Lover Awakened (Black Dagger Brotherhood #3)(38)

John stopped and whistled.

Tohr slowed, then halted. “Yeah?” he said quietly.

John took out his pad, scribbled something, and held it out.

Tohr’s brows came down as he read. “There’s nothing to be sorry for. Whatever makes you feel comfortable.”

John reached out and squeezed the man’s biceps. Tohr shook his head.

“It’s all right. Come on, I don’t want you to catch cold out here.” The man glanced over when John didn’t move. “Ah, hell…I’m just…I’m there for you. That’s all.”

John put his pen to the paper. I don’t doubt that for a moment. Ever.

“Good. You shouldn’t. Straight up, I feel like I’m your…” There was a pause as Tohr rubbed his thumb back and forth across his forehead. “Look, I don’t want to crowd you. Let’s go inside.”

Before John could beg him to finish the sentence, Tohr opened the door into the house. Wellsie’s voice drifted out…and so did another woman’s. John frowned as he came around the corner into the kitchen. And then stopped dead as a blond female looked over her shoulder.

Oh…wow.

Her hair was cut off at her jawline and her eyes were the color of new leaves. Those hip-hugger jeans she was wearing were so short-waisted…God, he could see her belly button and about an inch of flesh underneath. And her black turtleneck was…Well, he could tell exactly how perfect her body was, put it like that.

Wellsie grinned. “You guys got here just in time. John, this is my cousin Sarelle. Sarelle, this is John.”

“Hi, John.” The female smiled.

Fangs. Oh, yeah. Look at those fangs… Something traveled like a hot breeze over his skin, leaving him tingling from head to foot. Out of confusion, he opened his mouth. Then thought, uh-huh, right. As if anything was coming out of his useless piehole?

While flushing to all hell and gone, he lifted his hand in a wave.

“Sarelle’s helping me with the winter festival,” Wellsie said, “and she’s going to stay for a bite to eat before dawn breaks. Why don’t you two set the table?”

As Sarelle smiled again, that funny tingling thing got so strong, he felt as if he were levitating.

“John? You want to help set the table?” Wellsie prompted.

He nodded. And tried to remember where the knives and forks were.





O’s headlights swung across the front of Mr. X’s cabin. The Fore-lesser’s everyman minivan was parked right next to the door. O stopped his truck behind the Town & Country, blocking it in.

As he got out and the cold air shot into his lungs, he was aware that he was in the zone. In spite of what he was about to do, his emotions lay like smooth feathers over his chest, all arranged, nothing out of place. His body was just as unruffled, moving with its power checked, a gun ready to fire.

The scrolls had taken a long time to wade through, but he’d found what he needed. He knew what had to happen.

He opened the cabin’s door without knocking.

Mr. X looked up from the kitchen table. His face was impassive, showing no frown, no sneer, no aggression of any kind. No surprise, either.

So they were both in the zone.

Without a word, the Fore-lesser rose, one hand going around to his back. O knew what was there, and he smiled as he unsheathed his own knife.

“So, Mr. O—”

“I’m ready for a promotion.”

“Excuse me?”

O turned his blade on himself, putting the tip to his sternum. With a two-handed jabbing motion, he stabbed his own chest.

The last thing he saw before the great white inferno crisped the shit out of him was the shock on Mr. X’s face. Shock that quickly shifted to terror as the man figured out where O was going. And what O was going to do when he got there.





Chapter Fourteen


Lying in bed, Bella listened to the quiet sounds around her: male voices down the hall, low-pitched, rhythmic…the wind outside pushing against the mansion, capricious, uneven…the creak of a floorboard, quick, high-pitched.

She forced herself to close her eyes.

A minute or so later she was up and pacing around, the Oriental on the floor soft under her bare feet. None of her elegant surroundings made sense, and she felt like she had to awkwardly transcribe what she was seeing. The normalcy, the safety she was steeping in seemed like another language, one she had forgotten how to speak or read. Or was this a dream?

In the corner of the room the grandfather clock chimed five A.M. How long had she been free, exactly? How long since the Brothers had come for her and taken her from the earth back into the air? Eight hours now? Maybe, except it felt like minutes. Or maybe it felt like years?

The fuzzy quality of time was like her blurry vision, insulating her, scaring her.

She pulled the silk robe around her more tightly. This was all wrong. She should be rejoicing. After God only knew how many weeks in that pipe in the ground with that lesser standing over her, she should be weeping with sweet relief. Instead everything around her felt fake and insubstantial, as if she were in a life-size dollhouse filled with papier-maché fakes.

She paused in front of a window and realized that only one thing felt real. And she wished she were with him.

Zsadist must have been the one who had come to the side of the bed as she’d first woken up. She’d been dreaming of being back in the hole, back with the lesser. When she’d opened her eyes, all she’d seen was a massive black shape standing over her, and for a moment she hadn’t been able to separate reality from nightmare.