Lover Unleashed (Black Dagger Brotherhood #9)(5)

The inside of him went absolutely frigid. “Listen, I’m going to get that doctor here and—”

“Vishous,” she said hoarsely. “Verily, I would do it if I could, but I cannot, and there is no one else I have to turn to. Do you understand me.”

As he met her eyes, he wanted to scream, his gut roping up, sweat flushing across his brow. He was a killer by nature and training, but that wasn’t a skill set he’d ever intended to wield on his own blood. Well, their mother excepted, of course. Maybe their dad, except the guy had died on his own.

Okay, amendment: not something he would ever do to his sister.

“Vishous. Do you—”

“Yeah.” He looked down at his cursed hand and flexed the goddamn piece of shit. “I get it.”

Deep inside his skin, at his very core, his inner string started to vibrate. It was the kind of thing he’d been intimately familiar with for most of his life—and also an utter shock. He hadn’t had this sensation since Jane and Butch had come along, and its return was . . . another slice of Fuck Me.

In the past, it had taken him seriously off the rails into the land of hard-core sex and dangerous, on-the-edge shit.

At the speed of sound.

Payne’s voice was thready. “And what say you.”

Damn it, he’d just met her.

“Yes.” He flexed his deadly hand. “I’ll take care of you. If it comes to that.”




As Payne stared up out of the cage of her dead-lead body, her twin’s bleak profile was all she could see, and she despised herself for the position she’d put him in. She had spent the time since she’d arrived on this side trying to tease out another path, another option, another . . . anything.

But what she needed was hardly something one could ask of a stranger.

Then again, he was a stranger.

“Thank you,” she said. “Brother mine.”

Vishous just nodded once and resumed staring straight ahead. In person, he was so much more than the sum of his facial features and the massive size of his body. Back before she had been imprisoned by their mahmen, she had long watched him in the seeing bowls of the sacred Chosen and had known the instant he had appeared in the shallow water who he was to her—all she’d had to do was look at him and she saw herself.

Such a life he had led. Starting with the war camp and their father’s brutality . . . and now this.

And beneath his cold composure, he raged. She could feel it in her very bones, some link between them giving her insight beyond that which her eyes informed her of: On the surface, he was collected as a brick wall, his composite components all in order and mortared in place. Inside his skin, however, he seethed . . . and the external clue was his gloved right hand. From underneath its base, a bright light shone . . . and got e’er brighter. Especially after she’d asked him what she had.

This could be their only time together, she realized, her eyes slicking over anew.

“You are mated to the healer female?” she murmured.

“Yeah.”

When there was only silence, she wished she could engage him, but it was clear he answered her only out of courtesy. And yet she believed him when he said he was glad she’d arrived herein. He didn’t strike her as the type to lie—not because he cared about morality or politeness as such, but rather because he viewed such effort as a waste of time and inclination.

Payne eased her eyes back to the ring of bright fire that hung o’erhead. She wished he would hold her hand or touch her in some way, but she had asked more than plenty of him already.

Lying upon the rolling slab, her body felt all wrong, both heavy and weightless in the same moment, and her only hope was the spasms that tore down her legs and tickled into her feet, causing them to jerk. Surely all was not lost if that was occurring, she told herself.

Except even as she took shelter under that thought, a very small, quiet part of her mind told her that the cognitive roof she was trying to construct would not withstand the rain that hung o’er what was left of her life: When she moved her hands, though she could not see them, she could feel the cool, soft sheeting and the slick chill of the table she was upon. But when she told her feet to do the same . . . it was as though she were in the serene, tepid waters of the bathing pools on the Other Side, cocooned in an invisible embrace, sensing nothing against her.

Where was this healer?

Time . . . was passing.

As the wait went from intolerable to downright agonizing, it was difficult to know whether the choking sensation in her throat was from her condition or the quiet of the room. Verily, she and her twin were alike steeped in stillness—just for very different reasons: She was going nowhere with alacrity. He was on the verge of an explosion.

Desperate for some stimulation, something . . . anything, she murmured, “Tell me about the healer who is coming.”

The cool draft that hit her face and the scent of dark spices that tunneled into her nose told her it was a male. Had to be.

“He’s the best,” Vishous muttered. “Jane’s always talked about him like he’s a god.”

The tone was rather less than complimentary, but, indeed, vampire males did not appreciate others of their persuasion around their females.

Who could it be within the race? she wondered. The only healer that Payne had seen in the bowls was Havers. And surely there would have been no reason to search for him?