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

When he reached out to her, she took a sharp step back, and the sensation of something penetrating her flesh made her look down at herself.

She had gone through the glass panels that ran as a safety railing around the edge of the terrace. In all the upset, she had become ghostly enough to find the spaces within the molecules.

“Go then,” Vishous said coldly. “Bury yourself in work. If you ever come up for air and want to talk, you know where to find me.”

And there it was, she thought, the condescension and reserve she knew so well. Vishous was back behind his gates, holed up and encapsulated, removed even as he stood right in front of her.

“You’re so damned superior,” she muttered.

“I’m the son of a fucking deity. You want me to be average?”

She stared past his shoulder at all those lit candles. Those “toys” of his. That rack. “Just so you know, I wish I had never treated you back at St. Francis. I wish I had been off that night when you came in.”

“Well, that’s one last thing we can agree on then. Cheers to us.”

They both turned away at the same time, he to go back into his den of iniquity, she to disappear.

For a moment, it was tempting to just let herself drop, to call her corporeal form into being fully and allow gravity to do its thing, grabbing her and snapping her down to the pavement. But the impact would only matter for however long she kept herself intact. As soon as her hold on herself lapsed and she became invisible, she had to believe she would be back to non-normal.

Or perhaps she would warp on contact with the ground. Or maybe her exterior would crack and fly apart, leaving her ghostly core uncovered.

She wasn’t going to find out. Of all the things she would never allow herself to do, at the top of the list was getting broken by a man. A male. Whatever.

There was pain, yes. Disappointment in spades. A sense that this was either a bad dream or a case of her destiny having followed the wrong set of MapQuest directions.

But she refused to let this sink her. V was being utterly unreasonable, unfair, and had his head up his ass if he thought he could blame her for their problems.

As she traveled back to the Brotherhood compound, her first thought was to go to the training center and get right to work. There were always drug orders to put in and records to update and then that appointment with Layla and her young. But instead, she landed herself at the Pit’s front door and hoped that Fritz was finished with the rugs.

No such luck.

When she walked in—or rather through—the entrance, she caught the old-fashioned, vaguely minty spice of Spic and Span, and sure enough, the doggen had switched his black jacket for a full body apron and was up to his elbows scrubbing the kitchen sink.

“Mistress!” He seemed confused as he turned to her, yellow rubber gloves held up at the elbows as if he were a surgeon about to go into a patient’s chest cavity. “You are back?”

“Just to pick up a few things. Don’t mind me.”

Fritz bowed so low, his jowls nearly brushed the tops of his polished black shoes. “I could have packed for you if you two are staying overday—”

“Don’t worry about a thing. The floors and kitchen are much more important.”

His smile was of relief and pleasure, making the lie worth it. The truth was, she didn’t care about the floors or the kitchen. The roof or the chimney—did the Pit even have a chimney? It was no longer her concern.

“I’ll just get my things,” she murmured.

“Mayhap I shall just help you—”

“No.” She recast her tone. “This is private.”

“Oh, but of course, madam.” The butler blushed a little. “I shall carry on then.”

“Thank you, Fritz. As always.”

While he happily resumed his scrubbing, she marched down the hall like Joan of Arc, all loaded for bear. When she got to the doorway of what had been her bedroom, she didn’t even hesitate, she went over to—

Jane slowed. Stopped. Stared at the bed with its messy lineup of pillows and wrinkled duvet. There was a quantum physics textbook on one bed stand, his not hers, and a glass half filled with water, hers not his, on the other.

It was impossible not to think of the day before, when she had filled up that tumbler in the kitchen and come down here as she always did.

You rarely knew when you were doing something for the last time. No, that realization usually came later.

After she’d gotten her H2O, she remembered sitting on her side of the bed and hanging her head because she had been so exhausted. Her shoulders and the back of her neck had been on fire from tension, and her hamstrings had been aching from her having been bent over Tohrment’s lower leg. He’d popped his Achilles tendon again and she’d had to fix it in surgery. Pretty normal course of things—but for the fact that what should have been no more than an hour had taken three because of a bone anomaly and tons of scar tissue.

She had flopped back and tried to hold herself corporeal because she’d been hoping V would unplug from his computers and come and join her. In the end, the tantalizing peace that fading out offered had proven irresistible, and she had let herself go, disappearing so that the only trace of her was a dent in those covers, the place where her weight and her body had once been.

“Yeah, because I was helping his Brotherhood,” she muttered as she went to their closet and grabbed a duffel.