Lover Revealed (Black Dagger Brotherhood #4)(20)

He had been tortured. Recently.

Reaching into his mind again, he panned for memories, trying to get back to the last place he’d been. ZeroSum. ZeroSum with…oh, God, that female. In the bathroom. Having hard-core, who-cares sex. Then he’d gone out and…lessers. Fighting with those lessers. Getting shot and then…

His recollections came to the end of their train track at that point. Just shot off the edge of reasoning into a pit of huh, what?

Had he squealed on the Brotherhood? Betrayed them? Had he given his nearest and dearest away?

And what the hell had been done to his belly? God, he felt like there was sludge in his veins thanks to whatever had festered there.

Letting himself go limp, he breathed through his mouth for a while. And found there was no peace to be had.

As if his brain didn’t want to stop working, or maybe because it was showing off, the thing kicked up random visions from the distant past. Birthdays with his dad glaring at him and his mom tense and smoking like a chimney. Christmases where his brothers and sisters got presents and he didn’t.

Hot July nights that no fan could cool off, the heat driving his father into the cold beer. The Pabst Blue Ribbon driving his father into fist-cracking wake-up calls just for Butch.

Memories he hadn’t thought of for years came back, all unwanted visitors. He saw his sisters and brothers, happy, shouting, playing on bright green grass. And remembered how he’d wished he could be among them instead of hanging back, the oddball who’d never fit in.

And then—Oh, God, no…not this memory.

Too late. He pictured himself as the twelve-year-old he’d been, scrawny and shaggy, standing at the curb in front of the O’Neal family row house in South Boston. It had been a clear, beautiful fall afternoon when he’d watched his sister Janie get into a red Chevy Chevette that had rainbow stripes down the side. With perfect recollection he saw her waving at him through the window in the back as the car drove off.

Now that the door to the nightmare was open, he couldn’t stop the horror show. He recalled the police coming to the door that night and his mother’s knees going out when they finished talking to her. He remembered the cops questioning him because he was the last person to see Janie alive. He heard his younger self telling the badges that he hadn’t recognized the boys and had wanted to tell his sister not to get in.

Mostly, he saw his mother’s eyes burning with a pain so great she had no tears.

Then flash forward twenty-plus years. God…when was the last time he’d spoken to or seen either of his parents? Or his brothers and sisters? Five years? Probably. Man, the family had been so relieved when he’d moved away and started missing holidays.

Yeah, around the Christmas table, everyone else had been part of the O’Neal family fabric and he’d been the stain. Eventually he’d stopped going home altogether, leaving them only phone numbers to reach him, numbers they never dialed.

So they wouldn’t know if he died now, would they? Vishous no doubt knew everything about the O’Neal clan, down to their social security numbers and bank statements, but Butch had never spoken about them. Would the Brotherhood call? What would they say?

Butch looked down at himself and knew there was a good chance he wasn’t walking out of this room. His body looked a lot like those he’d seen in Homicide, the kind he investigated in the woods. Well, natch. That’s where he’d been found. Discarded. Used. Left for dead.

Rather like Janie.

Exactly like Janie.

Closing his eyes, he floated away on the pain in his body. And from out of the swill of agony, he had a vision of Marissa from the first night he’d met her. The image was so vivid, he could almost smell the ocean scent of her and he saw exactly what had been: the filmy yellow gown she’d had on…the way her hair had looked, down over her shoulders…the lemon-colored sitting room they’d been in together.

To him, she was the unforgettable woman, the one he’d never had and never would but who nonetheless reached into the core of him.

Man, he was so fricking tired.

He opened his eyes and took action before he really knew what he was doing. Reaching up to his inner forearm, he peeled the clear plastic tape off the skin around the IV insertion site. Sliding the needle out of his vein was easier than he’d thought it would be, but then again, the rest of him hurt so bad, messing around with that little piece of hardware was a drop in the bucket.

If he’d had the strength, he’d have gone looking for something with a little more punch to off himself. But time—time was the weapon he was going to use because that’s what he had at his disposal. And going by how shitty he felt, it wasn’t going to take long. He could practically hear his organs coughing up their livelihoods.

Closing his eyes, he let go of everything, only dimly aware that alarms were going off in the machinery behind the bed. A fighter by nature, the ease with which he gave up was a surprise, but then a heavy tide of exhaustion crashed over him. He knew instinctually that this was not the exhaustion of sleep but rather of death, and he was glad that it came so fast.

Drifting free of everything, he imagined that he was at the start of a long, blinding hallway at the end of which was a door. Marissa was standing in front of the portal and as she smiled at him she opened the way into a white bedroom full of light.

His soul eased as he took a deep breath and began to walk forward. He’d like to think he was going to heaven, in spite of all the bad things he’d done, so this made sense.