The Thief (Black Dagger Brotherhood #16)(10)

Part of her didn’t want to go to the Commodore because it seemed like spying. Like something a girl, not a woman, would do. It also felt…too real. As if her mate actually had lied by omission and was in fact meeting someone else—

Screw it, she thought. Waiting around for him to come home was just too passive.

Besides, it was, literally, the work of a moment for her to get downtown: One of the advantages to being nonexistent at will was that travel was more than a binary choice. Courtesy of V’s mother, the Scribe Virgin, Jane now had ambulation, motorization, and mentalization to pick from, with the latter being similar to vampires’ dematerializing: Her process of disappearing and reappearing required the same sort of concentration and will, and she could do it anywhere, anytime, with no apparent limit to the distance.

Closing her eyes, she imagined herself as a breeze, a disturbance of air molecules, a draft. Nothingness. Lightness. A pane of glass.

It had always worked in the past.

Yup. Really. It…had.

Yeah, well, not tonight, she thought as she lifted her lids.

Rubbing the center of her chest, she went to the Pit’s door and let herself out in the event that Fritz finished with his Dyson and caught her standing there like an idiot. As she emerged into the night, the cold woof! of January’s frigid breath made her gasp and have to collect herself.

The cottage she thought of as her home was the carriage house of the main mansion, located across the courtyard from the dour, stone mountain-on-top-of-a-mountain where the Brotherhood, the fighters, and their mates lived. She, V, Butch, and Marissa had been staying in the two-bedroom, two-bath setup since their relationships had taken root, and she had come to think of the four of them as a little family unit.

Tilting her head, she stared up at the great gray vertical expanse of the mansion. There were gargoyles along the roofline, and three or four levels of diamond-pane windows, and shadows everywhere because of the various wings, levels, and dormers.

Where else would vampires live?

Shutting her lids again, she told herself she needed to get a grip—and her self-discipline came to the rescue. Becoming one with the air, she moved through the darkness in a swirl that, when she had first started doing this, had made her stomach queasy, but now was just the same as riding in a car.

Traveling through the night toward downtown, she was no substance, all existence, her thoughts and feelings, her soul, remaining intact even as her body was ether—which meant her pain and uncertainty, her anxiety, her stress, came with her.

Off the mountain, into the hills. Through the farm country. Over the suburbs. Past the old-fashioned apartment buildings, entering the urban core of skyscrapers, parking garages, and one-way streets.

The Commodore was a high-rise right on the Hudson River, a Nakatomi Plaza–worthy show of twenty or thirty floors of steel and glass—and she landed, like a superhero, on a terrace right at its top.

“Oh, thank God,” she muttered as she saw the darkened windows of the penthouse.

Vishous was not here with someone else. He hadn’t made a decision she was going to have to do something about. There was, as it turned out, no deception, just a misunderstanding on the part of the butler and a paranoia on her side that, if she were smart and wanted to keep her mating strong, she’d use as a warning shot across her bow. She probably had been too wrapped up in her work lately—which wouldn’t have been any kind of excuse for infidelity on V’s part, but certainly would explain this distance she now was recognizing between them.

And if she had been feeling connected to him, she wouldn’t have been so scared about all this.

Taking out her phone, she got over herself and shot Vishous a text: Hey, off work for two hours. Let’s hang!

Cheerful. Upbeat. Positive. Not hinting that she’d lost her damn mind for an instant and devolved into insecurity. Now, she just had to wait to see what he responded.

As time passed, and she got nothing back, her heart began to beat hard again—and she thought, holy crap, it was like she was sixteen and trying to get a boy in her algebra class to ask her out.

Cupping the phone in her palms, she kept waiting, not feeling the gusts of wind or the cold, not noticing the height that made the Hudson River seem like a stream, not dwelling on the near-miss.

Okay, fine, she was dwelling on that.

But hey, this was an opportunity for them. They needed to get away and be together. Maybe they could head up to Rehv’s Great Camp? She didn’t think of herself as a romantic person, but that old cedar-shingled Victorian with its stone hearths and view of the lake could be just the ticket. Snow everywhere, only the evergreens offering color. No pressures or responsibilities. They could cook their meals together and sleep side by side and re-forge that which had gotten eclipsed by nightly life.

Taking a deep breath, she felt a surge of…optimism? Happiness? She hadn’t had whatever it was in so long that she didn’t know how to readily define the warm buoyancy.

And yeah, that was probably another sign she needed to rebalance things.

When a response still didn’t come, she turned to face the river. The other side of Caldwell was a much quieter landscape, with low buildings that glowed instead of skyscrapers that twinkled.

Assail lived down the Hudson a little ways. On a peninsula in a glass house.

Or at least had lived there.

What was she going to do about him…

Light bloomed from behind her, and she wheeled around, putting a smile on her face. V was here and this was an opportunity—