Lover Avenged (Black Dagger Brotherhood #7)(31)

Well, he already had the answer, didn’t he.

Her voice, that clear, lovely voice, replayed in his mind: You’d better keep that. For someone who might ever use it.

Sure, she didn’t know the particulars, but she was smart enough to turn down his business card.

Rehv focused on Xhex, who hadn’t moved from her position against the front door. As silence stretched out, she stared down at the short-napped black carpet, her boot heel making a circle around herself.

“What,” he said. When she didn’t look up at him, he sensed her struggling to collect herself. “What the f*ck happened?”

Trez and iAm came back into the office and settled against the black wall across from Rehv’s desk. As they crossed their arms in front of their huge chests, they kept their mouths shut.

Silence was characteristic of Shadows…but coupled with Xhex’s tight expression and the protractor routine she was pulling with that boot, shit had gone down.

“Talk. Now.”

Xhex’s eyes flipped up to his. “Chrissy Andrews is dead.”

“How.” Even though he knew.

“Beaten and strangled to death in her apartment. I had to go down to the morgue and ID the body.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“I’m going to take care of it.” Xhex wasn’t asking permission, and no matter what he said, she was going to go after that piece-of-shit boyfriend. “And I’m going to do it fast.”

Generally speaking, Rehv was in charge, but he wasn’t standing in her way on this. To him, his working girls weren’t just a revenue center…. They were employees who he cared about and identified with intimately. So if one got hurt, whether it was by a john or a boyfriend or a husband, he took a personal interest in payback.

Whores deserved respect, and his were going to get it.

“Teach him a lesson first,” Rehv growled.

“Don’t you worry about that.”

“Shit…I blame myself,” Rehv murmured as he reached forward and picked up his envelope opener. The thing was in the shape of a dagger and as sharp as a weapon, too. “We should have killed him sooner.”

“She seemed as if she was better.”

“Maybe she was just hiding it better.”

The four of them sat in the quiet for a bit. There were a lot of losses in their profession—people turning up dead was hardly a news flash—but for the most part, he and his crew were the minus signs in the equations: They did the taking out. A loss of their own by someone else sat badly.

“You want the update on tonight?” Xhex asked.

“Not yet. Got a little news of my own to share.” Forcing his head into gear, he looked at Trez and iAm. “What I’m about to say will make things very messy, and I want to give you both a chance to leave. Xhex, you don’t get that option. Sorry.”

Trez and iAm stayed put, which did not surprise him in the slightest. Trez also popped a middle finger at him. Not a shocker either.

“I went to Connecticut,” Rehv said.

“You also went to the clinic,” Xhex added. “Why?”

GPS sucked sometimes. Hard to have any privacy. “Forget the f*cking clinic. Listen, I need you to do a job for me.”

“Job as in…?”

“Think of Chrissy’s boyfriend as a cocktail before dinner.”

This got a cold smile out of her. “Tell me.”

He stared at the point of the envelope opener, thinking that he and Wrath had laughed because they both had one: The king had come in to visit after the raids during the summer, to discuss council business, and had seen the thing out on the desk. Wrath had joked that in their day jobs they both led by the blade, even if they had a pen in their hands.

Wasn’t that the truth. Although Wrath had morality on his side and Rehv had only self-interest.

So it was not with virtue that he’d made his decision and chosen the course. It was, as usual, what benefited him most.

“It’s not going to be easy,” he murmured.

“The fun ones never are.”

Rehv focused on the sharp point of the opener. “This one…is not for fun.”





With the night closing down and her shift ending, Ehlena was antsy. Date time. Decision time. The male was supposed to come and pick her up at the clinic in twenty minutes.

God, she was back to waffling again.

His name was Stephan. Stephan, son of Tehm, although she didn’t know him or his family. He was a civilian, not an aristocrat, and he’d come in with his cousin, who’d cut his hand splitting logs for firewood. While she’d been doing the discharge paperwork, she’d talked to Stephan about the kinds of things single people talked about: He liked Radiohead; she did, too. She liked Indonesian food; he did, too. He worked in the human world, doing computer programming, thanks to virtual commuting. She was a nurse, duh. He lived at home with his parents, the only son in a solidly civilian family—or at least they’d sounded solidly civilian, his father doing construction for vampire contractors, his mother teaching the Old Language freelance.

Nice, normal. Trustworthy.

Considering what the aristocrats had done to her father’s sanity, she figured that all seemed like a good bet, and when Stephan had asked her out for a coffee, she’d said yes, they’d agreed on tonight, and exchanged cell phone numbers.