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Just as he was getting a proper flip-out on, he saw the note on the bedside table. Grabbing for it, he read her precise cursive handwriting twice. The mountain. She loved him—and she had gone to the mountain.
Just as he had asked her to.
“Fucking hell.”
But what choice did they have? Phalen had checked in, just as she’d promised, and nothing forensic had been found inside Gus’s condo: No human hairs of note. No fingerprints. No mistakes. Except he’d already known that was going to be the result: A human hadn’t done the abduction. And neither had a vampire or a wolven, for that matter. It was one of those fucking cyborgs.
And just their luck, the Tesla in the garage hadn’t been spying on its surroundings. As for the development’s security cameras that were located in the common area in the center? They had to be hacked into and that was going to take time—but he wouldn’t be shocked if they, too, came up with a big, fat goose egg.
Rubbing his eyes, he worried about sending Lydia up that mountain. She wouldn’t be alone, though. At least her kind would watch over her. Even though she was, as she termed it, a half-breed, she was embraced among the wolves who lived on the preserve as one of their own.
It should have been him. He should have gone up with her.
Goddamn it. If he weren’t so busy fucking dying… they wouldn’t have had the conversation in the first place.
There was so much shit he wished he could do.
Shoving the covers off himself, he glanced at his lower body. Then he put his palm on his flaccid dick.
There were things,somany things, about cancer to get terrified over; the what-ifs, the maybe-nevers, the blind corners crushing your hopes and dreams for the future just in time for the actual bad news to crater your present. And then there was the stuff that hurt, and the surgeries and the tests, and all of the side effects of the treatments. There were also the indignities of strangers seeing you naked, the concessions to weakness like needing his cane to walk and his inability to hold peas on a fork anymore, and the loss of hair.
But he couldn’t say any of all that made him feel… small.
The fact that he couldn’t get it up anymore?
Daniel covered himself back up with the duvet. Layer by layer, what had made him a man, a person…himself… was being stripped away. No hair. His muscles gone. Hard to feed himself. Hard to walk. Hard to sleep.
No longer hard down below.
And it was just going to get worse.
Sadness crept into his marrow as he remembered Lydia pushing a towel into his hands as he coughed up blood, terror on her face. One day—or maybe night—that fear would be well founded. It would be his end—
“But not this evening,” he muttered. “Get your shit together, Joseph. Get yourfuckingshit together.”
He had to pull out of the spiral and be where he was right now: No medical emergency. No one pounding his chest to resuscitate him. No one hooking him up to a battery charge and shocking him back to life. No one bagging his lungs, or inserting a feeding tube, or coming up with another test or IV or drug or anything.
“I got time left,” he said out loud. You know, in case He was listening. Or She. Or Whoever was up there.
How stupid was he going to feel if it turned out that he had six months… and he spent them all sitting in this bed, staring off into the darkness, waiting for the Grim Reaper to remember where he lived?
And as for sex? Yeah, sure, his cock didn’t work, but his fingers sure did.
His tongue most certainly did.
Giving his Lydia pleasure was pleasure to him, and that was a helluva lot more than some cancer patients had or could do tonight.
Easing his hips to the side, he pushed his numb hand into the front pocket of his jeans. The zip tie with its trimmed end was about as romantic as a monkey wrench, but it was the only stand-in for a ring that he could find in the house without asking anyone. He’d intended to put it on Lydia’s finger in that apple orchard, and then go with her to find something more proper. Fate, that fucker, had had other ideas, but two could play at that game—
Tap, tap, tap.
On his shoulder.
Daniel jerked around, expecting to see Lydia—
Nobody was at the bedside. No… that wasn’t true. He could sense someone’s presence.
“Hello?” he called out. In case somebody had knocked on the closed door. “Come in?”
