Lover Avenged (Black Dagger Brotherhood #7)(201)

Instead, Xhex tossed the duvet off her body and put her hands behind her head, her breasts tingling from the chill and so much more.

Of all the justifications for not doing what they were going to, there was one overriding reality that crumbled the foundations of healthy choice: By the end of tomorrow night, there was a chance one or both of them might not be coming home.

Even with the Brotherhood as support, going to the colony was a suicide mission—and she was willing to bet there were a lot of people having sex under the mansion’s roof right now. Sometimes you had to have a taste of life right before you knocked on the Grim Reaper’s front door.

John took off his jeans and his shirt and left his clothes right where they landed. As he came over to her, his body was magnificent in the glowing light, his cock hard and ready, his heavily muscled form everything a female would want in her bed.

But all that oh-yeah wasn’t what she focused on as he got up on the mattress and mounted her. She wanted to see his eyes.

No luck, though. His face was in shadow, the light from the bathroom coming from directly behind him. For a moment, she almost turned on the lamp next to them, but then realized she wouldn’t want to catch a load of the numb coldness that was no doubt in his stare.

She wasn’t going to get what she was looking for from this, Xhex thought. This was not going to be about living.

And she was right.

No prelude. No foreplay. She opened her legs and he pushed in and her body loosened and accepted him because of biology. As he f*cked her, his head was by hers on the pillow, but it was turned away.

She didn’t come. He did. Four times.

When he rolled off her body and lay on his back, breathing heavily, her heart was thoroughly and completely broken: There had been a crack in the damn thing after she’d left him in her basement apartment, but with each pounding stroke he’d taken just now, more and more of it splintered and fell from the core of her.

A few minutes later, John got up, put his clothes back on, palmed his liquor bottle, and left.

As the door clicked shut, Xhex pulled the duvet over herself.

She did nothing to try to control the shakes that rattled her body, and didn’t attempt to stop herself from crying. Tears left both of her eyes at the far corners, slipping out and flowing over her temples. Some landed in her ears. Some eased down her neck and were absorbed by the pillow. Others clouded her vision, as if they didn’t want to leave home.

Feeling ridiculous, she put her hands to her face and captured them as best she could, wiping them on the duvet.

She cried for hours.

Alone.





SIXTY-SIX




The following evening, Lash was about fifteen miles south of Caldwell when he eased the Mercedes onto a dirt lane and turned off the sedan’s headlights. Driving slowly along a bumpy dirt lane, he used the rising moon to navigate, cutting through a scruffy, debrided cornfield.

“Get your weapons out,” he said.

In the passenger seat, Mr. D palmed his forty, and in the back, the pair of slayers cocked the shotguns they’d been given before Lash had taken them all out of town.

A hundred yards later, Lash hit the brakes and ran his gloved hand around the leather-wrapped steering wheel. The good thing about a big-ass black Mercedes was that when you got out of it you looked like a businessman, not a flashy drug thug. Plus you could fit your guard in the backseat.

“Let’s do this.”

In a synchronized punch, they popped the latches on their doors and got out, facing off across the snowy earth at another big-ass Mercedes.

Maroon AMG. Nice.

And Lash wasn’t the only one to bring guns-and-ammo accessories to the meeting. As all the AMG’s doors opened, three guys with forties and one who appeared to be unarmed got out.

Whereas the sedans suggested civility, or at least the appearance of it, all the men in them represented the violent side of the drug trade—which had f*ck-all to do with calculators and offshore accounts and money laundering.

Lash approached the man who didn’t have a weapon with both his hands out of the pockets of his Joseph Abboud coat. As he came forward, he searched the mind of the South American importer, who, at least according to the drug dealer they had tortured for fun and profit, had sold bulk product to Rehvenge.

“You wanted to meet with me?” the guy said with an accent.

Lash put his hand into the breast pocket of his coat and smiled. “You are not Ricardo Benloise.” He glanced to the other Mercedes. “And I do not appreciate you and your boss f*cking around with me. You tell that motherf*cker to get out of the car now, or I’m walking—which means that he will not be doing business with the guy who cleared the decks in Caldwell and who will be servicing the market the Reverend used to handle.”

The human seemed nonplussed for a moment; then he glanced back at the three comrades who were standing behind him. After a moment, his eyes finally shifted to the maroon Mercedes and he subtly shook his head.

There was a pause and then the passenger-side door opened and a smaller, older man got out. He was impeccably dressed, his black coat fitting his slight shoulders perfectly, his glossy loafers leaving a shuffling path in the snow.

He came forward with total calmness, as if he were a thousand percent sure that his men could handle whatever happened.

“You will understand my caution,” Benloise said with an accent that seemed part French and part Latin American. “It is a good time to be of care.”