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And it was the strangest thing.
Her vantage point changed even as her position didn’t. Suddenly, she felt as though she were looking at the three of them—four of them, counting George—from a distance, regarding what was up close from far enough away that it was as if she were a bystander.
And what did she see?
A family. A strong, anchored, united… family.
Emotions percolated and Beth glanced away so that she could clear the sheen from her eyes without doing something obvious.
And that was when the past came back.
Instead of being in the dining room as it was now, emptied of most of its furniture, nothing left but the pair of armchairs, and Saxton’s desk in the corner, and the sentries who guarded her hellren… she saw things as they had been when she’d first stepped into the house: The long, glossy table set with fresh flowers, crystal, and porcelain. The lovely carved chairs with their silk seat covers. The sideboards with their sterling silver serving platters and curling candelabra.
And there she and Wrath were, on their first date, clustered at one end of the table, the electricity and the anticipation charging the air between them.
Like eating peaches.
“Leelan?” Wrath whispered. “Why are you crying?”
Running her hand through his long jet-black hair, she couldn’t put words to the complex feelings swirling in her chest.
“I’m just… grateful,” she said quietly. “For my life now—and everything that started the night I met you. Everything that is right and good… started with you.”
Wrath wrapped his hand around the nape of her neck and inched her forward to his lips. As they kissed, more memories bubbled up, of them in their mating bed up on the third floor of the mansion, of the people and families they lived with, of this wonderful, fraught, funny, scary existence they shared.
“Well,” her hellren murmured against her mouth. “For me, it all started with you, too—”
“Fuck!”
At the barked curse, she and Wrath pulled apart—
—just in time to see John Matthew collapse onto the Persian rug in a seizure.
* * *
Underneath the Audience House, there were two subterranean bedrooms, and the Brothers ended up carrying John Matthew down to one of them because the civilians were already starting to arrive, and nobody needed to see one of the King’s private guard with his eyes rolled back into his skull and his extremities flapping like he was hooked up to a car battery.
And naturally, Beth wasn’t going to leave until the male was done being assessed.
For one, he was his half brother. For another, maybe there would be something she could help with.
“Well, he does have a history of seizures,” Doc Jane hedged as she packed up her doctor bag.
“Do we need to do an MRI or something?” Xhex, John Matthew’s mate, leaned over the bed and brushed back his hair. “He’s not coming around like he usually does.”
The female had arrived within moments of being summoned, and the panic on her hard face had been difficult to witness. Beth had been through a couple of emergencies with Wrath, and she knew the special kind of terror that came with your hellren being hurt or in danger.
And the female was right. Usually John Matthew would be better by now. Instead, he was still lying against the pillows, all logy and out of it, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow. But he had been able to answer simple questions like what year it was, who was the human president… what was Rhage’s favorite meal.
Everything had been the correct response to that last one.
“What are we going to do?” Xhex asked.
As Doc Jane sat back on her heels and crossed her arms over her white coat, her forest green stare narrowed on John Matthew like she was surveying the inside of him with some kind of special second sight.
“Let’s talk out in the hall,” she eventually replied.
Xhex nodded sharply and walked around the bed. As she passed by Beth, she gave L.W.’s chubby hand a little squeeze.
“I’m so sorry,” Beth whispered.
“It’s okay,” the female said, even though it wasn’t okay.
Doc Jane murmured something to her patient, and then she stepped out, too, the heavy door to the chamber closing behind them both.
Left alone with the Brother, Beth once again hitched L.W. up a little higher on her hip and then stared at John Matthew, willing him to be okay. He had always been such a mystery, born in a bus station with the Brotherhood’s star somehow marking his chest, adopted by Tohr and Wellsie just before his transition by a stroke of pure luck. And then, after Wellsie’s tragic murder, and Tohr’s disappearance, the other Brothers and their mates had taken the boy in and trained him up.
Now he was a bona fide member of the Black Dagger Brotherhood himself, a powerful fighter, a vicious protector, and a proud, bonded mate to a female of worth.
