Blood Vow (Black Dagger Legacy #2)(24)

He’d survive.

As he approached a steel-reinforced door, he didn’t have to wait. It was opened from the inside, the Dhestroyer shoving the heavy weight wide like the thing weighed as much as a sheet of paper.

“Evenin’,” the Brother Butch said. “We’re in the first classroom.”

Axe nodded and walked down the long hall, passing by interrogation rooms and other teaching areas, and then the new lab where they were, literally, blowing shit up.

The classroom they used was your typical set-up—or at least what he’d seen on the TV during his heroin days. There were two rows of long tables with pairs of seats facing an old-fashioned chalkboard. Overhead lights were banks of fluorescents; the flooring was speckled linoleum.

No readin’, writin’, and ’rithmetic taught here, though.

Try hand-to-hand-combat theory, military maneuvers, basic first aid, group dynamics.

Axe sat in the back and—thank you, God—Peyton parked it down in front. The others settled in, ready for the night.

The Brother Butch closed the door and sat on the desk that was off to the side. He had a Red Sox hat on, a shirt that had a stencil of Big Papi’s face on the front, and set of Adidas track pants in black. Running shoes were Brooks and in a pink and red neon.

“Tonight,” the Brother said, “we’re going to review how badly you each performed in that mock attack. Which should take us eight to twelve hours. Then, if there’s time left, we’ll keep going with poisons, focusing on aerosols and contact poisons. But first, I have a job opportunity for someone.”

Axe frowned.

Money, he thought, would be good.

“The position is one that will require the utmost discretion and tact.” The Brother leveled a deadly stare at the group. “As well as an intimate knowledge of personal defense.”

Rhage absolutely fucking hated Havers’s clinic. Yeah, sure, the underground facility was secure, and even though he didn’t like the guy, no one could argue with the healer’s treatment of his patients. But as Rhage sat in the corridor outside the exam room that Bitty and Mary had been in for, like, a hundred and fifty years, pretty much everything was getting on his nerves.

First of all, he hated the synthetic “clean” smell, that fake lemon disinfecta-stench burrowing into his sinuses. Hell, it was so bad, he kept imagining all kinds of tiny yellow minions with pickaxes and spray bottles of the shit paying personal attention to his nostril regions.

Second, the productive hush of everything bugged the fuck out of him, even though it was arguably a good thing. All the soft-soled shoes shuffling along, the quiet voices, the carts of medical supplies and equipment whispering along the hall.

But the worst thing? He really couldn’t stand the attention he got.

It wasn’t that the nurses were popping their bodices and going grind-on-it all over his junk, but damn, he didn’t need all the lingering glances and the unnecessary multi-walk-bys and the twittering and giggling.

He’d dealt with versions of this all his life—at least since the split second he’d made it through his transition. And pre-Mary, he’d taken advantage of the sexual attention to the point where he didn’t leave a reputation so much as a religion of fucking in his wake. Post-Mary, though, he had no interest in other females. In fact, he’d begun to think of his face and body like a sweet-ass whip that his brain drove. His core, his soul, his heart, didn’t have anything to do with how he looked.

And there was the issue.

When your daughter was on the other side of a thin door, dressed in a frail little hospital gown, her eyes big and wide from current fear and past trauma as her personal space and her body were invaded by third parties, the last thing you wanted was a bunch of people falling all over you because they thought you were Channing Tatum and Chris Hemsworth’s frickin’ love child.

Maybe he should put a paper bag over his head—

As a hand came down on his shoulder, he jumped—and was equally shocked to find Zsadist sitting down next to him on the hard floor of the corridor.

Across the way, V and Lassiter were still on their feet and arguing, the pair of them face to hockey mask, the brother putting a hand-rolled between his lips—and then whipping it out as if he remembered he couldn’t light up—the angel more than holding his own, talking a mile a minute.

Rhage didn’t have the energy or the focus to spare on them.

All he could think about was …

“She’s just suffered enough,” he heard himself say. “God … how long have they been in there?”

Looking into the eyes of his brother, he saw that instead of that stare being yellow, Z’s peepers were jet black.

But yeah, Rhage was being pretty annoying. He’d been bitching about the same thing for how long now? No wonder his brother was getting frustrated with him.

“Sorry.” Rhage rubbed his face. “I’ve got to shut up over here. Don’t mean to piss you off.”

Z looked at him like he’d sprouted a horn in the middle of his forehead. “Not you. I just want to dig up that sire of hers and kill him all over again. If Nalla had been abused like that? And had bones full of past breaks?”

The brother stopped talking at that point. Just as well. Rhage felt like vomiting again.

“When it’s your kids, it’s just a whole different level.” Rhage started to bang his head against the wall, and then worried that it might disturb Bitty and the doctors. “You know, I wasn’t prepared for this. I mean, I thought the hard part about being a dad was going to be the arguments—like her bringing some knuckle-dragging mouth breather home and expecting me not to slice off his smooth criminals and plant them in the yard. But this? I want to be the one going through it for her. It’s just not fair.”