by J. R. Ward
I can’t do this, Qhuinn thought. Not tonight.
Avoiding the whole dining room scene, he headed for the door beneath the stairs and put the thing to good use. The instant it closed behind him, the chatty patter of people talking was cut off and silent darkness rushed up to greet him. Which was more like it.
Down the shallow stairs. Through another coded door. Into the underground tunnel that ran from the main house to the training center. And now that he was alone, he ran out of gas, making it only about two feet before his legs stopped working and he had to lean against the smooth wall. Letting his head fall back, he closed his eyes . . . and wanted to put a gun to his temple.
He’d had that redhead back at the Iron Mask.
Had that hetero good and hard.
And it had happened exactly the way he’d predicted, starting with the pair of them yakking it up at the bar and checking out the chicks. Not long after, a set of double-Ds had gone trolling by on black platform boots. Talked to her. Drank with her . . . and her friend. Hour later? The four of them were in a bathroom, squeezed in tight.
Which had been part two of the plan. Hands were hands in cramped spaces, and when there was a lot of moving and pawing going down, you could never be sure who was touching you. Stroking you. Feeling you up.
The whole time they’d been with the chippies, Qhuinn had been strategizing on how to get rid of the females, and it had taken waaay longer than he’d wanted. After the sex, the girls had wanted to hang out some more—trade numbers, kibitz, ask if they wanted to go out for a bite.
Yeah, right. He didn’t need no digits, because he was never going to call them; he wasn’t into kibitzing even with people he liked; and the sort of bite he could offer them had nothing to do with greasy-ass diner food.
After filing the requests under Bitch, Please in his head, he’d been forced to brainwash them into leaving—which had led him to a rare moment of pity for human males who didn’t have that luxury.
And then he and his prey had been alone, the human male recovering against the sink; Qhuinn pretending to do likewise against the door. Eventually there had been eye contact, casual on the human’s side, very serious on Qhuinn’s.
“What?” the man had asked. But he’d known . . . because his eyelids had grown heavy.
Qhuinn had reached behind himself and turned the lock so they wouldn’t be disturbed. “I’m still hungry.”
Abruptly, the redhead had stared at the door like he’d wanted to leave . . . but his cock had told a different story. Behind the button fly of those jeans . . . he got hard.
“No one will ever know,” Qhuinn had said darkly. Hell, he could have made it so the redhead didn’t remember—although as long as the guy hadn’t tweaked to the whole vampire thing, there’d been no reason to pull out the skull Swiffer and clean things up.
“I thought you said you weren’t gay. . . .” The tone had been on the plaintive side, as if the man hadn’t felt entirely comfortable with what his body wanted.
Qhuinn had closed the distance between them, putting his chest against the redhead’s. And then he’d grabbed the back of the guy’s neck and yanked him over to his mouth. The kiss had done what it was designed to do: get all that thinking out of the bathroom and leave nothing but sensation behind.
Shit had gone from there. Twice.
When it was over, the guy hadn’t offered his number. He’d gotten off spectacularly, but it was clear that it had been a first-and-only experimental thing on his end—which was just fine with Qhuinn. They’d parted without a word, each going on about his life, with the redhead heading back to the bar . . . and Qhuinn leaving to go wander the streets of Caldwell alone.
Only dawn’s imminent arrival had made him return here.
“Fucking hell . . .” he said to himself.
The whole night had been a lesson in scratching poison ivy—yes, there were times in life when proxies worked: at a council meeting, for example, when you sent someone else to give your vote. Or when you needed something from a supermarket and you gave your list to a doggen . Or when you’d promised to play pool, but were too drunk to hold your stick, so you got someone else to snap your balls.
Unfortunately, the proxy theory most certainly did not work when you wished you had been the one to take someone’s virginity, but you hadn’t, and your best follow-up idea was to go to a club, find someone with a similar physical trait, like . . . oh, say . . . hair color . . . and fuck them instead.
In that proxy situation, you ended up feeling hollow, and not because you’d come your brains out and were floating on a little postcoital cloud of ahhhhh, yeah.
Standing in this tunnel, all by himself, Qhuinn was utterly empty in his own skin. Ghost-towned from the inside out.
Too bad his libido was far from out of bright ideas. In the quiet solitude, he started to imagine what it would be like if it were him instead of his cousin coming down with Blay for dinner. If he was the one sharing not just a bed, but a bedroom with the guy. If he stood up to everyone and said, Hey, this is my mate—
The mental lockdown that followed that little ditty was so complete, he felt like he’d been punched in the head.
And that was the problem, wasn’t it.
As he rubbed his mismatched eyes, he thought back on how much his family had hated him: He’d been raised to believe his genetic defect of having one blue and one green iris meant he was an abnormal freak, and they’d treated him as an embarrassment to the bloodline.
Well, actually it had been worse than that. They’d ended up kicking him out of house and sending an honor guard to teach him a lesson. Which was how he’d ended up a wahlker.
To think they’d never known about the other “abnormalities” he harbored.
Like wanting to be with his best friend.
Christ, he so didn’t need a mirror to see himself for the coward and the fraud he was . . . but there was nothing he could do about it. He was locked in a cage with no key that he could find, years of his family’s derision boxing him in and cramping him: The truth behind his wild side was that he was a straight-up pussy. Blay, on the other hand, was the strong one. Tired of waiting around, he’d declared who he was and found somebody to be with.
Fucking hell, this hurt . . .
With a curse, he cut off the premenstrual monologue and forced himself to get walking. With each footfall, he tightened himself up, duct-taping his messy inner workings together and fortifying his leaky pipes.
Life was about change. Blay had changed. John had changed.
And he was next on the list, apparently, because he couldn’t keep going like this.
As he entered the training center through the back of the office, he decided that if Blay could turn over a new leaf, so could he. Life was what you determined it to be; regardless of where fate put you, logic and free will meant you could make your cabbage patch anything the fuck you wanted.
And he didn’t want where he was: Not the anonymous sex. Not the desperate stupidity. Not the burning jealousy and nagging regrets that got him nowhere.
The locker room was empty, as there were no training classes going on, and he changed by himself, getting naked before pulling on black running shorts and a pair of black Nikes. The workout room was likewise an echo chamber, and that was just as well.
Firing up the sound system, he flipped through the shit with the remote. When Gorillaz’s “Clint Eastwood” came on, he went over to a treadmill and got on the thing. He hated working out . . . just despised the mindless gerbil nature of it all. Better to fuck or fight, he’d always said.
However, when you were stuck indoors because of the dawn, and were determined to try to give celibacy a shot, running to get nowhere seemed pretty frickin’ viable as an energy suck.
Juicing up the machine, he hopped on and sang along.
Focusing on the white-painted concrete across the way, he pounded one foot after another, again and again and again, until there was nothing to his mind or his body except the repetit
ive footfalls and the beat of his heart and the sweat that formed on his bare chest and stomach and back.
For once in his life, he did not go for breakneck: The speed was calibrated so that his pace was a steady churn, the kind of thing he could sustain for hours.
When you were trying to get away from yourself, you gravitated to the loud and obnoxious, to the extremes, to the reckless, because it forced you to scramble and hang on with your clawing nails to cliffs of your own self-invention.
Just as Blay was who he was, Qhuinn was the same: Even though he wished he could be out and with the . . . male . . . he loved, he couldn’t make himself go there.
But by God, he was going to stop running from his cowardice. He had to own his shit—even if it made him hate himself to the core. Because maybe if he did, he’d stop trying to distract himself with sex and drinking, and figure out what he did want.
Apart from Blay, that was.
FOURTEEN
Sitting beside Butch in the Escalade, V was a six-foot-six, two-hundred-fifty-pound contusion.
As they sped back to the compound, every inch of him was pounding, the pain forming a haze that calmed the screaming inside of him.
So he’d gotten something of what he’d needed.
The trouble was, the relief was beginning to fade already, and didn’t that get him pissed off at the Good Samaritan behind the wheel. Not that the cop seemed to care. He’d been dialing that cell phone of his and hanging up and dialing again and hanging up, like the fingers on his right hand had a case of Tourette’s.
He was probably calling Jane and thinking better of it. Thank fuck—
“Yeah, I’d like to report a dead body,” he heard the cop say. “No, I’m not giving my name. It’s in a Dumpster in an alley off Tenth Street, two blocks over from the Commodore. Looks to be a Caucasian female, late teens, early twenties . . . No, I’m not giving my name . . . . Hey, how about you get down the address and stop worrying about me. . . .”
As Butch got into it with the operator, V shifted his ass in the seat and felt the broken ribs on his right side howl. Not bad. If he needed another hit to chill him out, he could just do some sit-ups and get back on the agony-go-round—
Butch tossed his cell onto the dash. Cursed. Cursed again.
Then decided to share the wealth: “How far were you going to let it go, V? Until they stabbed you? Left you for the sun? What was going to be far enough?”
V talked around his swollen lip. “Don’t front, true.”
“Front?” Butch swung his head around, his eyes positively violent. “Excuse me?”
“Don’t pretend . . . you don’t know what this is like. I’ve seen you on a bender. . . . I’ve seen—” He coughed. “I’ve seen you drunk on your feet with a glass in both hands. So do not go holier-than-thou on me.”
Butch refocused on the road. “You are a miserable son of a bitch.”
“Whatever.”
Yup, that was about it for the convo.
By the time Butch tooled up in front of the mansion, both of them were wincing and blinking like they’d been hit in the puss with Mace: The sun was still buried on the far side of the horizon, but it was close enough to put a blush in the sky that was only a few megawatts south of deadly to a vampire.
They didn’t go into the big house. No fucking way. Last Meal was about to get its knife and fork on, and given both their moods, there was no reason to feed the gossip mill.
Without saying another word, V walked into the Pit and beelined for his bedroom. There was no seeing Jane or his sister looking like this, for real. Hell, given what his mug felt like, there might be no seeing them even after a shower.
In the bath, he started the water and disarmed in the dark—which involved all of taking his one dagger out of the belt holster around his waist and putting it on the counter. His clothes were filthy, covered with blood and wax and other shit, and he let them fall on the floor, unsure what he was going to do with them.
Then he got under the spray before it was warm. As the cold water hit his face and pecs, he hissed, the shock shooting down into his cock and hardening him—not that he felt any interest in doing something about the erection. He just closed his eyes as his blood and the blood of his enemy sluiced off his body and got sucked down the drain.
Man, after he got his shit washed up, he was so going to put a turtleneck on. His face was fucked-up, but maybe that could be explained away by his having been in a fight with the enemy. Turning himself into a black-and-blue canvas from head to foot?
Not so much.
Hanging his head and letting the water run off his nose and chin, he tried desperately to go back to the numb floats he’d had in the car, but with the pain fading, his drug of choice was losing its grip on him and the world was getting too clear again.
God, the sense of being out of control and pissed off choked him sure as if there were hands around his throat.
Fucking Butch. Do-gooder, nosy-ass, interfering son of a bitch.
Ten minutes later, he stepped out, grabbed a black towel, and stemmed-to-sterned the terry cloth as he walked into the bedroom. Popping open his closet, he willed a black candle on and . . . got an eyeful of wife-beaters. And leathers. Which was what happened to your wardrobe when you fought for a living and slept naked.
Not a turtleneck in sight.
Well, maybe the damage wasn’t so bad—
A quick pivot to the mirror on the back of the door and even he had to pause. He looked like he’d been clawed by Rhage’s beast, great stripes of angry red welts wrapping around his torso and pouring over his shoulders and his pecs. His face was a fucking joke, one eye so swollen that the lid was nearly inoperable . . . his lower lip split deep . . . his jaw looking like he was a squirrel stashing nuts.
Great. He was like one of Dana White’s boys.
After he grabbed his dirty clothes and stuffed them into the back of the closet, he stuck his swollen balloon head out in the hall, and took a listen. ESPN was chattering away down on the left. Something liquid was pouring to the right.
He headed for Butch and Marissa’s room buck-ass naked. No reason to hide the bruising from Butch—SOB had seen it happen.
As he stepped into the doorway, he found the cop sitting on the end of his bed, elbows on his knees, glass of Lag in his palms, bottle between his loafers.
“You know what I’m thinking about right now?” the guy said without looking up.
V could guess it was a hell of a list. “Tell me.”
“The night I watched you throw yourself off the balcony at the Commodore. The night I thought you’d died.” Butch took a swig from his glass. “I assumed we were over that.”
“If it’s any consolation . . . so did I.”
“Why don’t you go see your mom. Talk this shit out with her.”
Like there was anything that female could say at this point? “I’d kill her, cop. I don’t know how I’d do it . . . but I’d kill the bitch for this. She leaves me to that sociopath of a father—being precisely aware of what he’s like, because, hello, she sees all. Then she keeps herself a secret from me for three hundred years, before she turns up on my birthday and wants to put me out to stud for her stupid-ass religion. But I could have punted on that shiz, true? My sister, my twin, though? She put Payne away, cop. Held her against her will. For centuries. And never told me I even had a sibling? That’s too fucking much. I’m done.” V stared at the Lag. “You got some juice to spare there?”
Butch corked the bottle and tossed the thing. As V caught it in his palm, the cop said, “Waking up dead is not the answer, though. And neither is getting your ass kicked like that.”
“You volunteering to do it for me, then? Because I’m going crazy and it needs out, Butch. For real. I’m dangerous over here. . . .” V took a pull on the booze and cursed as the slice in his lip made it feel like he’d sucked on the wrong end of a hand-rolled. “And I can’t think of any way to get it out of me—because I sure as fuck am not going to fall i
nto my old habits.”
“Not tempted at all?”
V braced himself and then went for another drink. Through his grimace, he said, “I want the release, but I’m not going to be with anyone except Jane. No way I’m coming back to our mated bed with the stank of some slut all over my cock—it would ruin everything, not just for her but for me. Besides, what I need right now is a Dom, not a sub—and there’s no one I can trust.” Except maybe Butch, but that would cross too many lines. “So I’m caught. I got a screaming harpy in my head and nowhere to go with it . . . and it’s making me fucking mental.”
Jesus . . . he’d said it. All of it.
Go, him.
And the reward was another suck on the bottle. “Goddamn, my lip hurts.”
“No offense, but good—you deserve it.” Butch’s hazel eyes lifted, and after a moment, he smiled a little, flashing that cap on his front tooth as well as his fangs. “You know, I was really getting into hating you for a minute there, I truly was. And before you ask, the turtlenecks are down at the far end of that rack. Take some sweatpants, too. Your legs look like they’ve been hit with a clawhammer, and that ball of yours is clearly about to explode.”
“Thanks, man.” V walked down the lineup of clothes that were suspended on fine cedar hangers. One thing you could say about Butch was that his wardrobe was full of options. “Never thought I’d be glad that you’re a clothes whore.”
“I believe the term is sharp dresser.”
With that Boston accent of his, the words came out shahhp dressah, and V found himself wondering if there’d ever been a time when he hadn’t heard that Southie twang in his ear.
“What are you going to do about Jane?”
V put the bottle on the floor, pulled a cashmere turtleneck over his head, and was pissed to find it barely covered his navel. “She’s got enough on her plate. No shellan needs to hear her male went out for a good beating—and I don’t want you to tell her.”
“How’re you going to explain your puss, smart-ass?”
“The swelling’s going to go down.”