The Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 1-4

by J. R. Ward

  “I love you,” he repeated. “So, yeah…if you asked me not to, I wouldn’t.”

  She lowered her hand, her breath catching. “Swear to this. Here and now.”

  “On my mother.”

  “Thank you…” She pulled him into her arms. “Oh, God…thank you. And we can work through the…feeding issue. Mary and Rhage have. I just…Butch, we can have a good future.”

  They were silent for a time, just sitting on the floor. Then from out of the blue, he said gruffly, “I have three brothers and a sister.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve never talked to you about my family. I have three brothers and one sister. Well, there had been two girls, but then we lost one.”

  “Oh.” She sat back, thinking his tone was very odd.

  And his hollow voice gave her the total creeps as he said, “My earliest memory is of my sister Joyce coming home from the hospital as an infant. I wanted to check her out, and I ran to her crib, but my father shoved me back so my older brother and sister could look at her. As I bounced off the wall, dad picked up my brother and lifted him so he could touch her. I’ll never forget my father’s voice…” Butch’s accent changed, the vowels flattening out. “This here’s your sistah, Teddy. Yah gonna love’ah and take care’ahah. I thought, what about me? I would like to love her and take care of her. I said, Pa, I wanna help, too. He didn’t even look at me.”

  Marissa realized she was squeezing Butch’s hand so hard she must be bruising his bones, but he didn’t seem to notice. And she couldn’t loosen the hold.

  “After that,” he went on, “I started watching my father and my mom, watching how they were different with the other kids. Main thing was on Friday and Saturday nights. My father liked to drink, and I was the one he went for when he needed to knock something around.” When Marissa gasped, Butch shook his head with a total lack of regard. “No, it’s fine. It was good. I can suck back punches like you read about, thanks to him, and trust me, that’s come in handy. So anyway, one Fourth of July…Hell, I was almost twelve then…” He rubbed his jaw, his beard growth scratching. “Yeah, the Fourth of July came and we were doing the family thing out at my uncle’s on the Cape. My brother skims some beers from the cooler and he and his buddies go ’round back of the garage and crack them open. I hid in the bushes because I wanted to be invited in. You know…I hoped my brother would…” He cleared his throat. “When my father came looking for them, the other boys took off and my brother about crapped in his pants. My father just laughed. Told Teddy to make sure my mother never found out. Then dad saw me crouched down in the shrubs. He came over, hauled me up by the collar, and backhanded me so hard I spit blood.”

  As Butch smiled in a hard way, she looked at the uneven edge of his front tooth.

  “He told me it was for being a spy and a snitch. I swore to him I was just looking, I wasn’t going to tell no one. He clipped me again and called me a pervert. My brother…yeah, my brother just watched the whole thing happen. Didn’t say a word. And when I walked past my mother with my split lip and the chip out of my tooth, she just held my little sister Joyce closer and looked away.” He shook his head slowly. “Up at the house, I went to the bathroom and cleaned up, then headed for the room I was staying in. I didn’t give a shit about God, but I went down on my knees, clapped my little hands together, and prayed like a good Catholic should. I begged God that this not be my family. Please let this not be my family. Please let there be someplace else I can go…”

  She had a feeling he didn’t know he’d switched into the present tense. Or that he’d reached up and was gripping the solid gold cross around his neck like his life depended on it.

  His lips cracked into a half smile. “But God must have known I wasn’t sure about Him because nothing came of it. Then that fall my sister Janie was murdered.” As Marissa sucked in a breath, he pointed behind himself. “That’s the tattoo on my back. I count the years since she’s gone. I was the last one to see her alive, before she got in the car with those boys that just…desecrated her behind our high school.”

  She reached for him. “Butch, I’m so—”

  “No, let me get this out, okay? This shit’s like a train, now that it’s moving, I can’t stop it.” He dropped the cross and shoved his hand through his hair. “After Janie disappeared and they found her body, my father never touched me again. Wouldn’t come near me. Wouldn’t look at me. Didn’t talk to me, either. My mom went crazy after a little while and they had to put her in a psych ward. It was right around then that I started drinking. I ran the streets. Did drugs. Got in fights. The family just limped along. I never understood the change in my dad, though. I mean…for years he beat me, then…nothing.”

  “I’m so glad he stopped hitting you.”

  “No difference to me. The waiting to get clipped was as bad as getting my ass slammed. And to not know why…but I did find out. At my oldest brother’s bachelor party. I was like twenty by then and had moved from Southie—er—South Boston to here because I was starting as a cop with the CPD. Anyway, I went back home for the party. We were in some guy’s house with a lot of strippers. My father was pounding the beers hard. I was doing lines of cocaine and sucking back Scotch. Party comes to an end and I’m buzzing out of control. I’d done a lot of coke…man, I was so fucking polluted that night. So…Dad’s leaving…getting a ride home from someone, and suddenly I had to talk to the sonofabitch.

  “I end up chasing him out into the street, but he’s all ignoring me and shit. So in front of all the guys, I just grabbed him. I was beyond pissed. I started going off on him, about how I thought he’d been a real shitty father to me, how I was surprised he stopped cracking me because he liked it so much. I went on and on, until my old man finally looked into my face. I just froze. There was…total terror in his eyes. He was completely scared of me. Then he said, I left yah alone ’cause I couldn’t have yah killin’ any more of m’children, could I? I was all…What the fuck? He starts to cry and says, Yah knew she was my favorite…yah knew and that’s why yah put hah in that cah w’ those boys. Yah did it, yah knew what would happen.” Butch shook his head. “Man, everyone heard it. All the guys. My oldest brother, too…My father actually thought I’d had my sister murdered to get back at him.”

  Marissa tried to embrace him, but again he shrugged her off and took a deep breath. “I don’t go home anymore. Ever. Last I heard, Ma and Pa were spending some time in Florida every year, but otherwise were still in the house I grew up in. Like, my sister Joyce, her baby was just baptized? The only reason I knew about it was because her husband called me out of guilt.

  “So here’s my deal, Marissa. I’ve had a piece missing all my life. I’ve always been different from other people, not just in my family but when I was working here on the CPD force, too. I never fit in…until I met the Brotherhood. I met your kind…and, shit, now I know why. I was a stranger among humans.” He cursed softly. “I wanted to go through the change not just for you, but for me. Because I felt like then…I could be who I’m supposed to be. I mean, hell, I’ve been living on the fringes all my life. I kind of wanted to know what being in the thick was like.”

  In a powerful move, he got off the floor. “So that’s why I want…why I wanted to do this. It wasn’t just about you.”

  He went over to a window and pushed aside the pale blue velvet drapery. As he stared out into the night, the glow from a lamp on the desk fell across the planes of his face, the heft of his shoulders, the thick pads of his chest. And the golden cross that lay over his heart.

  God, how he yearned as he looked out of the window. Yearned so fiercely his eyes nearly glowed.

  She thought of him the night she’d fed from Rehvenge. Saddened, hurt, paralyzed by biology.

  Butch shrugged. “But…you know, sometimes you can’t have what you want. So you deal and move on.” He glanced back at her. “Like I said, you don’t want me to, I won’t.”

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Butch looked away from Ma
rissa and stared back out into the darkness. Against the dense black screen of the night, he saw images of his family, clip art that made his eyes sting. Holy fuck, he’d never put the whole story into words before. Never expected to.

  Not a pretty picture, the whole lot of it.

  Which was another reason he’d wanted to go through the transition. He could have used another shot at life, and the change would have been like birth, wouldn’t it? A new beginning, where he was something else, something…improved. And purified, too. A kind of baptism by blood.

  And man, he hungered to wipe the slate clean, all of it: the stuff with his family, the things he’d done as an adult, that shit with the Omega and the lessers.

  He winced, thinking he’d gotten so close. “Yeah…ah, I’m just going to tell Wrath and them this is not—”

  “Butch, I—”

  He cut her off by going to the door and opening it. As he looked out at the king and V, his chest burned. “Sorry, fellas. Change in plan—”

  “What will you do to him?” Marissa’s voice was loud and all hard edges as it cut through the air.

  Butch glanced over his shoulder. Across the study, she looked as grim as he felt.

  “Well?” she demanded. “What will you do to him?”

  Wrath nodded to his left. “Vishous, you better field that one.”

  V’s answer was factual, straight to the point. Horrific.

  Hell, any plan that ended with “and then we pray” was not a trip to Disneyland.

  “Where would you do it?” she asked.

  “Down in the training center,” V replied. “The Equipment Room has a separate area for first aid and PT treatments.”

  There was a long silence, during which Butch stared at Marissa. Surely, she couldn’t be—

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay…when do we do it?”

  Butch’s eyes popped. “Baby…?”

  Her gaze stuck to Vishous. “When?”

  “Tomorrow night. His chances will be better if he has a little time to recover from the regression.”

  “Tomorrow night, then,” Marissa said, wrapping her arms around herself.

  V nodded, then looked at Butch. “I imagine you two are going to want some privacy today. I’m going to crash here at the main house, so you have the Pit to yourselves.”

  Butch was so stunned out, he couldn’t make sense of anything. “Marissa, are you—”

  “Yes, I’m sure. And I’m terrified.” She walked past him, heading for the doorway. “Now, I’d like to go to the gatehouse if you don’t mind.”

  He grabbed his shirt and went after her.

  As they went along, he took her elbow…but had the sense that she was leading him.

  When they got to the Pit, Butch could not read Marissa’s mood. She was quiet, but she’d marched across the courtyard like a soldier, nothing but strength and focus.

  “I’d like a drink,” she said as he shut the door.

  “Okay.” This at least he could handle. Assuming they had anything but hard liquor in the house.

  He went into the kitchen and cracked the fridge. Oh, man…decaying bags of Taco Hell and Arby’s. Mustard packets. Two inches of milk that was now a solid. “I’m not sure what we’ve got. Um…water—”

  “No, I want a drink.”

  He looked up over the icebox door. “All…right. We have Scotch and vodka.”

  “I’ll try the vodka.”

  As he poured her some Grey Goose over ice, he watched her walk around. She checked out V’s computers. The Foosball table. The plasma screen TV.

  He went over to her. He wanted her in his arms; he gave her the glass.

  She put it to her mouth, tilted her head back, took a long one…and coughed until her eyes watered. While she choked, he maneuvered her onto the couch and sat down next to her.

  “Marissa—”

  “Shut up.”

  Okaaay. He clasped his hands together as she struggled with the Goose. After she got down about half an inch, she put the stuff on the coffee table with a grimace.

  She tackled him so fast, Butch never saw it coming. One second he was staring at his tightly laced fingers. The next, he was pressed into the sofa and she was straddling him and…oh, God, her tongue was in his mouth.

  She felt so damned good, but the vibe was all wrong. The desperation and the anger and the fear just weren’t appropriate background music. They were going to end up further apart if they kept going.

  He held her back from him, even though his cock screamed in protest. “Marissa—”

  “I want to have sex.”

  He closed his eyes. Christ, so did he. All night long. Except not like this.

  He took a deep breath, trying to frame the words right…and when he opened his lids, she’d pulled off her turtleneck and was working the clasp of a black bra that totally knocked him out.

  His hands tightened on her waist as those satin cups came off her and her nipples tightened in the chill. He leaned forward, ready to put his lips to the first piece of her he hit, when he stopped. He was not going to take her like this. The air was too hard between them.

  He stopped her hands as they went to his pants. “Marissa…no.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  He sat up, putting her back from his body. “I love you.”

  “Then don’t stop me.”

  He shook his head. “I won’t do this. Not as we are now.”

  She stared at him in disbelief. Then snatched her wrists out of his hold and turned her head from him.

  “Marissa—”

  She shrugged off his hands, batting them away. “I can’t believe this. Our one night together and you say no.”

  “Let me…Christ…let me hold you. Come on, Marissa.”

  She rubbed her eyes. Laughed in a tragic little burst. “I am destined to go to my grave a virgin, aren’t I? Sure, technically I’m not, but—”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t be with you.” She glanced over at him, tears glimmering on her lashes. “I just…Not with the anger. It’ll pollute the whole thing. I want it to be…special.”

  So what if that line was right out of a high school playbook. It was the truth.

  “Baby, why don’t we just go into my bedroom and lie down in the dark.” He handed her back the turtleneck and she put the thing to her breasts. “If we end up doing nothing but staring at the ceiling all night long, at least we’ll be together. And if something happens? It won’t be about pissed off and frustrated. Okay?”

  She wiped off the two tears that had fallen. Pulled her shirt on over her head. Looked at the vodka she’d tried to drink.

  He got to his feet and offered her his hand. “Come back with me.”

  After a long moment, her palm met his and he pulled her up and took her down to his bedroom. When he shut the door, everything went pitch-black, so he clicked on the little lamp on the dresser. The low-watt bulb glowed like embers in a fireplace.

  “Come here.” He drew her over to the bed, laid her down, and eased himself next to her so he was on his side and she on her back.

  As he smoothed some of her hair out on the pillow, she closed her eyes and took a shuddering breath. Gradually, the tension loosened in her body.

  “You’re right. That wouldn’t have gone well.”

  “It isn’t because I don’t want you.” As he kissed her on the shoulder, she turned her face to his hand and pressed her lips to his palm.

  “Are you scared?” she said. “About what’ll happen to you tomorrow?”

  “No.” The only thing he worried about was her. He didn’t want her to watch him die. Prayed it wouldn’t come to that.

  “Butch…about your human family. Do you want them to be told if you—”

  “Nope, there’s no need to tell them anything. And don’t talk like that. I’ll be fine.” Please, God, let her not have to see me pass.

  “But won’t they care?” When he shook his head, her expression grew sad. “You should be mourned by your blood.”<
br />
  “I will be. By the Brotherhood.” As her eyes watered, he kissed her. “And no more about mourning. That’s not part of the plan. Forget about it.”

  “I—”

  “Shh. We’re not going there. You and me are staying right here.”

  He lay his head down next to hers and continued running his hands through her beautiful blond hair. When her breathing grew deep and even, he shuffled a little closer, tucked her against his bare chest, and shut his eyes.

  He must have fallen asleep as well, because a little later he woke up. In the best possible way.

  He was kissing her throat and his hand was moving up her side, heading for her breast. He’d thrown a leg over both of hers, and his erection was pushed up against her hip. With a curse, he backed off, but she followed, staying with him until she was half on top of him.

  Her eyes flipped open. “Oh…”

  He swept his hands up to her face and pushed her hair back. Their eyes met.

  Lifting his head off the pillow, he kissed her softly on the mouth. Once. Twice. And…again.

  “Is…something happening?” she whispered.

  “Yeah. I think something’s happening.”

  He drew her back into a kiss, then entered her with his tongue, stroking against hers. As he kept at it, their bodies began to move together, mimicking the sex act, his hips advancing and retreating, hers absorbing him, rubbing against him.

  There was no rush and he took it slowly, undressing her with care. When she was naked, he eased back and looked at her body.

  Oh…God. All that soft female skin. Her perfect breasts with their nipples straining. Her secrets. And her face was the best of all: It showed no fear, just erotic anticipation.

  Which meant he was going to finish this between them. If there had been a lick of doubt in her eyes, he would have just pleasured her and left it at that. But she wanted the same thing he did, and he was certain there would be no pain for her this time.

  Butch stood up and slipped off his loafers, the Guccis making a thunking sound one by one. She watched with wide eyes as his hands went to the waistband of his slacks and he popped the button, then unzipped. Boxers hit the floor with the pants and his erection shot straight out from his body. He covered himself with his hand, folding his cock against his belly, not wanting her to get unnerved.