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Several underground living units over from where Nalla was standing barefoot in numb shock, Elizabeth, née Randall, mated of Wrath, son of Wrath, sire of Wrath, turned the light off in her own bathroom and leaned against the jamb. Across the shallow space of her little subterranean suite, herhellrenwas naked and stretched out on the twin bed she always slept on… and in spite of the way they’d spent the last hour, the sight of his heavily muscled, still semi-erect body was the kind of thing that she kept expecting to wake up from.
How is this not a dream, she thought for the hundredth time as she searched his aristocratic face.
Licking her lips, she could still taste the dark wine of her mate’s pure blood, and the burn in her belly was the sustaining kind, something she had not known for—
“Thirty-three years, nine months, and three days,” she corrected him. “Not that I was counting.”
Wrath’s pale green eyes, with their pinpoint pupils, narrowed on the glowing fixture overhead, as if he could actually see the dimmed light. “I was gonethatlong.”
“You didn’t… know?”
He shook his head and appeared to focus on her. “When the explosion went off, I felt the heat and the blast, and thought I was dead.” He snapped his fingers. “The next thing I knew, I was walking in snow, up on the mountain at the mansion.”
Beth could only shake her head at what Rahvyn had managed to pull off. Then she revisited the past that had, for her, seemed like a lifetime ago. “You saved Fritz’s life that night. How did you know to go down to the Audience House?”
Those dark brows tightened. “Boo led me to where a couple ofdoggenwere talking. They said he’d gone there even though I’d told everyone that Lash had discovered the location and it was no longer secure. I had this fucking awful feeling something was going to happen. Thank God I got there in time to push him out of the way. And Rahvyn never told you? What she did?”
“She just said I had to trust her.” Tears flooded her eyes. “When you walked through my door tonight, with L.W. at your side, it all came together. But it’s been… thirty-three years and an eternity for me.”
“I can’t fucking imagine what you’ve been through. And now that I’m here”—he gestured around the stark bedroom, the expression on that beautiful, harsh face turning tentative in a way she’d only seen once before, when he’d held his infant son for the first time—“I can sense all the years in the change of environment. Everything smells different… sounds different. I used to know where I was when we were in the mansion. Here? I’m lost in a forest of doorjambs and furniture, and the passage of time is in each step I blindly take and everything I bump into.”
She remembered moving into these underground living quarters, along with the rest of the Brotherhood. There had been a sense of relief that she didn’t need to sleep in the bejeweled First Family’s quarters anymore, in that king-sized bed they’d shared… and also a total despair andice-cold loneliness that first day when she’d put her head down on the pillow. Thank God George had been with her. Wrath’s golden and she had curled up and she had stared at the ceiling for eight hours straight, Beth holding the dog as they’d both remembered the master they had loved so much.
God, that was forever ago, she thought.
At least L.W. had been able to sleep in his crib right beside them, but that was an infant for you. Their needs were fundamental, their awareness basic, and there had been such a kindness to all he hadn’t been conscious of back then.
Not that things hadn’t caught up to him later, sadly.
“Hidden in… time,” she murmured. “Like it’s something physical you can take cover behind. I’m never going to think of minutes and hours the same again.”
“And I’m sure as shit not going to argue with how everything turned out.”
Instantly, Wrath’s harsh face was transformed by the love he’d always felt for her. Though his fangs were like a saber-toothed tiger’s even when sheathed, and in spite of the fact that his black hair falling from that widow’s peak was right out of the Dracula catalogue, he looked almost approachable…
Okay, fine, herhellrendidn’t appear at all approachable.
He was still an animal underneath a thin, civilized veneer that could be shed like a suit of clothes in a moment’s notice. And screw the passage of three decades. He remained the male who had ushered her into who she really was all those years ago, a divine mystery who had done more to define the joy in her life than anybody else, and whose loss had taken all the color from her world. His “death” had destroyed her from the inside out, even as she had continued breathing, and his shocking return was inflating all those places that had suffocated.
How long until I can trust this, she wondered.
“Why are you so far away from me,leelan.”
As he reached out to her, lifting one of his massive arms, the blackdiamond in the King’s ring flashed, and the tattoos that ran up the inside of his forearm, the ones that detailed his purebred lineage in the Old Language, rippled.
“I’m just enjoying the view,” she purred.
And what a view it was.
His waist-length black hair flowed over the pillow she’d laid her own head on, the ends dropping off into thin air and nearly touching the carpet. She thought about what the straight, silken lengths had felt like, draping all around as he’d mounted her, that which had faded from well-worn memories happening in real time, no distillation from recollections required anymore.
That warrior body of his was just the same as well, the muscles that padded his heavy bones marked with veins, his contours so different from her own. When he’d taken her, his weight had pressed her down into the mattress, and as he’d surged on top of her, penetrating her sex, marking her with his bonding scent… it had been like the first time.
Betterthan the first time—
A pain she didn’t understand lit up behind her sternum, and she rubbed the spot that hurt. The sensation was familiar, the infection of grief and mourning like a pneumonia that refused to be cured and required her to make effort out of breathing. But if there was any moment she needed to be overjoyed, it was here, it was now. Her nightmare was over.
And yet the sense that this was all a cruel trick of her subconscious nagged at her.
