Lover Avenged (Black Dagger Brotherhood #7)(189)

“What is it?”

“How’s Bella?”

Beth cleared her throat as if she were surprised by his question. “Bella’s…doing the best she can. We don’t leave her alone much, and it’s good that Zsadist has taken some time off. It’s just so hard that she lost both of them within days of each other. I mean her mother and her brother…”

“That shit about Rehv was a lie.”

“I don’t understand.”

He reached around for the Caldwell Courier Journal she’d been reading him, and tapped the article she’d just finished. “I find it hard to believe that someone blew his ass up. Rehv was no dummy, and those Moors who guarded him? That head of security? No f*cking way they’d let some cocksucker with a bomb anywhere near that club. Plus, Rhage said that he and V went to the Iron Mask the other night to drag John home, and the three of them are working there—iAm, Trez, and Xhex are still together. Usually people scatter after tragedy. Except that bunch is right where they always were, like they’re waiting for him to come back.”

“But there was a skeleton in the ruins, wasn’t there?”

“Could be anyone’s. Sure, it was male, but what else do the police know? Nothing. If I wanted to disappear from the human world—hell, even the vampire one—I’d plant a body and blow up my building.” He shook his head, thinking of Rehv lying in his bed up at the Great Camp, so f*cking ill…and yet well enough to have his assassin take care of the guy who’d wanted to kill Wrath. “Man, that SOB was there for me. He had every chance in the world to f*ck me when Montrag met with him. I owe him.”

“Wait…why in the world would he fake his own death? He loved Bella and her young so much. Hell, he practically raised his sister, and I can’t believe he would ever hurt her like that. Plus, where would he go?”

The colony, Wrath thought.

Wrath wanted to tell his queen everything that was on his mind, but he hesitated, because he’d been flirting with a decision that was going to complicate the shit out of things. Bottom line was, that e-mail about Rehv? Wrath’s intuition was telling him the guy had lied about it. It was just too coincidental that the thing came in and the next night Rehv “dies.” It had to have been legit. But with Montrag dead, who could have—

There was a sharp crack and a free fall and a hard-ass landing.

As Beth shrieked, Wrath cursed. “What the f*ck?”

He patted around, feeling splinters of old, delicate French wood all around them.

“Are you okay, leelan?” he said sharply.

Beth laughed and got up to her feet. “Oh, my God…we broke the chair.”

“Pulverized it might be more accurate—”

The knock on the door had Wrath struggling up to his feet with grunts of pain. Which he was getting used to. Payne always went for the shins, and his left leg was killing him. But it wasn’t like he didn’t return the favor. After this last session, it was quite possible that she was nursing a concussion.

“Come in,” he called out.

The instant the door opened, he knew who it was…and that she was not alone.

“Who is with you, Mary?” he demanded, reaching for the knife he wore on his hip. The scent wasn’t human…but it wasn’t a vampire.

There was a subtle clinking and a long, lovely sigh from his shellan, as if she were looking at something that pleased her greatly.

“This is George,” Mary said. “Please put your weapon away. He won’t hurt you.”

Wrath kept his dagger in the palm of his hand and flared his nostrils. The scent was…“Is that a dog?”

“Yes. He’s trained to assist the blind.”

Wrath recoiled slightly at the b-word, still struggling to accept that classification as pertaining to him.

“I would like to bring him over to you,” Mary said in that level voice of hers. “But not until you put the weapon away.”

Beth stayed silent, and Mary stayed back, which was smart of them. His neurons were firing in all kinds of directions, thoughts racing everywhere. The past month had had a lot of triumphs and a lot of shitty losses: Back when he’d returned from his first meeting with Payne, he’d known it was going to be a tough road ahead, but it had been longer and steeper than he’d thought.

The two biggest problems were that he hated having to rely so much on Beth and his brothers, and he found relearning simple things was curiously exhausting. Like…for f*ck’s sake, making toast for himself was now a production. He’d tried it again yesterday and succeeded in breaking the glass dish the butter was kept on. Which naturally had taken him forever to clean up.

Still, the idea of using a dog to get around was…too much.

Mary’s voice eased across the room with the vocal equivalent of an ambling, nonthreatening gait. “Fritz has been trained to handle the dog, and together he and I are prepared to work with you and George. There’s a two-week trial period, after which, if you don’t like it or it isn’t working, we can return the animal. There is no obligation here, Wrath.”

He was about to tell them to take the dog away when he heard a soft whine and more of that jingle.

“No, George,” Mary said. “You can’t go over to him.”

“He wants to come to me?”