Prisoner of Night (The Black Dagger Brotherhood #16.5)(23)

“I was born into it, yes.”

“And what happened to your mahmen?”

“My father kept her alive because he was in love with her and he liked to torture her with his presence. The second she died of natural causes, he sent me to Chalen. He might have done that sooner, but I look like him, and every time she met my eyes, it was like he was right with her. He’s a sick fuck.” There was a long pause. “She loved me, though.” As the prisoner’s voice cracked, he cleared his throat. “I don’t know how . . . but she loved me as her son. How the hell could she do that? She should have hated me.”

“None of this was your fault.”

Bleak eyes met her own. “No, I’m just the living, breathing symbol of everything she endured. I wouldn’t have been able to be like her if the roles had been reversed.”

“A mahmen’s love is the greatest force in the universe.” Ahmare thought of her own family. “It is sacred. It’s stronger than hate. Stronger than death, too. Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the day and I can swear my mahmen’s hand is on my shoulder and her sweet voice is telling me all will be well because she will never leave me. It’s as though, even from the Fade, she watches over me.”

But if that was true, Ahmare thought, how had her brother gone down such a bad path? Surely the female watched over him, too?

“I will never understand it,” the prisoner said.

She refocused. “You don’t have to. You don’t even need to accept it because every breath you take and each beat of your heart does that. Your sire might have been evil, but love won in the end, didn’t it?”

There was another long period of quiet.

“No,” he said eventually. “I don’t think it does.”





13




SO HOW GOOD ARE you with a knife?”

As the prisoner asked the question, Ahmare had a quick image of her stab—har-har—at decapitation.

“Average,” she said as her stomach rolled. “Why?”

“I need to get this off.” He tugged at his beard and hair. “And without scissors and a razor, I’m going to need help.”

“Mirror,” she added.

“Huh?”

“You’d also do well to have a mirror.” She shifted onto her knees and unholstered her hunting knife. “But I can do it. My father used to shave with a straight edge and he taught me how.”

“You mind if we go over there?” Duran nodded at the bunk. “I’m aching.”

As he got his height and weight off the floor, he grunted and there were cracking sounds, like branches snapping during the dry fall. Also a pop or two that made her wonder if he wasn’t going to need to have a bone set.

“How old are you?” she blurted.

“I don’t keep track of those things. But I am certainly too young to be moving like this.” He limped over and groaned as he sat himself down on the thin, bare mattress. “Too many broken things healed in bad ways.”

Ahmare took her time getting to her feet. Otherwise, it felt like she was showing off the fact that she didn’t hurt all over.

As she approached him with the knife, she was amazed that he sat there so calmly as someone he didn’t know came toward him with a shiny blade capable of doing damage—

Without warning, the Mississippi delta of blood spilling from Rollie’s open, ragged neck barged in, an out-of-order interloper that she would rather have stayed away from her proverbial establishment. God, if she never thought about that death again, it would be too soon. The trouble was, she couldn’t ignore the fact that the last time she had had this hilt in her palm, it had been to kill.

Now, it was to shave.

Could she be like the blade? she wondered. Could she turn away from carnage and return to the mundane? Along those lines, after all this, what would she be like, if she survived?

She thought of that hand analogy that she’d given the Shadow, the one where Rollie’s dead fingers penetrated the big divide in her life and contaminated her peaceable past. Except maybe the contamination hadn’t started with Rollie. Maybe it had started with the raids, with the death of her parents. Maybe that was the beginning of everything turning toxic and her present circumstance was a trickle-down of her parents’ blood being spilled.

Maybe she’d gotten the timeline wrong, even if her conclusion was right.

“Well?” the prisoner prompted.

She had come to stand before him, she realized, and she was staring down at his bearded face without seeing him.

“Sorry,” she said as she put the trigger in her back pocket and tried to focus on how she was going to get rid of that facial hair without cutting him.

When he reached out and took her hand, she jumped, but all he did was hold on to her, a solid, surprisingly calm anchor amidst the chaos.

“It’s okay.” His voice was soft. “I know what it’s like to have the world disappear behind things you’d rather not re-see. You can take your time coming back, and not just because we’ve got hours ahead of us.”

Ahmare looked down at where they had unexpectedly connected. His palm dwarfed hers, but the warmth of his skin was exactly the same as her own.

His thumb, his nail-less, bruised thumb, stroked over her twice.