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And she had some kind of power over him.
Of course, he didn’t like to admit this, just like she didn’t like the reminder that he had saved her. They were a pair, weren’t they. At least for the next twenty-four hours, take it or leave it.
“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” he muttered as he continued to the exit.
Funny, he wasn’t sure who he was talking to on that one.
The thing about knowing all kinds of shit about how vampire body systems worked . . . was that with the nitty-gritty details stuck in your head, the mystery was gone. You were aware of exactly what was happening when you were hungry. Tired. Had a twitch in your eyebrow, a tickle up your ass, a grumble in your stomach, an ache at your shoulder. There was a marching band of medical terminology inside your brain that had a song for every symptom and for every function both normal and abnormal.
So it was really fucking hard to just exist. Even if all the other pressing, incidental, and middle-of-the-road issues in your life receded in your mind, even if you closed your eyes, put noise-canceling headphones on, and floated in a tub of water calibrated to your precise body temperature . . . you still had the idle hum of your corpuscles to think about.
Sometimes, though, even the most rigorously logical of minds put down the gauntlet of thought, and went offline.
Now was one of these moments for Vishous.
As he lay on the latex-sheeted hospital bed, he was floating on a cloud, his body cotton candy. The inside of a good sofa cushion. Wonder Bread.
And his brain, his magnificent, complicated, PITA brain . . . was likewise, the integration complete.
He smiled.
Off in the distance, he could hear water running in a sink, but he didn’t worry about it. He didn’t worry about anything. He just was. With nothing teeing up his hair-trigger mind, no pain in his heart, no choking grip of the past threatening to suffocate him, he was able to be in the moment to such a degree that he became just another second clicking by, inseparable from the eternal instant.
Bliss.
Taking yet another deep breath, he opened his eyes and looked down his body. The bed was at a tilt, so he could see the bruising on his ankles and his wrists, the skin there bright red and inflamed. Likewise, all over his legs and his torso, patches of red dotted him like he was a leopard. And at his hips, his cock was in a well-used, exhausted deflation off to one side.
The cleanup was done, the blood and come washed away, the tools removed, the session over.
But it wasn’t like it had never happened. The pain had receded to a glow, like a banked fire to warm his hands by, something to cozy up to and relax beside, not anything that could ever, ever hurt him.
And that was true both for the shit on the outside of him . . . as well as what was on the inside.
All he knew was peace—which was what he had been after. Jane came through the connecting door. She was dressed in surgical scrubs, her hair a mess, her face still flushed. As their eyes met, she paused and leaned against the jamb. Crossing her arms over her chest, she smiled slowly.
And that said it all, didn’t it.
When V extended his arm out to her, she came over. Bent over. Laid herself across his big-ass chest. Her lips were soft as they brushed the side of his neck, and his palm was slow over her back, and his heart was full, as was hers.
“Can you help me back to the Pit,” he asked after a little while. “I want to be in our bed.”
“Absolutely.”
Jane straightened and stroked his hair. Then she offered him her hands, and he pulled himself up and shifted his legs off the table.
That was when he saw the chair. Over by the door.
Butch actually had been here. And so had Marissa. Hadn’t they.
Unsure how he felt about that, V met Jane’s eyes. “I am . . .”
“Surrounded by people who love you,” she finished for him.
Yes, he thought. That was so true.
With a sense of feeling lucky, he put his bare feet on the tile and stood up. The next thing he knew, Jane was pulling a set of scrubs on him, top first, then the bottoms. He was stiff as he started for the way out, and his mate was right beside him, his arm looping across her shoulders so that she took some of his weight.
When she opened the door, he was hit with the characteristic smell of the training center: part cement, part shampoos and conditioners from the showers by the weight room, plus a whiff of far-off chlorine from the pool and a tinge of gunpowder from the shooting range.
