Prisoner of Night (The Black Dagger Brotherhood #16.5)(22)

Funny, she couldn’t smell whatever it had been. Usually at the gym where she worked, she had to train her nose away from all the bodywashes, Biolages, and colognes, the human need to artificially enhance their scents a reflection of their subpar olfactory range.

She had this male in her nose and down the back of her throat—

Stay focused on Ahlan, she told herself. What she needed to do was—

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

As the prisoner spoke, Ahmare jerked and had to catch up with what the syllables meant.

“You’re staring at me,” he said as he finished the sandwich. “And I can only guess you’re worried about how the day is going to go. So let me just get that out of the way. I’m not going to touch you.”

The fact that her libido felt a sting of rejection made her want to bang her head into one of the walls until she left a dent in the shape of her own face.

He pointed over to the bunk. “You can sleep there.” Then he pointed across the way in the opposite direction, to a bare wall. “I’ll sleep here. And you always have that trigger. You can drop me in a heartbeat, isn’t that what you said?”

Yes, she had been reminding herself of that fact at different points in this shitty adventure they were on. But concern for her personal safety hadn’t been why she’d been staring at him now, not that he was ever going to know the real reason.

“So tell me about your brother,” the prisoner said as he packed up the empty baggies, picking one to hold all the others.

Ahmare took a deep breath and figured talking was better than silence. “He’s about six-five, so a little shorter than you. Dark hair like mine. Eyes my green color. He came along sixty years after me. I was excited.”

Such basic statistics. That told nothing about Ahlan, really.

She stared down at the half-moon that she’d made in the bread when she’d taken her bite. “Live wire, Ahlan was—I mean, Ahlan is—a live wire. And that was a great characteristic before the raids, something that made the house come alive. After my parents were killed, though . . .” She shook her head. “He went off the rails. In that regard, we both played to type. I doubled down on the self-control, he became a firework going in a thousand different directions. I refused to think about my grief, burying myself in learning skills in self-defense and weapons that came too late. He ran from his, following any distraction he could.”

Clearing her throat, she looked up. “I can’t finish this sandwich. Do you want it?”

The prisoner reached out, and it was then that she noticed two out of his five fingers had no nails.

“They pulled them off so many times,” he explained, “that they stopped growing back.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered as he popped what she’d given him into his mouth and put his hand palm up in his lap so the nail beds didn’t show.

“How did Chalen get involved in the story?” he asked.

She opened her mouth to speak. But couldn’t seem to get any words out.

The prisoner’s brows went low, but he didn’t seem offended. It was more like bad memories were coming back to him.

“My father gave me to Chalen,” he told her. When she recoiled, he smiled. At least she thought he did. It was hard to be sure because of the beard. “My father is a very superstitious male, and superstition becomes a hard fact if you believe in it enough.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My father believes that if you kill a direct descendant of yours, you suffer a mortal event yourself. It’s like in his mind, he and I are intrinsically tied together, and if he causes my death, it’s tantamount to committing suicide. He’ll die as well.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“It’s an Old Country thing.”

“I was born in the New World.”

“So was I. The old ways live on, though, don’t they.” He planted his palms flat behind his hips and leaned into them. “He also believed I was going to come after him one night. Tricky situation for a guy who has plans to live a long life. His personal Grim Reaper out in the world, tracking him, waiting for him to slip up, and yet he couldn’t eliminate the threat.”

“You make it sound like you’re his killer.”

“I will be.”

Ahmare blinked at this. “Why?”

“He raped my mahmen. Repeatedly. That’s how I was born. He had her once and couldn’t stop. When her needing came, he took her over and over again. The nature of his addiction to her crippled him, and I believe his plan was to kill her as soon as he had his last hurrah during her fertile time—like a goddamn alcoholic going on a bender. But then when it was over, it dawned on him that he might get in trouble with that whole can’t-kill-my-young thing. He had to wait to see if it took, if she got pregnant, and she did. I have no doubt he hoped she and I would both die on the birthing bed because I heard he had repeated nightmares that what he had sired would exact revenge for the way the conception had happened. No such luck on the maternal/fetal funeral, and then, horror of horrors, I was a son. Like a female wouldn’t be strong enough to take revenge?”

“So he gave you to Chalen so someone else would kill you.”

“Bingo.”

“You were a member of the cult, then?”