Lover Unleashed (Black Dagger Brotherhood #9)(51)

“I just wish you didn’t have to.”

“You get me.”

“Yeah, but you’re easy.”

Jane propped herself up. “I’m a frickin’ ghost. In case you haven’t noticed. Not something a lot of men would be psyched about.”

V pulled her to his mouth for a quick, hard kiss. “But I get you for the rest of my life.”

“That you do.” Humans, after all, didn’t last a tenth of what vampires did.

When the alarm went off beside them, V glared at the thing. “Now I know why I sleep with a gun under my pillow.”

As he reached out to silence the clock, she had to agree. “You know, you could just shoot it.”

“Nah, Butch would get his ass in here, and I don’t want a weapon in my palm if he ever sees you naked.”

Jane smiled and then lay back as he got out of bed and walked over to the bathroom. At the door, he paused and looked over his shoulder. “I came to you, Jane. Every night this week, I came to you. I didn’t want you to be alone. And I didn’t want to sleep without you.”

On that note, he ducked into the bath, and a moment later she heard the shower come on.

He was better at words than he thought.

With a satisfied stretch, she knew she had to get up and moving, too—time to relieve Ehlena from her day shift in the clinic. But man, she would love to lie here all night. Maybe just a little longer . . .

Vishous left ten minutes later to go to meet with Wrath and the Brotherhood, and he kissed her on the way to the exit. Twice.

Getting out of bed, she hit the bathroom for a while, and then went to their closet and opened the double doors. Hanging from the rod there were leathers—his; plain white T-shirts—hers; white coats—hers; biker jackets—his. The weapons were all locked up in a fire safe; shoes were down on the floor.

Her life was in many ways incomprehensible. Ghost married to a vampire? Come on.

But looking at this closet, so nice and arranged with their crazy lives at rest among these carefully placed clothes and footwear, she felt good about where they were. “Normal” was not a bad thing in this lunatic world; it really wasn’t.

No matter how it happened to be defined.





EIGHTEEN


Down in the training center’s clinic, Payne was doing her exercises, as she’d come to think of them.

Lying in the hospital bed with the pillows pushed to the side, she crossed her arms over her chest and tightened her stomach, pulling her torso upright on a slow rise. When she was perpendicular to the mattress, she extended her arms straight out and held them there while she eased back down. After even one round, her heart was pounding and her breath was short, but she gave herself only a brief recovery and repeated. And repeated. And repeated.

Each time the effort grew progressively more strenuous, until sweat beaded on her forehead and her stomach muscles strained into pain. Jane had shown her how to do this, and she supposed it was a benefit—although compared to what she had been capable of, it was a spark measured against a bonfire.

Indeed, Jane had tried to get her to do so much more . . . had even wheeled in a chair for her to sit in and ambulate, but Payne couldn’t bear the sight of the thing, or the idea of spending her life rolling from place to place.

In the past week, she had summarily closed off all avenues of accommodation in the hopes of a singular miracle . . . that had never materialized.

It felt like centuries since she’d fought with Wrath . . . since she had known the coordination and strength of her limbs. She had taken so much for granted, and now she missed who she had once been with a grief that she’d assumed one had only for the dead.

Then again, she supposed she had died. Her body just wasn’t smart enough to stop working.

With a curse in the Old Language, she collapsed back and left herself lying there. When she was able, she found the leather strap that she had cranked down over her thighs. The thing was so tight, she knew it was cutting off circulation, but she felt neither the constriction of the binding nor any sweet release as she sprang the clasp and the leather popped loose.

It had been thus since the night she had returned herein.

No change.

Closing her eyes, she reentered into an inner war whereupon her fears drew swords against her mind, and the results were e’er more tragic. After seven cycles of night and day, her army of rationality was suffering from a sorry lack of ammunition and deep fatigue amongst its troops. Thus, the tide was turning. First, she had been buoyed by optimism, but that had faded, and then there had been a period of resolved patience, which had not lasted long. Since then, she had tarried along this barren road of baseless hope.

Alone.

Verily, the loneliness was the worst part of the ordeal: For all the people who were free to come and go, in and out of her room, she was utterly separate even when they sat and talked to her or attended to her very basic needs. Confined to this bed, she was on another plane of reality from them, separated by a vast, invisible desert that she could see clearly o’er, but was unable to cross.

And it was strange. All that she had lost became most acute whenever she thought of her human healer—which was so often she could not count the times.

Oh, how she missed that man. Many were the hours she had spent remembering his voice and his face and that last moment between them . . . until her memories became a blanket with which to warm herself during the long, cold stretches of worry and concern.