “But you know what the worst of it was?”

  “What?”

  “I was living with this sense that there was something going on, something important, but I didn’t know what it was. It was like…I knew the secret was there, and it was a dark one, but I just couldn’t reach it. Nearly drove me mad.”

  “So finding out you weren’t just a human was—”

  “These last months with you have been worse.” She looked over at him. “When I think back over the fall…I knew something was wrong. In the back of my mind, I knew it, I could absolutely sense it. You stopped coming to bed regularly, and if you did, it wasn’t to sleep. You couldn’t settle. You didn’t really eat. You never fed. The kingship always stressed you, but these last couple of months have been different.” She went back to staring at her old apartment. “I knew it, but I didn’t want to face the reality that you might actually be lying to me about something as significant and terrifying as you going out alone to fight.”

  “Shit, I didn’t mean to do that to you.”

  Her profile was both beautiful and hard as she continued. “I think that’s part of the head fuck I’ve got going on now. The whole thing takes me back to the way I used to live every day of my life. After I went through the change and you and I moved in with the Brothers, I was so relieved, because I finally knew for sure what I’d always wondered about. The truth was incredibly grounding. It made me feel safe.” She turned back to him. “This thing with you? The lying? I don’t feel like I can trust my reality again. I just don’t feel safe. I mean, my whole world is about you. My whole world. It’s all based on you, because our mating is the foundation of my life. So this is about so much more than you fighting.”

  “Yeah.” Fuck. What the hell did he say?

  “I know you had your reasons.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I know you didn’t mean to hurt me.” This was spoken with a lift at the end, the words a question, rather than a statement.

  “I absolutely didn’t mean to.”

  “But you knew it would, didn’t you.”

  Wrath put his elbows on his knees and leaned into his heavy arms. “Yeah, I did. That’s why I haven’t been sleeping. It felt wrong not to tell you.”

  “Were you afraid I’d refuse to let you go out or something? That I’d turn you in for violating the law? Or…?”

  “Here’s the thing…. At the end of every night I came home and told myself I wasn’t doing it again. And every sunset I found myself strapping on my daggers. I didn’t want you to worry, and I told myself I didn’t think it would continue. But you were right to call me on that. I had no plans to stop.” He rubbed his eyes under his wraparounds as his head started to pound. “It was so wrong, and I couldn’t face up to what I was doing to you. It was killing me.”

  Her hand went to his leg and he froze, her kind touch more than he deserved. As she stroked his thigh a little, he dropped his sunglasses back in place and carefully captured her hand.

  Neither said a
thing as they held on to each other, palm-to-palm.

  Sometimes words were less valuable than the air that carried them when it came to getting close.

  As the cold wind blew across the backyard, causing some brown leaves to crackle by in front of them, the lights went on in Beth’s old place, illumination flooding the galley kitchen and the single main room.

  Beth laughed a little. “They put their furniture right where mine was, the futon against that one long wall.”

  Which meant they had a full view of the couple who came stumbling into the studio and beelined for the bed. The humans were locked lip-to-lip, hip-to-hip, and they landed on the futon in a messy scramble, the man mounting the woman.

  As if embarrassed by the show, Beth got off the table and cleared her throat. “I guess I’d better get back to Safe Place.”

  “I’m off rotation tonight. I’ll be at home, you know, all night.”

  “That’s good. Try to get some rest.”

  God, the distance was horrid, but at least they were talking. “You want me to see you back there?”

  “I’ll be fine.” Beth burrowed into her parka, her face sinking into the down collar. “Man, it’s cold.”

  “Yeah. It is.” As the time for parting came, he was anxious about where they stood, and fear made his vision fairly clear. God, how he hated the lonely look on her face. “You can’t know how sorry I am.”

  Beth reached up and touched his jaw. “I hear it in your voice.”

  He took her hand and placed it over his heart. “I’m nothing without you.”

  “Not true.” She stepped out of his hold. “You are the king. No matter who your shellan is, you are everything.”

  Beth dematerialized into the thin air, her vital, warm presence replaced with nothing but frigid December wind.

  Wrath waited for about two minutes; then he dematerialized to Safe Place. She had so much of his blood in her after all their time of feeding from each other that he sensed her presence inside the stout walls of the security-laden facility, and he knew she was protected.

  With a heavy heart, Wrath dematerialized again and headed back to the mansion: He had stitches to get removed and a whole night to pass alone in his study.

  TWENTY-ONE

  An hour after Trez took the tray back down to the kitchen, Rehv’s stomach was in full revolt. Man, if oatmeal was no longer a viable food afterward, what was he left with? Bananas? White rice?

  Fucking Gerber baby gruel?

  And it wasn’t just his digestive tract that was screwed up. If he’d been able to feel anything, he was pretty sure he had a headache along with the tossing nausea. Anytime there was a light source, like when Trez came in to check on him, Rehv’s eyes went on autoblink, flickering up and down in an uncoordinated, ocular version of the Safety Dance; then he’d start to salivate and swallow compulsively. So he had to be nauseated.

  As his phone went off, he put his hand on it and brought it to his ear without turning his head. There was a lot going on at ZeroSum tonight, and he needed to keep tabs. “Yeah.”

  “Hi…you called me?”

  Rehv’s eyes shot to the bathroom door, which had a soft light glowing around the jambs.

  Oh, God, he hadn’t had a shower yet.

  He was still covered with the sex he’d had.

  Even though Ehlena was about a three-hour drive away and he wasn’t on a Web cam, he felt absolutely nasty just talking to her.

  “Hey,” he said in a rough voice.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.” Which was a total fucking lie, and the gravel in his voice made that obvious.

  “Well, I, ah…I saw that you’d called me—” As a strangled sound came out of his mouth, Ehlena stopped. “You’re sick.”

  “No—”

  “For God’s sake, please come to the clinic—”

  “I can’t. I’m…” God, he couldn’t bear to speak to her. “I’m not in town. I’m upstate.”

  There was a long pause. “I’ll bring the antibiotics to you.”

  “No.” She couldn’t see him like this. Shit, she couldn’t see him ever again. He was filthy. A filthy, dirty whore who let someone he hated touch him and suck on him and use him, and force him to do the same to her.

  The princess was right. He was a fucking dildo.

  “Rehv? Let me come to you—”

  “No.”

  “Goddamn it, don’t you do this to yourself!”

  “You can’t save me!” he shouted.

  In the aftermath of his explosion, he thought, Jesus…where had that come from? “I’m sorry…it’s been a bad night for me.”

  When Ehlena finally spoke, her voice was a thin whisper. “Don’t do this to me. Don’t make me see you in the morgue. Don’t do that to me.”

  Rehv squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m not doing anything to you.”

  “The hell you aren’t.” Her voice cracked on a sob.

  “Ehlena…”

  Her moan of despair came through the phone all too clearly. “Oh…Christ. Whatever. Kill yourself, fine.”

  She hung up on him.

  “Fuck.” He rubbed his face. “Fuck!”

  Rehv sat up and fired the cell phone at the bedroom door. And just as it ricocheted off the panels and went flying, he realized he’d busted the only thing he had with her number in it.

  With a roar and a messy scramble, he launched his body off the bed, quilts landing everywhere. Not a great move on his part. As his numb feet hit the throw rug, he went Frisbee, finding air briefly before landing on his face. On impact, a sound like a bomb had gone off rumbled through the floorboards, and he crawled for the phone, tracking the light that still glowed from its screen.

  Please, oh, fucking please, if there is a God…

  He was almost in range when the door swung open, narrowly missing his head and clipping the phone—which shot like a hockey puck in the opposite direction. As Rehv wheeled around and lunged for thing, he shouted at Trez.

  “Don’t shoot me!”

  Trez was in full fighting stance, gun up and pointed at the window, then the closet, then the bed. “What the fuck was that.”

  Rehv sprawled out flat to reach the phone, which was spinning under the bed. When he caught it, he closed his eyes and brought it close to his face.

  “Rehv?”

  “Please…”

  “What? Please…what?”

  He opened his eyes. The screen was flickering, and he pressed the buttons fast. Calls received…calls received…calls r—

  “Rehv, what the hell is going on?”

  There it was. The number. He stared at the seven digits after the area code as if they were the combination to his own safe, trying to get them all.

  The screen went dark and he let his head fall down on his arm.

  Trez crouched beside him. “You okay?”

  Rehv pushed himself out from under the bed and sat up, the room spinning like a merry-go-round. “Oh…fuck me.”

  Trez holstered his gun. “What happened?”

  “I dropped my phone.”

  “Right. Of course. Because it weighs enough to make that kind of—Hey, easy, there.” Trez caught him as he tried to get up. “Now where are you going?”

  “I need a shower. I need…”

  More pictures of him with the princess hammered into his brain. He saw her back arched, that red mesh split free of her ass, him buried deep in her sex, pumping until that barb of his locked him inside of her so that his release would get way up into her.

  Rehv pressed his fists into his eyes. “I need to…”

  Oh, Jesus…He orgasmed when he was with his blackmailer. And not just once, usually three or four times. At least the whores in his club who hated what they did for the money could take solace in the fact that they didn’t enjoy it. But a male’s release said it all, didn’t it.

  Rehv’s gag reflex tightened, and in a panic he Curly-shuffled into the bathroom. The oatmeal and the toast made a successful bid for l
iberation, and Trez was right there to hold him over the loo. Rehv couldn’t feel the retching, but he was damn sure that his esophagus was getting torn, because after a couple of minutes of coughing and trying to breathe and seeing stars, blood started to come up.

  “Lie back,” Trez said.

  “No, shower—”

  “You’re in no shape—”

  “I have to get her off me!” Rehv’s voice bellowed through not just his bedroom, but the whole house. “For fuck’s sake…I can’t stand her.”

  There was a moment that positively smacked of holy crap: Rehv wasn’t the type to ask for a life jacket even if he were drowning, and he never bitched about the arrangement with the princess. He got through it and did what he had to and paid the consequences, because it was all worth it to him to keep his and Xhex’s secret.

  And part of you likes it, an inner voice pointed out. You get to be you without apology when you’re in her.

  Fuck off, he told himself.

  “I’m sorry I yelled at you,” he said to his friend hoarsely.

  “Nah, it’s cool. Don’t blame you.” Trez gently lifted him up from the tile and tried to reposition him on the sinks. “It’s about time.”

  Rehv lurched for the shower.

  “Nope,” Trez said, pushing him back. “Let me get the water warm.”

  “I won’t feel it.”

  “Your core temperature has enough problems already. Just stay there.”

  As Trez leaned into the marble shower and turned on the water, Rehv stared down at his cock, which lay loose and long down his thigh. It seemed like the sex of someone else, and that was a good thing.

  “You realize I could kill her for you,” Trez said. “I could make it look like an accident. No one would know.”

  Rehv shook his head. “I don’t want you sucked into this shithole. We got enough people down it already.”

  “The offer stands.”

  “Duly noted.”

  Trez reached in and put his hand under the spray. With his palm in the rushing water, his chocolate eyes drifted back and abruptly became white from anger. “Just so we’re clear. You die? I’m going to skin that bitch alive in the s’Hisbe tradition and send the strips back to your uncle. Then I’m going to spit-roast her carcass and chew the meat from her bones.”