Lover Revealed (Black Dagger Brotherhood #4)(19)

She nodded at his feet with a smile. “The lab.”

“Ah…yes. I have.” He reached down and took the covers off his loafers, crushing the yellow plastic in his hand. “Marissa, would you do me the favor of returning to the house? I’ve asked the Princeps Council leahdyre and seven other members to dinner on Monday next. The menu must be perfect and I would talk to Karolyn myself, but I’m due in the OR.”

“Of course.” Except then Marissa frowned, aware that her brother was still as a statue. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, thank you. Go…go now. Do…yes, please go now.”

She was tempted to pry, but she didn’t want to keep him from the young’s operation, so she kissed him on the cheek, straightened his bow tie, and walked away. When she reached the double doors that led into the reception area, though, something made her glance back.

Havers was stuffing what he’d been wearing on his feet into a biohazard bin, and his face was drawn into tight lines. With a deep breath, he braced himself, then pushed open the door to the surgical suite’s anteroom.

Ah, she thought, so that’s what it was. He was upset about operating on the young. And who could blame him?

Marissa turned back to the doors…then heard the boots.

She froze. Only one kind of male made that thunder when he approached.

Pivoting around, she saw Vishous striding down the hall, his dark head lowered, and behind him, Phury and Rhage were similar silent menaces. All three were dripping with weapons and weariness, and Vishous had dried blood on his leathers and his jacket. But why had they been in Havers’s lab? That facility was the only thing back there, really.

The Brothers didn’t notice her until they practically mowed her down. Coming to a stop as a group, their eyes quickly went elsewhere, no doubt because of her having fallen from Wrath’s grace.

Dear Virgin, up close they looked truly awful. Sick, yet not unwell, if that made any sense.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” she asked.

“Everything’s cool,” Vishous said in a hard voice. “’Scuse us.”

The dream…Butch lying in the snow…“Is someone hurt? Is…Butch…”

Vishous just shrugged her off and stepped past her, punching open the doors into Reception. The other two offered stiff smiles, then did the same.

Following at a distance, she watched them walk by the nursing station to the access elevator. As they waited for the doors to open, Rhage reached out and put his hand on Vishous’s shoulder, and the other Brother seemed to shudder.

The exchange made warning bells go off, and the instant the elevator doors closed Marissa headed for the wing of the clinic the three had originally come from. Moving quickly, she passed the sprawling, brilliantly lit lab, then put her head into the six older patient rooms. All of which were empty.

Why had the Brothers been here? Maybe just to talk to Havers?

On instinct, she went out to the front desk, logged on to the computer and scanned the admissions. Nothing about any of the Brothers or Butch came up, but that didn’t mean a thing. The warriors were never entered into the system, and she had to imagine it would be the same for Butch if he were in-house. What she was after was how many beds were occupied of the thirty-five they had.

She got the number and did a quick walk around, scouting each room. Everything was accounted for. There was nothing out of the ordinary. Butch had not been admitted—unless he was in one of the other rooms in the main house. Sometimes patients who were VIPs stayed there.

Marissa picked up her skirts and hightailed it for the back stairs.



Butch curled into himself even though he wasn’t cold, operating on the theory that if he could just bring his knees up high enough, the pain in his stomach would ease a little.

Yeah, right. The hot poker in his gut was not impressed by that plan.

He peeled his puffy eyelids apart, and after a lot of blinking and deep breathing, he came to the following conclusions: He was not dead. He was in a hospital. And shit that was no doubt keeping him alive was being pumped into his arm.

As he rolled over gingerly, he came to one more realization. His body had been used for a punching bag. Oh…and something nasty was in his belly, like his last meal had been rancid roast beef.

What the f*ck had happened to him?

Only a vague series of snapshots came to mind: Vishous finding him in the woods. Him with a screaming instinct that the brother should leave him to die. Then some knife action and…something about that hand of V’s, that glowing thing used to take out a vile piece of—

Butch lurched over onto his side and gagged just from the memory. There had been evil in his belly. Pure, undiluted malice, and the black horror had been spreading.

With shaking hands, he grabbed the hospital johnny he was wearing and yanked it up. “Oh…Jesus…”

There was a stain on the skin of his stomach, like the scorch mark of a fire that had been snuffed out. In desperation, he weeded through his sloppy brain, trying to remember how the scarring had gotten there and what it was, but he just came up with a big fat zero.

So like the detective he’d been before, he examined the scene—which in this case was his body. Lifting one of his hands, he saw that his fingernails were a mess, as if something like a file or some small nails had been hammered under a number of them. A deep breath told him his ribs were cracked. And going by his swollen eyes, he had to assume his face had partied with a lot of knuckles.