The Thief (Black Dagger Brotherhood #16)(27)

As Sola became aware of a pressure on her own mouth, she realized she had put her palm to her face to keep her reaction in.

How had this happened? she thought. How had he gone from being that healthy, strong man…to this?

Then again, cancer was a fucker.

“Talk to him,” Doc Jane prompted quietly, before raising her voice. “Hello, Assail. You have a visitor.”

As if he were a hundred years old in a nursing home.

Sola lowered her hand and tried to find something, anything, to say.

“It’s still him in there,” Doc Jane whispered. “The physical body may seem different, but the soul remains the same.”

“Oh, God…what do I say?”

“If you were lying there, what would you like to hear?”

I love you. You are not alone. I am not going to leave you. As her heart pounded and she felt sick to her stomach, those three simple sentences went through her mind over and over again. I love you…

Back when he had been healthy and she had been centered, when time had seemed like a river without beginning or end, it had been so important to keep herself from saying those words. Now? Impending death wiped out all that self-protection and that illusion of choice and free will, giving her a courage she had lacked.

Forcing herself to go around to him, she reached out to take his hand—

Frowning, she looked back. “Why is he restrained?”

“It was for his safety and ours—”

Without warning, Assail’s lids popped open and he looked at her—and Sola gasped. His silvery eyes were dilated so wide, there was no color around the pupils, and the sclera was red, as if his skull had filled up with blood and drowned out the white.

As he stared through the pain of his suffering, he began to pant, his hollow chest pumping up and down and his arms rising against the binds that kept them in place.

Sola took his hand and squeezed his cold fingers. “Assail? I’ve missed you.”

His mouth moved as if he wanted to speak, but nothing came out. Instead, his response was a single crystalline tear that formed in the corner of his eye…and dropped silently onto the pillow.

“Assail,” she begged. “Can you stay with me? Don’t go now. Stay here with me for a little while?”

She had no idea whether he could see out of those eyes, but the doctor was right. He knew it was her. He absolutely knew she had come.





THIRTEEN


“You’re hurt, my man.”

Instead of responding to Butch’s co-dependency, V leaned forward between the front seats of the Hummer. “Yo, Q, this piece of shit go any faster?”

Qhuinn shot a glare over his shoulder. “We’re doing seventy in a forty-five. And I just blew through two red lights. This is not the Millennium Falcon—what else do you want.”

“Cut through the park up here. Just punch over the curb and plow through the bitch—”

“Next time, you drive. Until then, shut up.”

Sitting back, V crossed his arms over his chest and refused to meet the cop’s annoyingly steady stare—which was being beamed across the backseat like a laser. Instead, he glared out at the small, chic shops they were tooling by. When his upper arm burned, he repositioned the damn thing, and then had to move it yet again.

So yeah, fine, the cop might have a point, but V wasn’t going to see what was doing with his biceps, that was for damn sure.

At least not in front of witnesses. Besides, there was no blood—and the sleeve on his leather jacket wasn’t even broken. So what could possibly be wrong under there?

As his cell phone went off, he checked the text and hid a grimace as that arm of his let out another holler. “Wrath is ready for us.”

“Everyone’s coming in?” Blay asked from the passenger seat up front.

“Yeah, even the Bastards.” V put his phone away. “So can you drive faster there, Grandma?”

Qhuinn bared his fangs in the rearview mirror. “Put a patch on, asshole, if you can’t handle being without your nicotine.”

As Qhuinn turned up the Guns N’ Roses, V wanted to lob a fuck-off with plenty of spin on it at the brother, but it was hard to argue with the logic. He was, in fact, pissy because he was jonesing for a cigarette, and by the way, he couldn’t wait until Qhuinn got off this rock kick he was on. How about some Bryson Tiller, FFS.

Butch elbowed him in the wound, making him hide a groan. “Take this,” the cop said.

As V’s vision checkerboarded on him, he grabbed whatever the cop was offering. Wait, Nicorette?

“When did you start this?” V asked as he popped a piece of gum out of its plastic tile.

“About a month ago. I won’t smoke in front of Marissa, it’s too nasty. But you know, old habits die hard, and lately, I’ve been stressed the hell out.”

V put the square in his mouth and gave his molars a workout. The taste wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t Wrigley’s, either. What mattered was that after a little bit, he did feel considerably less like playing target practice with their driver, true? And yeah, sure, he could have dematerialized to the Audience House, but Butch, as a half-breed, couldn’t ghost out, and V never felt right about deserting the guy during transports.

“You got any more of that?” he asked.