Lover Avenged (Black Dagger Brotherhood #7)(64)

Wrath stood outside Safe Place in a ball-numbing wind, not caring two shits about the nasty weather. Rising before him like something out of a Leave It to Beaver Rockwell daydream, the house that was a haven to victims of domestic violence was big and rambling and welcoming, the windows covered with quilted drapery, a wreath on the door, the mat on the top step reading WELCOME in cursive letters.

As a male, he couldn’t go inside, so he waited like lawn sculpture on the hard brown grass, praying that his beloved leelan was inside—and willing to see him.

After having spent all day in the study hoping that Beth would come to him, he’d finally gone through the mansion searching her out. When he hadn’t found her, he’d prayed she was volunteering here, as she often did.

Marissa appeared on the back stoop and shut the door behind herself. Butch’s shellan and Wrath’s former blood mate looked typically professional in her black slacks and jacket, her blond hair twisted into an elegant chignon, her scent like the ocean.

“Beth just left,” she said as he walked over to her.

“She go back home?”

“Redd Avenue.”

Wrath stiffened. “What the…Why’s she over there?” Shit, his shellan out alone in Caldwell? “You mean at her old apartment?”

Marissa nodded. “I think she wanted to go back to where things started.”

“Is she alone?”

“As far as I know.”

“Jesus Christ, she’s already been abducted once,” he snapped. As Marissa recoiled, he cursed himself. “Look, I’m sorry. I’m not real rational right now.”

After a moment, Marissa smiled. “This is going to sound bad, but I’m glad you’re frantic. You deserve to be.”

“Yeah, I was a shit. Big-time.”

Marissa tilted her head up to the sky. “On that note, a word of advice when you go over to her.”

“Hit me.”

Her perfect face leveled again, and as she refocused on him, her voice grew rueful. “Try not to be angry. You look like an ogre when you’re pissed, and right now, Beth needs to be reminded of why she should let her guard down around you, not why she shouldn’t.”

“Good point.”

“Be well, my lord.”

He nodded to her with a quick bob of the head and dematerialized directly to the Redd Avenue address where Beth had had an apartment when they’d first met. As he went, he got a good goddamn taste of what his shellan had to deal with every night he was out in the city. Dearest Virgin Scribe, how did she deal with the fear? The idea that everything might not be all right? The fact that there was more danger to be found out where he was than safety?

As he took form in front of the apartment building, he thought of the night he had gone to find her after her father’s death. He’d been a reluctant, unsuitable savior, tasked by his friend’s last will and testament to see her through her transition—when she hadn’t even known what she was.

His first approach hadn’t gone well, but the second time he’d tried to talk to her? That had gone very well.

God, he wanted to be with her again like that. Naked skin on naked skin, moving together, him deep inside of her, marking her as his.

But that was a long way off, assuming it ever even happened again.

Wrath walked around to the backyard; his shitkickers were quiet, his shadow large on the frosty ground beneath his feet.

Beth was huddled on a rickety picnic table he’d once sat on himself, and she was staring into the apartment straight ahead just as he had when he’d come for her. Cold wind blew her dark hair around, making it seem as if she were underwater and swimming amid strong currents.

His scent must have carried over to her, because her head snapped around. As she looked at him, she sat up straighter and kept her arms locked around the North Face parka he’d bought her.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“Marissa told me where you were.” He glanced at the apartment’s sliding glass door, then back at her. “Mind if I join you?”

“Ah…okay. That’s fine.” She shuffled over a little as he came to her. “I wasn’t going to be here long.”

“No?”

“I was going to come see you. I wasn’t sure when you were going out to fight and thought maybe there was time before…But then, I don’t know, I…”

As she let the sentence drift, he got up on the table beside her, the supports squeaking as the thing accepted his heft. He wanted to put an arm around her, but hung back and hoped the parka was doing its job to keep her warm enough.

In the silence, words buzzed in his head, all of them of the apologetic variety, all of them bullshit. He’d already said he was sorry, and she knew he meant it, and it was going to be a long time before he stopped wishing there were more he could do to make it up to her.

On this cold night, as they sat suspended between their past and their future, all he could do was sit with her and stare at the darkened windows of the apartment she had once lived in…back before fate had put them together.

“I don’t remember being especially happy in there,” she said softly.

“No?”

She swept her hand across her face, clearing wisps of hair from her eyes. “I didn’t like coming home from work and being there alone. Thank God for Boo. Without that cat? I mean, TV only does so much for a person.”