Lover Avenged (Black Dagger Brotherhood #7)(175)

Mr. D and the others were going to be working him out, and not in the gym.

Which made Lash think about his time in the city.

The war with the vampires would always be in Caldwell, unless the Brothers chose to move. But Manhattan was one of the drug capitals of the world, and it was close, very close. Only an hour’s drive.

Naturally, the trip down south had been about more than the Fifth Avenue shoppies. He’d spent most of the evening going from club to club, checking the scenes, looking for patterns in who went where—because that would tell you what people were buying. Ravers liked X. Slick, twitchy new money liked coke and X. College kids preferred weed and ’shrooms, but you could also move Oxy and meth to them. Goths and emos were into X and razor blades. And the junkies who were in all the alleys around the clubs were into crack, crank, and H.

If he could make inroads in Caldie first, he could do the same for more return in Manhattan. And there was no reason not to think big.

Turning off onto the dirt lane he’d been down before, he reached under the seat and brought out the spank SIG forty he’d bought the night before on the way down to the city.

There was no reason to change into fighting clothes. A good assassin didn’t need to break a sweat to do his job.

The white farmhouse still sat all lovely amidst the now-snow-covered landscape, a perfect Christmas-card candidate for humans. In the lingering night, pale smoke drifted up out of one of its chimneys, the whiffs catching and amplifying the soft moonlight, creating shadows that scampered across the roof. On the other side of the windows, the golden illumination of candles shifted as if there were a subtle breeze moving throughout all the rooms. Or maybe that was just those damn spiders.

Man, in spite of all the home-and-hearth appearance, the place really was tweaked with dread, wasn’t it.

As he parked the Mercedes by the monastical order sign and got out, snow fluffed over the tops of his brand-new Dunhills. As he shook the shit off with a curse, he wondered why in the hell the f*cking symphaths couldn’t have been quarantined in Miami.

But nooooooooo, the sin-eaters got parked an ass crack away from Canada.

Then again, no one liked them, so the logic did follow.

The farmhouse door opened and the king appeared, his white robes wafting around, his glowing red eyes oddly resplendent. “You are late. By a factor of days.”

“Whatever, your candles are holding up just fine.”

“And my time is not so valuable as wasted wax?”

“Didn’t say that.”

“But your actions, they speak loudly.”

Lash mounted the stairs with his gun in his hand and felt like he wanted to double-check that his fly was up as the king watched his body move. And yet, when he was standing head-to-head with the guy, the current sparked between them again, licking in the cold air.

Fuckin’ A. He didn’t drive that kind of stick. Really, he didn’t.

“So, we going to take care of business?” Lash murmured, staring into those bloodred eyes and trying not to be captivated.

The king smiled and raised his three-knuckled fingers to the diamonds at his throat. “Yes, I do believe we shall. Come this way and I shall take you to your target. He is abed—”

“I thought you only wore red, Princess. And what the f*ck are you doing here, Lash?”

As the king stiffened, Lash shifted around, leading with his gun. Coming up the lawn was…a massive male with glowing amethyst eyes and an unmistakable signature mohawk: Rehvenge, son of Rempoon.

Bastard wasn’t at all surprised to find himself on symphath ground. On the contrary, he looked quite at home. As well as pissed off.

Princess?

A quick look over Lash’s shoulder showed him…nothing that he hadn’t seen before. Thin guy, white robes, hair twisted up like a…girl’s, actually.

In this circumstance, it would be nice to have been snowed. Much better to want to f*ck a female liar than have to confront the fact that he was a…Yeah, no reason to go there, even in his own mind.

Whipping his head back around, Lash knew the timing of this little weird-ass interruption was perfect. Getting Rehv out of the drug game would free up all kinds of commerce space in Caldwell.

Just as his finger squeezed the trigger, the king shot forward and grabbed the muzzle. “Not him! Not him!”





As the gunshot rang out in the night and the bullet walleyed into a tree trunk, Rehvenge watched Lash and the princess fight for control of the weapon. On one level, he didn’t give a shit which of the two of them won, or whether he or anybody else got popped in the process, or exactly why a kid who’d been killed was still very much alive. His life was ending where it had been conceived, here in this colony. Whether he died tonight or in the morning or after a hundred years, whether he was killed by the princess or Lash, the outcome had been decided, so the particulars didn’t matter.

Although maybe that laissez-f*ck-off attitude was a mood thing? After all, he was a bonded male without his mate, so in traveling terms, he’d pretty much packed up his luggage, checked out of his mortal motel room, and was in the elevator going down to hell’s lobby.

At least, that was the way the vampire side of him was thinking. The other half of his bloodline was doing the wakey-wakey: mortal drama was always inducement to his bad side, and he wasn’t surprised as the symphath in him beat back the last of the dopamine he’d pumped into his veins. In a quick flash, his vision lost the full-color spectrum and flattened out, the princess’s robes turning to red, the diamonds at her throat bleeding into rubies. Evidently, she dressed in white, but as he’d never seen her without his sin-eater eyes, he’d just assumed she clothed herself in the color of the vein.