Lover Avenged (42 page)

It had seemed as if they had a lifetime of only happiness and joy before them…and yet now here he was on the other side of unthinkable loss, alone.

No, worse than alone. Alone and about to take another female’s blood into his body.

“This is happening too fast,” he mumbled behind his palms. “I can’t…I need more time…”

So help him, God, if that angel said one word about how now was the right moment, he was going to make that bastard wish his teeth were made out of safety glass.

“My lord,” the Chosen said softly, “I shall come back if that is your wish. And come back anon if then is not right. And return and return once more until you are ready. Please…my lord, verily I should only wish to help, not hurt you.”

He frowned. She sounded very kind, and there wasn’t a sultry note to any of the syllables that had left her lips.

“Tell me the color of your hair,” he said through his hands.

“It is black as the night and bound tight as my sisters and I could make it. I took leave to wrap it in a turban as well, though you did not ask that of me. I thought…perhaps it would help further.”

“Tell me the color of your eyes.”

“They are blue, my lord. A pale sky blue.”

Wellsie’s had been sherry colored.

“My lord,” the Chosen whispered, “you need not even look upon me. Allow me to stand behind you, and take my wrist that way.”

He heard the rustle of soft cloth, and the scent of the female shifted around until it came from behind him. Dropping his hands, Tohr saw Lassiter’s long, jeans-clad legs. The angel’s ankles were crossed again, this time as he leaned back against the wall.

A slender arm draped in white cloth appeared before him.

In slow tugs, the sleeve of the robing was gradually lifted higher and higher.

The wrist that was exposed was fragile, the skin white and fine.

The veins beneath the surface were light blue.

Tohr’s fangs slammed down from the roof of his mouth and a snarl came out of his lips. The bastard angel was right. Suddenly there was nothing on his mind; everything was his body and what he’d deprived it of for so long.

Tohr clamped a hard hand on her shoulder, hissed like a cobra, and bit the Chosen’s wrist down to the bone, locking his fangs in place. There was a cry of alarm and a scramble, but he was gone as he drank, his swallows like fists on a rope, pulling that blood down into his gut so fast he didn’t have time to taste it.

He nearly killed the Chosen.

And he knew this only later, after Lassiter finally peeled him free and knocked him out with a punch to the head-because the instant he’d been separated from the source of those nutrients, he’d tried to go for the female again.

The fallen angel had been right.

Horrible biology was the ultimate driver, winning over even the stoutest of heart.

And the most reverent of widowers.

When Ehlena got home, she put on a fake face, sent Lusie off, and checked with her father, who was “making incredible strides” in his work. The second she could get free, though, she went into her room to hop online. She had to figure out how much money they had, down to the penny, and didn’t think she was going to like what she came up with. After signing onto her bank account, she scrolled through the checks that had yet to clear and tallied up what was due the first week of the month. The good news was that she was still going to get her pay for November.

Their savings account had just under eleven grand in it.

There was nothing left to sell. And no fat on the monthly budget.

Lusie would have to stop coming. Which would suck, because she’d take on another client to fill the spot, so when Ehlena found a new job there’d be a nursing care hole to plug.

Although that was assuming she could get another position. Sure as hell it wasn’t going to be in nursing. Getting fired for cause was not what any employer wanted to see on a résumé.

Why had she lifted those fucking pills?

Ehlena sat staring at the screen adding and readding all the little numbers until they blurred together, not even the sum of them registering anymore.

“Daughter mine?”

She quickly shut down the laptop, because her father didn’t do well with electronics, and composed her face. “Yes? I mean, yes?”

“I wonder if you would care to read a passage or two of my work? You seem anxious, and I find such pursuits calm my mind.” He shuffled to the side and gallantly extended his arm.

Ehlena stood up because sometimes all a person could do was accept the direction of others. She didn’t want to read any of the gibberish he had committed to the page. Couldn’t bear to pretend that everything was okay. Wished that, even if just for an hour, she could have her parent back so she could talk through the bad position she had landed them both in.

“That would be lovely,” she said in a dead, elegant voice.

Following him into his study, she helped settle him into his chair and looked around at the sloppy stacks of paper. What a mess. There were black leather binders crammed to the point of breaking. File folders stuffed wide. Spiral-bound notebooks with pages lolling out of their confines like the tongues of dogs. White loose-leaf paper sprinkled here and there, as if the pages had tried to fly away and gotten only so far.

It was all his diary, or so he maintained. In reality, it was just pile after pile of nonsense, the physical manifestation of his mental chaos.

“Here. Sit, sit.” Her father cleared off the seat next to his desk, moving over steno pads that were held together with tan rubber bands.

After she sat down, she put her hands on her knees and squeezed hard, trying not to lose it. It was as if the debris in the room were a spinning magnet that made her own thoughts and machinations rotate even faster, and that was absolutely not the help she needed.

Her father glanced around the office and smiled as if in apology. “Such industry for a comparatively small yield. Rather like harvesting pearls. The hours I have spent herein, the many hours to fulfill my purpose…”

Ehlena barely heard him. If she couldn’t afford the rent here, where would they go? Was there anything even cheaper that didn’t have rats and hissing cockroaches in it? How would her father fare in an unfamiliar environment? Dearest Virgin Scribe, she’d assumed they’d hit bottom the night he’d burned down the proper house they’d been renting. What was lower than this?

She knew she was in trouble when everything got blurry.

Her father’s voice continued on, marching across her panicked silence. “I have endeavored to record with faithfulness all that I saw…”

Ehlena didn’t hear much more.

She cracked in half. Sitting in the little side chair, swamped by her father’s mindless, useless prattle, confronted by her actions and where a bad call had landed both of them, she wept.

It was about so much more than losing the job. It was Stephan. It was what had happened with Rehvenge. It was the fact that her father was an adult who couldn’t comprehend the realities of their situation.

It was that she was so alone.

Ehlena held herself and wept, hoarse breaths barking out of her lips until she was too exhausted to do anything but sag into her own lap.

Eventually, she heaved a great sigh and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of the uniform she no longer needed anymore.

When she looked up, her father was sitting stock-still in his chair, his expression one of utter shock. “Verily…my daughter.”

See, this was the thing. They might have lost all the monetary trappings of their previous station, but old habits died hard. The reserve of the glymera still defined their discourse-so a great wailing session was tantamount to her flipping onto her back at the breakfast table and having an alien bust out of her stomach.

“Forgive me, Father,” she said, feeling like an utter fool. “I believe I shall excuse myself.”

“No…wait. You were going to read.”

She closed her eyes, her skin tightening up all over her body. On some level, her whole life was defined by his mental pathology, and though for the most part she saw her sacrifices as his due, tonight she was too raw to be able to pretend the crucial importance of something as worthless as his “work.”

“Father, I…”

One of the desk drawers opened and shut. “Here, daughter. Take into thy hands more than just a passage.”

She dragged her lids open…

And had to lean forward to make sure she was seeing things right. Between her father’s two palms was a perfectly aligned stack of white pages about an inch thick.

“This is my work,” he said simply. “A book for you, mine daughter.”

Downstairs in the Tudor safe house, Rehv waited by the windows in the living room, staring out over the rolling lawn. The clouds had cleared, and a half-assed moon hung winter-bright in the sky. In his numb hand, he held his new cell phone, which he had just clipped shut with a curse.

He couldn’t believe that above him his mother was on her deathbed and that at this very moment his sister and her hellren were speeding to beat the sunrise to get here…and yet work was raising its ugly horned head.

Another dead drug dealer. Which made three in the last twenty-four hours.

Xhex had been short and to the point, which was her way. Unlike Ricky Martinez and Isaac Rush, whose bodies had been found down by the river, this guy had turned up in his car in a strip mall parking lot with a bullet through the back of the skull. Which meant that the car had to have been driven there with the body in it: No way anyone would be stupid enough to pop a motherfucker in a place that undoubtedly had security-camera coverage. As the police scanner hadn’t reported anything further, though, they were going to have to wait for the newspapers and the morning news on TV tomorrow for more details.

But here was the problem, and the reason that he’d cursed.

All three of them had made buys from him within the last two nights.

Which was why Xhex had interrupted him at his mother’s. The drug business was not merely deregulated, but totally unregulated, and the stasis point that had been reached in Caldwell so that he and his high-level broker colleagues could make money was a very delicate kind of thing.

As a big player, his suppliers were a combination of Miami traffickers, New York harbor importers, Connecticut meth labbers, and Rhode Island X makers. They were all businessmen, just like him, and most of them were independents, i.e., unaffiliated with the mob here in the States. The relationships were solid, the men on the other end as careful and scrupulous as he was: what they did was simply a matter of financial transactions and product changing hands, just like any other legitimate segment of the economy. Shipments came into Caldwell to various residences and were transferred to ZeroSum, where Rally was in charge of the sampling and the cutting down and the packaging.

It was a well-oiled machine that had taken ten years to set up, and required a combination of well-reimbursed employees, threats of bodily harm, actual beatings, and constant relationship building to maintain.

Three dead bodies was enough to throw the whole arrangement into the shitter, causing not just an economic shortfall, but a power struggle on the lower levels that no one needed: Someone was picking off people on his turf, and his colleagues were going to wonder if he was doing a discipline or, worse, being disciplined himself. Prices would fluctuate, relationships would be strained, information would get twisted.

This needed tending to.

He had to make some calls to reassure his importers and producers that he was in control of Caldwell and that nothing was going to impede the sale of their goods. But Christ, why now?

Rehv’s eyes shifted to the ceiling.

For a moment, he fantasized about giving it all up, except that was just bullshit. As long as the princess was in his life, he had to stay in business, because there was no way in hell he was going to let that bitch take down his family’s fortunes. God knew Bella’s father had done enough in that direction by making bad financial decisions.

As long as the princess was aboveground, Rehv would remain the drug lord of Caldie and he would make his calls-although not in his mother’s house, not during this family time. Business could wait until family had been served.

Although one thing was clear. Going forward, Xhex, Trez, and iAm were going to have to keep an even tighter eye on things, because sure as shit, if someone was ambitious enough to try to knock off those middlemen, they were more than likely going to attempt a run at a fat boy like Rehv. Trouble was, it was going to be important for Rehv to be seen around the club. Showing face was critical during unsettled times, when his contacts in the biz would be looking to see if he was going to run and hide. Better to be perceived as the person who might be doing the killings than a pussy-ass who ducked out of his turf when the going got tough.

For no good reason, he opened his phone and checked for missed calls. Again. Nothing from Ehlena. Still.

She was probably just busy at the clinic, all caught up in the hustle. Of course she was. And it wasn’t like the facility was in danger of being sacked. It was in a remote location and had plenty of security, and he would have heard something if anything bad had happened.

Right?

Damn it.

With a frown, he checked his watch. Time for two more pills.

He headed into the kitchen and was drinking a glass of milk and popping more penicillin when a pair of headlights hit the front of the house. As the Escalade pulled up in front and its doors opened, he put his glass down, plugged his cane into the floor, and went to greet his sister and her mate and their young.

Bella was already red-eyed as she came in, because he’d made it clear what was going on. Her hellren was right behind her, carrying their snoozing daughter in his huge arms, his scarred face grim.