Lover Mine (Black Dagger Brotherhood #8)(103)

warmed himself with the memories. On some level, he couldn't believe that 265

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his time with her had been mere days ago. Felt more like ages since he'd had her under him. For f*ck's sake, finding that first lesion on his wrist had been the beginning of the end . . . he just hadn't known it at the time.

Just a scratch.

Yeah, right.

Lifting his hand to push at his hair, he hit the bill of the baseball cap and was reminded that he had nothing to fuss with anymore. All he had left up there was a bone dome.

If he'd had more energy, he would have started ranting and raving at

the unfairness and the cruelty of his decaying destiny. Life wasn't supposed to be like this. He wasn't supposed to be looking in from the outside. He had always been the focus, the driver, the special one.

For some stupid reason, he thought of John Matthew. When the

motherf*cker had come into the training program for soldiers, he'd been a particularly small pretrans with nothing but a Brotherhood name and a star scar on his chest. He'd been the perfect target to ostracize and Lash had gotten off on riding the kid hard.

Man, back then, he'd had no idea what it was like to be the odd man

out. How it made you feel like worthless crap. How you looked at the other people who had it going on and would trade anything to be in with them.

Good thing he hadn't had a clue how it was. Or he might have thought

twice about f*cking with the cocksucker.

And here and now, leaning against the shaggy, cold bark of an oak

tree and watching through the windows of the farmhouse as some other

golden boy lived his life, he felt his plans shifting.

If it was the last thing he did, he was going to take that little shit down.

It was even more important than Xhex.

That the guy had dared to mark Lash for death wasn't the driver. It

was the need to send a message to his father. He was, after all, a rotting apple that didn't fall far from the tree, and payback was a bitch.

266





J. R.Ward

THIRTY-NINE

"That's Bella's old house," Xhex said after she took form in a meadow beside John Matthew.

As he nodded, she looked around at the pastoral spread. Bella's white farmhouse with its wraparound porch and its red chimneys was picture-perfect in the moonlight, and it seemed a shame that the place was left empty with nothing but exterior security lights on.

The fact that its outbuilding had a Ford F-150 parked in its gravel

drive and windows that were glowing seemed to make the sense of desertion even more acute.

"Bella was the one who first found you?"

John made an equivocal motion with his hand and pointed over to

another little house on the lane. As he started to sign and then stopped himself, his frustration over the communication barrier was obvious.

"Someone in that house . . . you knew them and they put you in touch with Bella?"

He nodded as he reached into his jacket and brought out what

appeared to be a handmade bracelet. Taking it from him, she saw that

symbols in the Old Language had been carved into the hide.

"Tehrror." When he touched his chest, she said, "Your name? But how did you know?"

He touched his head, then shrugged.

"It came to you." She focused on the smaller house. There was a pool in the back and she sensed that his memories were sharpest there, because every time his eyes passed over that terrace, his emotional grid fired up, a switchboard with a lot of circuits flaring.

He'd come here at first to protect someone. Bella had not been the

reason.

Mary, she thought. Rhage's shellan, Mary. But how had they met?

Odd . . . that was a blank wall. He was shutting her off from that part.

"Bella got in touch with the Brotherhood and Tohrment came for

you."

When he nodded again, she gave him back the bracelet, and while he

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fingered the symbols, she marveled at the relativity of time. Since they'd left the mansion, only an hour had passed, but she felt as though they'd spent a year together.

God, he'd given her more than she'd ever expected . . . and now she

knew precisely why he'd been so helpful as she'd flipped out in the OR.

He'd endured a hell of a lot, having not so much lived through his

early life as been dragged through it.

The question was, How had he gotten lost to the human world in the

first place? Where were his parents? The king had been his whard when he'd been a pretrans--that was what his papers had said when she'd first met him in ZeroSum. She'd assumed his mother had died, and the visit to the bus station didn't disprove that . . . but there were holes in the story. Some of which she got the impression were deliberate, others of which he didn't seem to be able to fill.

With a frown, she sensed his father was still very much with him, and yet he didn't appear to have ever known the guy.

"You're taking me to one last place?" she murmured.

He seemed to take a final look about and then he poofed off and she

followed him, thanks to all the blood of his that was in her system.

When they resumed form in front of a stunning modern house, his

sadness overwhelmed him to such a degree that his emotional superstructure actually started to cave in on itself. With force of will, however, he managed to stop the disintegration in time, before it couldn't be righted.