Blood Vow (Black Dagger Legacy #2)(66)

“At least two nights, maybe three. But everyone will see me when I’m down there. Either because of my status or because I’ll put a gun to their head.”

“No coercion,” Mary warned grimly. “I can’t—we can’t have that.”

“Take Phury with you,” Wrath announced. “He has a way about him. He’s a good foil for you.”

“All right.” V nodded once. “As you wish, my Lord.”

“You’ll leave tomorrow?” Rhage demanded.

“No, right after I finish this cigarette. I already spoke to Jane, and I have a place to stay.”

“My brother—” Rhage started.

“No,” V cut in. “Don’t you dare thank me. This is a fucking nightmare and I hate it. I hate everything about this. But goddamn it, I’m going to do this right, no matter the outcome.”

There was a long pause and Rhage watched V’s eyes focus on some point about two feet in front of his face. It was clear the brother was already prioritizing things, making lists, thinking of what he had to accomplish.

Then Rhage looked around at the mess he’d made in the kitchen.

“Where is the uncle now?” he said roughly.

V talked through an exhale. “I put him up in a bolt-hole here in Caldie. He didn’t want to accept the digs, but I told him it was nonnegotiable. I can’t disclose where he is—there really can’t be any contact between the three of you right now. Lot of emotion.”

Rhage went over and righted the mangled table with Z’s help. The thing no longer sat square on the floor, one leg twisted and bent at an angle, the top cracked, one plank missing from where he’d punched it. He wanted to move the heavy expanse back into position, to have them all sit around it again, to return things to normal, but there was no future in that.

“Did you tell him …” Mary cleared her throat. “Did you tell him about us?”

V leaned against the wall and ran his black-gloved hand over his goatee. “I told him that Bitty was with a well-qualified and well-vetted foster family who was keeping her safe. I did not share any identifying information or mention the formal adoption. Unless he’s got a legal claim, there’s no reason to go into your private information.”

“What’s …” Mary rubbed her face. “What’s he like?”

Rhage got quiet, freezing in the process of picking up the chair he’d been in from where it had ended up across the room.

V just shrugged. “I’m going to find that out.”

Mary and Rhage took the GTO back to the mansion, the two of them quiet for most of the ride, their hands nonetheless linked except for when he had to shift. During the last leg of the journey, Mary stared out her window, the trees on the shoulder of the rural road a blur in the night, the moon overhead so bright that the headlights were unnecessary.

“I don’t know how to be when we see her,” Rhage said. “I mean, you know, how to be normal.”

“I don’t either.”

They’d decided it made no sense to tell her about the male showing up. What if he turned out to be a faker? How cruel would that be? And yet … how were they going to pretend to Bitty that everything was fine and nothing unusual was going on?

That was going to require acting skills far out of her league.

Mary’s stomach ache, which had begun riiiiiight after she had read that private message back in her office, got even worse as they started up the mansion’s drive, the ascent seeming to compress the unprocessed omelet and bagel, which she’d had at First Meal hours before, into a cement block.

As the great gray manse came into view, with its gargoyles and its countless windows and its towering, monolithic mass, she felt like she couldn’t breathe.

“Take your time parking,” she muttered as Rhage slowed to go around the winterized fountain in the center of the courtyard. “God …”

He eased in between Qhuinn’s second Hummer and V’s new R8. Turned off the engine and the lights. Even undid his seat belt. But neither of them made a move to get out. They just stared ahead, at the rolling, snow-dusted lawn that dipped down to the edge of the forest … at the drop to the valley below … at the show of stars above.

There was so much ugliness that she felt prepared to deal with. And by that, she didn’t mean that she was excited to see tragedy or disease or loss up close and personal. But she at least had frames of reference for all of that.

This?

Well, life was just full of surprises, wasn’t it.

And all things considered, she would have rather learned what winning the lottery was like. Or maybe try going around the world. Or becoming president of the United States.

But not this bungee cord of learning she wasn’t ever going to be a mom. And then finding out she was. And then having all of that taken away.

Potentially taken away, she reminded herself.

Plus on top of that, Bitty was in a damn wheelchair, still recovering from what they’d had to do to her at Havers’s.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go see her.”

They got out together and reunited at the trunk of the muscle car, Rhage putting his arm around her shoulders. As they came up to the fountain, she was sad that it had been all drained and tarped up: The gentle fall of the sparkling water was something she had come to associate with home. But winter in upstate New York did not offer the kind of climate where you wanted exposed exterior pipes to be full of H2O, even if the system was running.