Lover Avenged (Black Dagger Brotherhood #7)(114)

Many, many years ago, after family had double-crossed him in business and ruined him in the eyes of the glymera, he no longer trusted his ability to read the intentions and motivations of others. He had put his faith in the wrong people and…it had cost him his shellan.

The thing was, Ehlena had figured her mother’s death wrong. Right after the great fall, her mother had turned to laudanum to help her cope, and the temporary relief had bloomed into a crutch as life as she’d known it had crumbled…money, position, homes, possessions leaving her like lovely doves scattering from a field, going somewhere safer.

And then Ehlena’s engagement had failed, the male distancing himself before publicly declaring that he was ending the relationship—because Ehlena had seduced him into her bed and taken advantage of him.

That had been her mother’s last straw.

What had been a joint decision between Ehlena and the male had been spun into Ehlena’s being a female without worth, a harlot hell-bent on corrupting a male who had had only the most honorable of intentions. With that known in the glymera, Ehlena would never marry, even if her family had had the station they’d lost.

The night the scandal had broken, Ehlena’s mother had gone into her bedroom and they’d found her dead hours later. Ehlena had always assumed it had been a laudanum overdose, but no. According to the manuscript, she had slit her wrists and bled out on the sheets.

Her father had started hearing voices as soon as he saw his female deceased on their mated bed, her pale body framed by a halo of dark red spilled life.

As his mental disease had progressed, he had retreated farther and farther into paranoia, but in a strange way he felt more secure there. Real life was fraught, in his mind, with people who might or might not betray him. The voices in his head, however, were all out to get him. With those crazy monkeys that flipped and tripped among the branches of the sickness’s forest, raining sticks and hard nubs of fruit at him in the form of thoughts, he knew his enemies. He could see and feel and know them for what they were, and his weapons to combat them were a well-ordered refrigerator and tin over the windows and rituals of words and his writings.

Out in the real world? He was helpless and lost, at the mercy of others, with no defenses to judge what was dangerous and what wasn’t. The illness, on the other hand, was where he wanted to be, because he knew, as he put it, the confines of the forest and the trails around the trunks and the tribulations of the monkeys.

There his compass held a true north.

To Ehlena’s surprise? It wasn’t all suffering for him. Before he had fallen ill, he’d been a litigator in matters of the Old Law, a male well-known for his affection for debate and his lust for strong opponents. In his illness, he found just the kind of conflict he had enjoyed while sane. The voices in his own head, as he put it with self-actualized irony, were every bit as intelligent and facile at debate as he was. To him, his violent episodes were nothing more than the mental equivalent of a good boxing match, and since he always came out of them eventually, he always felt victorious.

He was also aware he was never leaving the forest. It was, as he said in the final line of the book, his last address before he went unto the Fade. And his only regret was that there was room for just one inhabitant in there—that his sojourn among the monkeys meant he could not be with her, his daughter.

He was saddened by the separation and the burden he was on her.

He knew he was a lot to handle. He was aware of the sacrifices. He mourned her loneliness.

It was everything she had wanted to hear him say, and as she held the pages, it didn’t matter that it was all written and not voiced. If anything it was better this way because she could read it over and over again.

Her father knew so much more than she thought.

And he was far more content than she ever could have guessed.

She smoothed her palm over the first page. The handwriting, which was in blue, because a properly trained attorney never wrote in black, was as neat and orderly as the recitation of the past, and as elegant and graceful as the larger conclusions he drew and the insights he offered.

God…for so long, she had lived around him, but now she knew what he lived in.

And all people were like him, weren’t they. Each in their own rain forests, alone no matter how many folk walked beside them.

Was mental health just a matter of having fewer monkeys? Maybe the same number, only nice ones?

The muffled sound of a cell phone going off brought her head up. Reaching across to her coat, she took the thing out of her pocket and answered it.

“Hello?” She knew in the silence who it was. “Rehvenge?”

“You got fired.”

Ehlena put her elbow on the table and covered her forehead with her hand. “I’m fine. About to go to sleep. And you?”

“It was because of the pills you brought me, wasn’t it.”

“Dinner was really good. Cottage cheese and carrot sticks—”

“Stop it,” he barked.

She dropped her arm and frowned. “I beg your pardon.”

“Why did you do it, Ehlena? Why the hell—”

“Okay, you’re going to rethink your tone or this conversation’s getting the end button.”

“Ehlena, you need that job.”

“Don’t tell me what I need.”

He cursed some. Cursed some more.