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The mobster stiffened, his hand whipping out in an STFU to theguy next to him. Then came the rager. Richard Montiere started yelling at everyone sitting around him, jabbing his finger into the men’s faces, snarling so that his bulldog-ugly face got even uglier. And just like the aristocrat’s submission, all kinds of palms went up with wasn’t-me, nope, nuttin’-boss.
Interesting. Unless all those wise guys, including Uncle, had Oscar-worthy acting skills, Mickey hadn’t been sent by the bosses.
That was all he needed to know.
With one last look at the female he never, ever wanted to see again, Nate turned to the fire door—
Rahvyn is not coming back to you. She was mated thirty fucking years ago, okay? And she was never yours to begin with.
“Fuck you, Shuli,” he muttered.
Punching the release bar, he was slapped in the face with the cold, but he liked the sizzle in his pores and the fresh-ish air: However bad Caldwell’s back alleys smelled, it was better than the human sweat stew in the club, and God, he hated the stink of alcohol in his nose.
As the steel panel slammed shut behind him and cut off most of the music, he sent his instincts down both directions of the alley, even though he didn’t expect to catch the sweet roadkill bouquet of the enemy. The address at Bathe was a little too good forlessers. The field of combat had always been farther west, where the buildings were shitty and empty, the humans less likely to have cell phones, and the city’s monitoring project, with all those fucking cameras, had long ago petered out.
The door opened behind him. “Where thehellare you going.”
He glanced over his shoulder at the non-question. Shuli was leaning out of the club, and the male’s expression was as dirty as his white suit, stains of disgust, anger, and frustration marking up all that handsome.
“I told the Brothers we’d be down here.” Shuli pointed to his loafers. “They’re gonna want to talk to you after that shit you pulled in the middle of Market Street.”
Later, Nate would wonder why he went back over to the guy.
Searching his friend’s face, he remembered where they had started. He didn’t often go into his memory banks as there was nothing good in them, and sure enough, mental images of those early nights after his transition, hammering nails and painting the garage at Luchas House with Shuli, made his chest feel tight.
Especially when he thought about what had happened to make him never, ever go back to that farmhouse again.
“Let me go, Shuli,” he said softly. “Just stop trying, okay? Consider it a birthday present to yourself.”
For the briefest of moments, Shuli’s face changed, the young male he had once been returning. Gone was the Chad-about-town with the swagger and the bitches and the money. In his place? The kid who had just made it through his own change, and was fumbling his way through all kinds of firsts with the kind of discombobulation that made you look for friends. Even in places you shouldn’t.
“Yeah,” came the rough reply. “I’ll do that.”
Nate nodded once. “Happy birthday.”
He did not look back as he strode off, the sense that he was jettisoning a weight long held making him feel buoyant to the point of being too light in his boots—
He forgot all that emotional bullshit as Evan Montiere, the other nephew who’d trespassed onto his property, stumbled across the head of the alley like he’d been punched in the gut.
Or had maybe witnessed something that had made him sick to his fucking stomach.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Back out in the suburbs, underground, Wrath had something he needed to do before he left, and it was a solo mission. Trying to focus on Beth’s directions, stressed like he always got when the war and all the shit that came with it crept into his private time with his Queen, he’d left her bedroom—theirbedroom—and thought he knew where he was going. It shouldn’t have been that hard. The layout of the Brotherhood’s private quarters was just like an old-fashioned wagon wheel, spokes of corridors fanning out from a common area in the center to each of the satellite groups of a family’s rooms, the whole also connected by a long, circular track that formed an outer rim.
Fucking simple. Except somehow, he got turned around and ended up in the central open area.
It was the first time he had become disorientated in his blindness in forever, and even with George at his side, and the handle of the harness squarely against his dagger palm, he was suddenly floating untethered through the galaxy… and never shall return.
“Fuck,” he whispered.
Back before he’d gone completely blind, he’d had a little sight: Hazy, blurry, indistinct, foggy, furry, only blinks. But at least he’d had some shapes and shadows, could tell the difference between a hallway and a corner, could watch out for stairs and obstacles in his way.
Could fight the enemy downtown in the field.
By the time the blindness had come fully, all those places, like the mansion, the Audience House, and the Tomb, had been committed to a permanent visual map in his mind, one so carefully rendered by repetition and the accuracy of a powerful memory that the information his eyes fed him and what he recalled melded together, becoming a kind of sight. And as maps required a compass for orientation, so he’d had his four points: his hearing, his sense of smell, the sensations of his body’s movement… and what became his one true north.
That precise recollection of his.
