by J. R. Ward
Bella waited for a moment, as if she were hoping this time would be different and he would go over and take the child into his arms and comfort the infant who so clearly wanted him.
Z backed away until his shoulder blades hit the far wall, tucking his arms around his chest.
Bella turned and whispered to her darling one as she went into the adjoining nursery. The door muffled the daughter’s whimpering as it slid shut.
Z let himself slide down until his ass hit the floor. “Fuck.”
He rubbed his skull trim back and forth, then let both hands hang off his knees. After a moment, he realized he was sitting as he had back in the cell, his back against the corner facing the door, his knees up, his naked body shivering.
He looked at the slave bands around his wrists. The black was so dense in his skin, so solid, it was like the iron cuffs he’d once worn.
After God only knew how long, the door to the nursery slid open and Bella came back with the young. Nalla was asleep again, but as Bella laid her out in the crib, it was with care, as if a bomb were about to go off at any moment.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly, rubbing his wrists.
Bella put on a dressing gown and went to the door that led out into the hall. With her hand on the knob, she looked back at him, her eyes remote. “I can’t say this is okay anymore.”
“I’m really sorry about the dreams—”
“I’m talking about Nalla. I can’t say that your shunning her is all right . . . that I understand, that it’s going to get better and I’ll be patient. The fact is, she is your child as well as mine, and it kills me to see you pulling away from her. I know what you went through, and I don’t want to be callous, but . . . everything’s different for me now. I need to think in terms of what’s good for her, and having a father who won’t even touch her? That’s not it.”
Z flexed open both his hands and stared at his palms, trying to imagine picking the young up.
The slave bands seemed huge to him. Huge . . . and contagious.
The word wasn’t won’t, he thought. It was can’t.
The thing was if he did comfort Nalla and play with her and read to her, it would mean she had him for a father, and his legacy was nothing you wanted to saddle a young with. Bella’s born daughter deserved better than that.
“I need you to decide what you want to do,” Bella said. “If you can’t be her father, I’m leaving you. I know that sounds harsh, but . . . I have to think of what’s best for her. I love you and I will always love you, but it’s not about me anymore.”
For a moment, he didn’t think he’d heard right. Leaving him?
Bella stepped out into the hall of statues. “I’m going to go grab something to eat. Don’t worry about her—I’ll be right back.”
She closed the door behind her without a sound.
When night fell about two hours later, the way that door had shut so quietly was still banging around Z’s head.
Standing in front of his closet full of black shirts and leathers and shitkickers, he sought his inner intentions, chasing them around the maze of his emotions.
Sure, he wanted to overcome the head fuck with his daughter. Of course he did.
It was just insurmountable: What had been done to him might have been in the past, but all he had to do was look at his wrists to see that he was still dirtied by it all—and he didn’t want that kind of shit anywhere near Nalla. He’d had the same problem with Bella in the beginning of their relationship, and had managed to get over it with his shellan, but the implications were more grave with the young: Z was the corporeal embodiment of the kind of cruelty that existed in the world. He didn’t want his daughter to know that such depths of depravity existed, much less expose her to their aftereffects.
Fuck.
What the hell was he going to do when she got to be old enough to look up into his face and ask him why he was scarred and how he’d gotten that way? What would he do when she wanted to know why he had black bands on his skin? What was her uncle Phury going to reply when she asked him why he was missing a leg?
Z dragged on a shirt and a pair of leathers, then pulled on his chest holster of daggers and opened the gun closet. As he took out a pair of SIG Sauer forties, he checked them quickly. He used to palm nines—shit, he used to fight with nothing but his bare hands. Ever since Bella had come into his life, however, he’d been more careful.
And this, of course, was the other part of his brain twist. He killed for a living. That was his job. Nalla was going to have to grow up worrying about him every night. How could she not? Bella did.
He shut the gun closet and relocked it, then tucked the muzzles into his hip holster, checked his daggers, and pulled on his leather jacket.
He glanced over to the crib where Nalla was still sleeping.
Guns. Blades. Throwing stars. Christ, the infant needed to be surrounded by rattles and plush teddy bears.
Bottom line was, he wasn’t cut out to be a father. Never had been. Biology, however, had jacked him into the role, and now they were all chained to his past: As much as he couldn’t imagine living without Bella, there was no fathoming how he could be the dad Nalla deserved.
With a frown, he pictured Nalla’s coming-out party, something all females of the glymera had one year after their transitions. The daughter always had the first dance with her father, and he saw Nalla dressed in a flowing red gown, her multicolored hair up, rubies at her throat . . . and himself with his fucked-up face and his slave bands peeking out of the cuffs of his tuxedo.
Great. Helluva picture.
Cursing, Z went to the bathroom, where Bella was getting ready for the evening. He was going to tell her that he was heading out on a follow-up from the night before and that as soon as he was finished, he’d come home and they would talk. As he looked around the corner, though, he stopped dead.
In the mist that lingered from her shower, Bella was drying off her body. Her hair was wrapped in a towel, her long neck exposed, her creamy shoulders working this way and that as she made quick work with the terry cloth across her back. Her breasts swayed, catching his eyes, hardening him.
Fuck him, but as he watched her, all he could think about was sex. God, she was beautiful. He’d liked her rounded by the pregnancy, and he liked her as she was now, too. She’d thinned out quickly after Nalla’s birth, her stomach as tight as it had been before, her hips regaining their lean contours. Her breasts were bigger, though, the nipples a deeper pink, the swells heavier.
His cock punched into his leathers, a criminal wanting out of jail.
As he rearranged himself, he realized he and Bella hadn’t been together since well before the birth. The pregnancy had been difficult, and afterward Bella had needed time to heal and had been rightfully consumed with taking care of her infant.
He missed her. Wanted her. Thought she was still the most spectacularly erotic female on the face of the planet.
Bella dropped her robe on the counter, faced the mirror, and stared at herself. With a grimace, she leaned forward and prodded at her cheekbones, her jawline, under her chin. Straightening, she frowned and turned to the side, sucking in her stomach.
He cleared his throat to get her attention. “I’m about to go out now.”
At the sound of his voice, Bella scrambled to get her robe. Pulling it on quickly, she tied the sash and dragged the lapels in close to her throat. “I didn’t know you were there.”
“Well . . .” His erection deflated. “I am.”
“Are you leaving?” she said as she unwrapped her hair.
She hadn’t even heard his words, he thought. “Yeah, I’m about to go out now. I’m going to be reachable, though, as always—”
“We’ll be fine.” She bent over and started rubbing her hair dry, the towel’s flapping loud to his ear.
Even though she was only ten feet away, he couldn’t reach her. Couldn’t ask her why she hid herself from him. Was too afraid of what the answer might be.
“Have
a good evening,” he said roughly. He waited a moment, praying that she would look up at him, smile at him a little, give him a kiss on his way out into the war.
“You, too.” She flipped her hair up and reached for the hair dryer. “Be safe.”
“I will.”
Bella flicked on the hair dryer and picked up her brush to look busy as Z turned and walked out. When she was sure he had to be gone, she stopped the pretense, turning off the dryer and letting it fall to the marble counter.
Her heart ached so badly, she was sick to her stomach, and as she stared at her reflection, she wanted to throw something at the glass.
The two of them hadn’t been together, as in been together, since . . . God, it must have been four or five months ago, before she’d started spotting.
He didn’t think of her sexually anymore. Not since Nalla had come. It was as if the birth had turned off that part of their relationship for him. When he touched her now, it was as a brother would—gently, with compassion.
Never with passion.
At first, she’d thought it was maybe because she wasn’t as thin as she’d been, but in the last four weeks her body had bounced back.
At least, she thought it had. Maybe she was fooling herself?
Loosening the robe, she parted the two halves, turned to the side, and measured her stomach. Back when her father had been around, back when she’d been growing up, the importance of females in the glymera being thin had been drilled into her, and even after his death all those years ago, those stern warnings about being fat stuck with her.
Bella wound herself back up, tying the sash tight.
Yes, she wanted Nalla to have her father, and that was the primary concern. But she missed her hellren. The pregnancy had happened so quickly that they hadn’t had the chance to enjoy a lovebird period where they just reveled in each other’s company.
As she picked up the dryer and flicked on the switch again, she tried not to count the number of days since he’d last reached for her as a male would. It had been so long since he’d fished through the sheets with his big, warm hands and woken her up with lips on the back of her neck and a hard arousal pressing into her hip.
She hadn’t reached for him, either, true. But she wasn’t taking for granted the kind of reception she’d receive. The last thing she needed now was to be turned down because he wasn’t attracted to her anymore. She was already an emotional wreck as a mother, thank you very much. Failure on the female front was too much to handle.
When her hair was dry, she gave it a quick brush and then went out to check on Nalla. Standing over the crib, looking at their daughter, she couldn’t believe things had come down to ultimatums. She’d always known that Z would have continuing issues after what he’d been put through, but it had never dawned on her that they couldn’t bridge his past.
Their love had seemed like it would be enough to get them through everything.
Maybe it wasn’t.
THREE
The house was set back from the dirt road and crowded by overgrown bushes and shaggy trees with brown leaves. The design of the thing was a hodgepodge of various architectural styles, with the only unifying element being that they’d all been repro’d badly: It had a roof like a Cape Cod, but was on one story like a ranch; it had pillars on the front porch like a colonial, but was sided in plastic like a trailer; it was set up on its lot like a castle and yet had the nobility of a busted trash bin.
Oh, and it was painted green. Like, Jolly Green Giant green.
Twenty years ago the place had probably been built by a city guy with bad taste looking to start life over as a gentleman farmer. Now everything about it was run down, except for one thing: The door was made out of shiny, fresh-as-a-daisy stainless steel and reinforced like something you’d find in a psych hospital or a jail.
And the windows were boarded up with rows of two-by-sixes.
Z crouched behind the rotted shell of what had been a ’92 Trans Am and waited for the clouds above to pull together and cover the moon so he could move in. Across the weedy lawn and gravel driveway, Rhage was behind an oak.
Which was really the only tree big enough to hide the mofo.
The Brotherhood had found the site the night before by stroke of luck. Z had been downtown patrolling the needle park under Caldwell’s bridges when he’d caught a pair of thugs dumping a body into the Hudson River. The disposal had been quick and professional: Nondescript sedan drove up, two guys in black hoodies got out and went to the trunk, body was head-and-footed, remains were tossed into the current.
Splish-splash, taking a bath.
Z had been downstream by about ten yards, so when the dead guy floated by, he saw from its grimacing mouth that it was a human male. Normally this would have been cause for doing absolutely nothing at all. If some man had been God-father ’d, that was not his biz.
But the wind changed directions and brought him a whiff of something cotton-candy sweet.
There were only two things Z knew of that smelled like that and walked upright: old ladies and his race’s enemy. Considering it was unlikely that Betty White and Bea Arthur were under those hoods channeling their inner Tony Soprano, that meant there were two lessers up ahead. So the sitch was very much on Z’s list of things to do.
With perfect timing, the pair of slayers got into an argument. While they went nose-to-nose and did a couple punch-shoves, Z dematerialized to the pylon nearest the sedan. The license plate on the Impala junker read 818 NPA, and there didn’t appear to be any other passenger of either the stiff or the quick variety.
In the blink of an eye, he dematerialized again, this time to the roof of the warehouse that flanked the bridge. From his crow’s-eye view, he waited with his phone to his ear and a line open to Qhuinn, bracing himself against the rush of wind coming up the building’s ass.
Lessers didn’t ordinarily kill humans. It was a waste of time, for one thing, because it didn’t gain you points with the Omega, and a lot of hassle if you got caught, for another. That being said, if some guy saw something he shouldn’t have, the slayers wouldn’t hesitate to cash-and-carry him to his royal reward.
When the Impala finally came out from under the bridge, it took a right and headed away from downtown. Z spoke into his phone, and a moment later a black Hummer emerged right where the Impala had come out.
Qhuinn and John Matthew had been taking the night off with Blay at ZeroSum, but those boys were always ready for action. As soon as Z had called, the three raced for Qhuinn’s brand-new wheels, which had been parked a block and a half away.
At Z’s direction, the boys floored it to catch up with the sedan. While they closed in, Z kept an eye on the lessers, dematerializing from building top to building top as their POS made its way down the river’s edge. Thank fuck the slayers didn’t highway it or they might have gotten away.
Qhuinn had skills behind the wheel and once his Hummer was tailing the SUV reliably, Z stopped his Spidey shit and let the boys do the work. About ten miles later, Rhage took over from them in his GTO just to mix it up and reduce the chance the lessers would catch on that they were being tracked.
Just before dawn, Rhage had followed them to this place, but it had been too close to daylight to do any kind of infiltration.
Tonight was follow-up. Big time.
And what do you know, the Impala was sitting pretty in the driveway.
As the clouds finally got their act together, Z gave the nod to Hollywood, and the two of them dematerialized to either side of the front door. A quick listen revealed arguing, the voices the same ones Z had heard by the Hudson the night before. Evidently the pair of slayers were still oil-and-watering it.