by J. R. Ward
So the manse could last centuries.
“No, you don’t owe me.” Xhex slipped in between the car-sized rocks. “But you are lucky we had a change of clothes in Trez’s office.”
And that shower, he thought as he squeezed himself into the shallow hideaway. As he’d come off the field of conflict, he’d been covered with all kinds of blood and the last thing he wanted was for Sarah to see him like that. Looking for exactly what he happened to find, he’d gone to Xhex’s club and ID’d a vampire among the security staff monitoring the entrance. The male had been good enough to get Xhex without asking a lot of questions.
She hadn’t asked for any details, either. Especially as he’d told her he’d been with her mate. It was obvious her feelings were hurt, but typical of the female, she hadn’t let any of that emotion through.
Leaning forward, she hit a hidden button and a small fake “rock” panel slid back to reveal a keypad. After she entered in a code, the lock was released and part of the entire cave wall opened.
But she didn’t step aside so he could go through. Instead, she leveled those gunmetal-gray eyes at him.
“Listen,” she said, “you need to get straight with the Brotherhood and take care of that human woman. She can’t stay here in our world, Murhder. Say your goodbyes, wipe her memories and then get her back where she belongs. Or they’re going to do that shit for you.”
“She’s going to help John.” As the female looked away sharply, he put his hand on her shoulder. “Xhex, she’s going to figure it out.”
Those hard eyes swung back to him. “I don’t want to be cruel here, I really don’t. But you don’t know that woman. You’re attracted to her so that sizzle of chemistry makes you think you’re on intimate terms, but you don’t have a clue about what she’s really like—and I refuse to put my faith in some human who incidentally worked for the company which has been torturing members of the species for over two decades.”
Anger curled in his gut. “So you’re just going to let John die?”
“Excuse me?” Xhex glared at him. “Not believing in a pipe dream does not equate to letting my hellren die. And fuck you for bringing that up.”
He let his head fall back as he took a couple of deep breaths. When he righted things, the female had crossed her arms over her chest and was staring over his shoulder.
He was willing to bet in her mind, she was kneeing him in the balls.
“I apologize,” he muttered. “That was a low blow.”
Her eyes returned to his again. “Thank you. Now go make things easy on yourself and do the right thing. It’ll be better for everybody.”
When she went to walk off, he reached for her hand. “Xhex . . .”
It was a while before she glanced at him. And when she did, there was too much emotion in her normally composed face.
“Let me go,” she said. And yet she didn’t fight his loose hold.
“Talk to me. You look . . .” Too much like how he felt. “Just tell me what I can do to help you.”
“God, Murhder,” she said in a voice that cracked. “I’m just so tired. I’m . . . so fucking exhausted from being in pain. It’s like I can’t shake the hits. They keep coming at me, and anytime I feel like I’ve bounced back, I get nailed again—and this one? With John’s injury? It’s a mortal wound for the both of us if I lose him.”
As she rubbed her eyes, Murhder cursed and pulled her in against him. There was a hesitation, and then her arms went around him and she held on tight. And that was when the fantasizing stopped for him and reality fell on his head.
He was going to lose Sarah.
She was going to lose John.
They had always had things in common. Too bad it was only the stuff that hurt.
When they eventually stepped apart, Murhder said, “When it comes to Sarah . . . I’ll do the right thing.”
“You always do,” she murmured with defeat.
After a moment, she stepped away and he slipped through the heavy steel entry, making sure things closed up tight behind him. Walking forward, he came up to the shelves of weapons, nonperishable food, water and outerwear.
This was the place to be if the zombie apocalypse ever went down.
Striding through the tunnel, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his borrowed slacks and entertained a brief folly of him and Sarah living at the Rathboone House—and of course, in his version of reality, they were like all the other romantic couples who cuddled in old beds and enjoyed the fires in the fireplaces and held hands for absolutely no reason. But all of that was ridiculous. He couldn’t expect her to sacrifice her scientific work for a nocturnal existence with a vampire rattling around in that B&B.
You don’t know that woman.
But he did. He’d seen her with Nate. With John . . .
She was a female of worth.
Except, even as the conviction came to him, Xhex was right about one thing. He knew nothing about how Sarah had come to be at BioMed and how she had “discovered” the terrible secret experiments. Had she been involved with them somehow? He didn’t know how that was possible, but what if she were lying to everyone? He’d been inside her mind, true . . . but could he trust himself to have seen clearly?
He was, after all, insane.
When he got to the entry into the training center, he put in the code Xhex had given him and walked through the supply closet. No one was in the office, which was a bonus, and he didn’t run into anybody as he strode down to the clinical area—another bonus, as he was technically banned from the premises. But fuck that . . . and fuck Tohr.
Murhder was halfway to the treatment area when Sarah stepped out of Nate’s room, a stainless steel tray in her hands, all kinds of test tubes filled with blood standing upright on it in a holder.
“Is he okay?” Murhder asked in alarm.
“You’re back.” She smiled and walked over. “He’s great. He’s a great man—male. He’s a really good person.”
“What are you doing with all that?” He tacked on a smile so it didn’t sound as suspicious as he suddenly was. “I mean, just checking him, right?”
“Actually, I’m working on a theory about John’s case. I’m wondering if—” She frowned. “Where are your clothes?”
He glanced down at himself. “I, ah, I had to change.”
“I get that. I wish I had some of my own clothes, too.”
As he looked at her face, as he stared deeply into her guileless golden eyes . . . as he probed for signs that she was misleading them all . . . his heart told him what he did not trust his mind to know: She was a healer, not a destroyer.
His fingertips lifted to the open collar of the button-down shirt he’d borrowed and found the sacred shard of seeing glass.
No, he thought as he rubbed the talisman between his thumb and forefinger. Xhex was wrong. She just had to be. Sarah’s was the visage he had seen in the glass long ago, the woman he was supposed to be with.
And as soon as he grounded himself on that fact, he thought of one and only one thing: How in the hell he was going to be able to take her memories, release her out into the human world, leave her to live the rest of her life without him?
Sadly, however, the sacred glass had showed him only her face, not some kind of a future for them as mates.
Destiny had dictated only that they meet. Not that they be together for long.
“Are you all right?” she said. When he didn’t immediately answer—because his throat was too tight to let speech through—she nodded to the left, toward a doorway. “Let me give this to Ehlena for testing in the lab. And then let’s—is there anywhere we can go for a walk or something?”
“There’s a gym?” He motioned over his shoulder. “Back that way.”
“Give me a minute.”
The facility was a lot larger than Sarah had initially assumed, and she learned the footprint firsthand as she and Murhder strolled down the corridor away from the clinical area. As they went along, they passed by locker rooms. A we
ight room. That gym he’d mentioned. An office. There was also a pool complex with what certainly seemed to be an Olympic-sized body of water.
“Big place,” she murmured as they kept going.
“Yeah.”
She glanced over at Murhder. His head was down, his brows cranked tight over his eyes, his big shoulders tense.
“You look like you’re trying to take pi out to thirty decimals.”
He looked at her, his beautiful red-and-black hair hanging forward. “What?”
“Sorry. Scientist joke.”
“So you were saying you’ve got an idea for John’s treatment?”
Sarah stopped. “What’s going on? Just tell me. Whatever it is, I’ll deal with it.”
Murhder reached out and brushed her cheek with his fingertips. As silence stretched between them, she got the feeling he was trying out lies to her in his head.
The truth, however, was what he eventually spoke: “We’re running out of time.”
Her first thought—her only thought—was that she couldn’t leave him. Nate. John. And logic told her that that desperation was because she had no other life to go back to anymore. It couldn’t possibly be because . . . she’d fallen in love with a vampire. In like, twenty-four hours.
Oh, God . . .
“I know,” she said sadly.
“Come here.”
When he put his arms around her, she went willingly up against his body. And the next thing she knew, they were kissing, lips melding, tongues meeting.
When they were both breathing hard, he took her hand and drew her over to a door. She had no idea where they were going and didn’t care. Whatever was on the far side was dark, and that meant they could steal some private moments.
Really dark, that was.
As they were shut in together, she could see absolutely nothing, the room they had entered pitch black and then some—and oddly, she was reminded of what it was like to skinny-dip at night, your body floating in a void.
At least she didn’t have to worry about sharks in this case. In fact, she wasn’t worried about anything attacking them. Murhder would take care of it—and defend her.
His hands were rough as he peeled off the top half of the scrubs she’d borrowed after she’d taken a quick shower during the day . . . his nimble fingers shedding the baggy layers, finding her skin. The fact that she was blind in the darkness meant every stroke of his was magnified, and when he captured her breast in his palm, she gasped against his mouth.
She was sloppy with the buttons of his fine silk shirt, impatient, fumbling. When he helped by yanking the thing off, a tear sounded out. And then they were kissing again, the bottoms to the scrubs disappearing, his slacks getting unbuttoned at the waist and falling down to his shoes.
Murhder picked her up and she straddled his hips, his strong arms holding her off the floor. His penetration was a firebrand, nothing slow and gentle this time, his arousal entering her on a one-stroke that went so deep, she nearly orgasmed then and there. Desperate to find a good rhythm, he shuffled them over to a wall, the hard, cool surface hitting her bare back as he braced her against it. Then he pumped into her, his body working hard, churning, dominating.
She held on for dear life.
And only wanted more.
Linking her arms around the back of his neck, she put her face in his long hair. He’d shampooed it, and it was still damp underneath, and she breathed in the scent of—no, that wasn’t shampoo. That was him.
And he was making that erotic sound again, deep in his throat, part growl, part purr.
When he started to release, she went along with him, their bodies going over the edge together, the pleasure so intense it was painful, the line between orgasm and agony mixing, the explosions inside of her racking her to the soul—
All at once, lights came on, rows of caged fixtures in the long, low-ceilinged room illuminating sequentially toward some kind of terminal point.
Target range. They were in a target range.
As they both froze in surprised blindness, Sarah shifted her arms and started patting around behind herself, trying to find the switch they’d hit.
“Oh, my God!” She pushed against Murhder’s shoulders. “What happened to you!”
Staring down at his magnificent pectorals, she saw the leather thong necklace he wore with its piece of quartz in it—but that was not what she was looking at. Bruises. There were big bruises all over his chest and shoulders, the deep purple welts staining his tan skin.
“It’s okay—they don’t hurt.”
He must have found the switch himself because they were instantly back in the dark. But when he tried to keep kissing her, she turned her head aside and pushed at him again.
“You’re hurt,” she said into the void. “I want to know what happened.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Murhder hadn’t even thought about the black and blue marks. He’d seen them in the mirror as he’d undressed in Xhex’s boss’s bathroom, but they were no big deal. By morning, they would already be faded—and even the bullet wound on his leg was nothing more than a surface graze. He was perfectly fine, the battle bruises nothing more or less than he’d ever gotten when he’d headed out into the field and engaged with the enemy.
“Murhder, seriously.” Sarah’s voice was brimming with concern. “What happened? You’re hurt.”
“No, I’m not.”
“So that’s what, paint? Come on.”
He wanted to track what she was saying and respond appropriately. But she was wriggling around in his hold and that was causing the kind of fiction that males had a hard time focusing through: His cock was hard and ultra-sensitive, her core warm and tight, the slip and slide going right to his head and fritzing out his higher reasoning.
As much as he tried to hold himself back, he started to come, his arousal ejaculating in a series of pumps deep inside of her. He fought it as best he could, gritting his teeth and cursing, and when that got him nowhere, he attempted to pull out—but she squeezed her legs on his hips and arched against him, saying his name in frustration and pleasure.
He didn’t mean to start pumping again, but the next thing he knew they were straining against each other, their bodies taking over, the need for the release, the joining, the connection, overriding everything else.
At least temporarily.
When they finally stopped, he relied on the wall to help him stay upright, his breath punching out of his mouth, his body throwing off all kinds of heat as he braced his weight on his arms so he didn’t crush her.
He felt her hands make their way up his throat . . . to his face.
“How did you get hurt?” she said in the dark.
Not a demand. A worried plea.
Murhder closed his eyes. He wanted to lie to her and tell her he got distracted and was hit by a car—not exactly a fib, given what had happened in front of Wrath’s Audience House. But that was just going to alarm her more, and he already knew that lying to her was never going to sit right with him.
Abruptly, the lights came on again, the punches of their ignitions echoing in the concrete facility. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw a lineup of shooting booths and then paper targets hanging at various distances down a target range.
When he looked back at Sarah, she was blinking in the glare, her human eyes requiring more time to adjust than his did.
With reluctance, he loosened his hold on her waist and let her disengage and slide down to the floor. She picked up her scrubs and got them back on with an efficiency that he respected. He didn’t want anyone to see her naked, either.
As she yanked up the bottoms, she stared at his bare torso. And then looked into his eyes with a very clear you-better-start-talking-now-mister glare.
“I was trained to fight,” he said in a dull voice. “And I fought tonight.”
He pulled up the slacks and did the fly thing. Then he picked the borrowed shirt off the concrete floor and pulled it onto his shoulders. Unable to stand still
, he paced up and back by the shooting stations. Each booth had ear protection hanging on a peg. Boxes of ammo stacked on the left. Yellow-tinted eyewear.
“We’re hunted,” he muttered with his back to her. “And not by humans. I was trained to protect the species. It was what I used to do.”
“No longer, then? You’re doing something else now?”
She sounded almost relieved, as if she recognized the danger he had faced.
“I’m not fighting anymore.” He focused on the target straight ahead of him and hated himself. “I had a problem.”
“Physically?”
Could he still shoot well, he wondered. That target was fifty yards away. There was a time when it would have been no big deal for him to hit a thimble at that distance.
He thought about that first slayer’s backup nearly killing him at point-blank range. If John hadn’t come along when he did, by some stroke of luck . . . Murhder would be dead now.
“What kind of problem did you have?”
“A mental one.” As he touched the side of his head, he could not bear to turn around and look her in the eye. “I lost my mind. Just cracked.”
“Because of PTSD? From fighting.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I just couldn’t pull myself together anymore.”
“That’s not uncommon for people who—”
“It wasn’t related to my job.” He paused. “Xhex was sold to BioMed—you remember, she told you she’d been experimented on? Well, I was determined to find her . . . a lot of things went wrong. She ended up getting herself out and then I couldn’t—I just didn’t let it go, you know. I needed to make sure they didn’t do anything like that to anyone else. So I kept hunting the humans who hurt her, the humans you work for.”
Now, he glanced over his shoulder. “That’s how I knew Nate’s mahmen. I knew her. I failed to rescue her. But she ended up getting out and eventually found me.”