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"What are you talking about?" came a female voice from the doorway.
Ehlena glanced over her shoulder and recognized who it was: Bella, mate of the Brother Zsadist, who frequently helped with Safe Place patients. The female was standing between the ornate jambs with her young in her arms, her face drained of color, her eyes hollow.
"What about Rehvenge?" she demanded, voice rising. "What about my brother?"
As Ehlena started to connect the dots, Zsadist went to his shellan.
"I think you two need to talk," Wrath said carefully. "In private."
Z nodded and escorted his mate and young from the room. As the pair went down the hall, Bella's voice could be heard still, her questions peppered with increasing panic.
And then there was a "What?!" that seemed to indicate a bomb had just been dropped on the poor female.
Ehlena stared down at the lovely blue carpet. God...she knew exactly what Bella was going through right at this moment. The ripples of shock, the recasting of what she knew, the feeling of betrayal.
Hard place to be in. Hard to get out of, too.
After a door shut and the voices were dimmed, Wrath looked around the room as if giving everyone a chance to measure his resolve.
"Tomorrow night is showdown, because there isn't enough daylight left now to get a car up there." The king nodded to Ehlena and Xhex. "You both are staying here until then."
So that meant she was going? Thank the Virgin Scribe. As for the overday, she would have to call her father, but given that Lusie was in the house, she wasn't worried about being gone. "No problem for me-"
"I have to go," Xhex said tightly. "But I'll be back at-"
"Not an invitation. You are staying here so that I know where you are and what you are doing. And if you're worried about weapons, we have plenty of them-hell, we got a whole crateful off the lessers just last month. You want to do this? You're under our roof until nightfall."
It totally was obvious that the king didn't trust Xhex, given the mandate and the way he smiled at her so fiercely.
"So what's it going to be, sin-eater?" he said smoothly. "My way or the highway?"
"Fine," Xhex shot back. "Whatever you want."
"Always," Wrath murmured. "Always."
An hour later, Xhex stood with her arms out straight in front of her and her boots planted eighteen inches apart. In her hands was a SIG Sauer forty that reeked of baby powder, and she was squeezing off rounds at a man-shaped target twenty yards down the Brotherhood's shooting range. In spite of the stench, the weapon was superlative, with a sweet kick and excellent aim.
While she put the gun through its paces, she could feel the males behind her staring hard. To their credit, it wasn't at her ass.
Nah, the Brothers weren't interested in her tail. None of them particularly liked her, although, given their expressions of grudging respect as she'd reloaded the gun, they were viewing her spot-on aim as an asset.
In the shooting stall next door, Ehlena was proving she hadn't lied about being good with a gun. She'd chosen an autoloader with a little less firepower, which made sense, given that she didn't have the upper-body strength that Xhex did. Her aim was awesome for an amateur, and what was more, she handled the weapon with the kind of quiet confidence that suggested she wouldn't mistakenly cap someone's knees.
Xhex took off her ear protection and turned around to the Brotherhood, keeping her weapon down by her thigh. "I'll want to try the other one out, but the pair of these should do me just fine. And I want my knife back."
The weapon had been taken from her before she and Ehlena had been driven to the mansion in that black Mercedes.
"You'll have it," someone said, "when you need it."
Against her will, her eyes did a quick check of who was kibitzing. Same cast of muscle. Which meant John Matthew hadn't sneaked in.
Given how big the Brotherhood's compound seemed to be, she figured he could be anywhere, including the next town, for chrissakes: When the meeting in the king's study had finished, he'd just walked out, and she hadn't seen him since.
Which was good. Right now she needed to be focused on what was looming over them all tomorrow night, not her crappy, castrated love life. Fortunately, everything seemed to be falling into place. She'd called iAm and Trez and left voice mails that she was taking a day off, and they'd phoned back saying it wasn't a problem. No doubt they were going to check in with her again, but hopefully with the Brothers' backing, she would be in and out of the colony before their babysitting impulses overwhelmed them.
Twenty minutes later, she finished trying out the other SIG and was not at all surprised when both guns were confiscated. The trip back to the mansion was long and tense, and she looked over at Ehlena to see how the other female was faring. It was hard not to approve of the resolute strength in that nurse's face: Rehv's female was going after her male, and nothing was going to get in her way.
Which was great...but the determination made Xhex twitchy nonetheless. She was willing to bet Muhrder had had the same kind of resolve in his eyes when he'd gone up to that colony to get her.
And look at how well that had gone.
Then again, true to his character he'd gone in rogue, without backup. At least she and Ehlena had been smart enough to get some serious-ass help, and one could only pray that made all the difference.
Back at the mansion, Xhex grabbed some food from the kitchen and was shown to a second-floor guest room that was down a long hall of statues.
Eat. Drink. Shower.
She left the light in the bath on because the room was unfamiliar, got into bed naked, and closed her eyes.
When the door opened some half an hour later, she was both shocked and unsurprised at the big shadow standing in the lee of the hallway light.
"You're drunk," she said.
John Matthew came inside without an invitation, and he locked the door without permission. He was indeed drunk, but that was not a news flash.
The fact that he was sexually aroused was also not front-page material.
As he put the bottle he was carrying down on the bureau, she knew his hands were headed for the fly of his jeans, and there were roughly a hundred thousand reasons why she should tell him to cut the shit and get the hell away from her.
Instead, Xhex tossed the duvet off her body and put her hands behind her head, her br**sts tingling from the chill and so much more.
Of all the justifications for not doing what they were going to, there was one overriding reality that crumbled the foundations of healthy choice: By the end of tomorrow night, there was a chance one or both of them might not be coming home.
Even with the Brotherhood as support, going to the colony was a suicide mission-and she was willing to bet there were a lot of people having sex under the mansion's roof right now. Sometimes you had to have a taste of life right before you knocked on the Grim Reaper's front door.
John took off his jeans and his shirt and left his clothes right where they landed. As he came over to her, his body was magnificent in the glowing light, his c**k hard and ready, his heavily muscled form everything a female would want in her bed.
But all that oh-yeah wasn't what she focused on as he got up on the mattress and mounted her. She wanted to see his eyes.
No luck, though. His face was in shadow, the light from the bathroom coming from directly behind him. For a moment, she almost turned on the lamp next to them, but then realized she wouldn't want to catch a load of the numb coldness that was no doubt in his stare.
She wasn't going to get what she was looking for from this, Xhex thought. This was not going to be about living.
And she was right.
No prelude. No foreplay. She opened her legs and he pushed in and her body loosened and accepted him because of biology. As he f**ked her, his head was by hers on the pillow, but it was turned away.
She didn't come. He did. Four times.
When he rolled off her body and lay on his back, breathing heavily, her heart was thoroughly and completely broken: There had been a crack in the damn thing after she'd left him in her basement apartment, but with each pounding stroke he'd taken just now, more and more of it splintered and fell from the core of her.
A few minutes later, John got up, put his clothes back on, palmed his liquor bottle, and left.
As the door clicked shut, Xhex pulled the duvet over herself.
She did nothing to try to control the shakes that rattled her body, and didn't attempt to stop herself from crying. Tears left both of her eyes at the far corners, slipping out and flowing over her temples. Some landed in her ears. Some eased down her neck and were absorbed by the pillow. Others clouded her vision, as if they didn't want to leave home.
