The Shadows (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #13)(7)

On a sagging curse, Rhage coughed and breathed deep a couple of times. Shit. His beast had a hair trigger on a good night, when he was well-fed, well-f*cked, and properly exercised. But when someone tried to kill him?

Even if there might have been a good goddamn reason for it?

Clearly, the Shadow had bonded with the Chosen. ’Cuz that reaction had male hormones all over it.

“I’m sorry,” Trez mumbled. “I don’t know what came over me. Swear on my brother’s life.”

“Why didn’t you”—Rhage tripped over his own words—“tell us you bonded with her?”

There was a pause. Then Trez said, “I … shit.”

V added a string of curse words. “You gonna stay put, Shadow, or am I slicing the front of your throat open?”

“I’m good. Swear.”

A moment later, V came over. “Rhage…? My brother?”

Rhage put his palms to his face and let himself slide off the vertical until he was ass-on-the-floor. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.

They already had a lesser in the club.

His beast was the last kind of patron they needed.

Breathe in.

Breathe out—

“What’s going on with him?” Trez asked.

“Don’t ever aggress on that motherf*cker,” was the last thing Rhage heard before the world receded like smoke in a draft.





THREE


In the most sacred hall of the s’Hisbe’s Grand Palace, s’Ex stood on the far side of a door that had no knob, no handle, hardly any seam to distinguish the panel from the wall it was set into.

On the far side, he could hear the infant crying, and the sound, that plaintive entreaty for help, aid, succor, went into his ears and through to his soul. His hand shook as he put it to the cool expanse. His daughter. His offspring. The only one he would probably ever have.

The infant was not alone in the ceremonial room. There was the high priest, AnsLai; the Chief Astrologer; and the Tretary, a position charged with witnessing and recording events such as this.

The baby had been wrapped in a pure white blanket of woven wool by the nursemaid before being taken in there and left behind with those three males.

To cry for a father who would not come to save her.

s’Ex’s heart pounded so violently the whites of his eyes registered the rhythmic pressure. He had not expected this reaction, but mayhap this precise fervor was why he had not been allowed to touch the child—or be alone with her. Ever since the Queen had given birth to her approximately six hours ago, he had been permitted to view her twice: once after she had been cleaned, and just now, as she had been rendered into that white marble room that had no windows and only one door … that locked from the inside.

The second of her birth had determined this, demanded this. That was what custom dictated. The stars had aligned in such a way that his daughter was not to be the heir to the throne, and thus she had to be …

Get in there! his heart screamed. Stop this, stop this before—

Silence.

Suddenly there was silence.

A sound like that of a wounded animal vibrated up his throat and out of his mouth, and s’Ex curled a fist, banging it into that door so hard, fissures formed in a star pattern, radiating outward from the point of impact.

Distraught and deadly, he knew he must needs retreat before he did something as unthinkable as what had just been done. Tripping over his black robing, he wheeled around and stumbled down the corridor. He was dimly aware of banging into the walls, his momentum bouncing him left and right, his shoulders slamming into the more slick white marble.

For some reason, he thought of a night many years before, at least two decades ago, when he had waited by the exit for TrezLath, the Anointed One, to come down and attempt to escape. Now he was doing what that male had done then.

Escaping.

Whilst in fact not freeing himself at all.

Unlike Trez, who had not been allowed to leave the palace, s’Ex, as the Queen’s executioner, was permitted to. He was also the one who was responsible for monitoring all comings and goings.

There would be no delays for him.

And that would save lives this night.

That silence, that horrible, resonant silence, cannibalized his mind as he wound through the maze of halls, nearing the very exit Trez had sought. That male, too, had been condemned, the position of the stars the moment he was born more dispositive than nature or nurture.

Those constellations, so distant, so unknown at the time of birth and unknowable in maturity, determined everything. Your status. Your work. Your worth.

And his daughter, like Trez, had been born to a portent that had been a death sentence.

Nine months they had awaited her birth, society coming to a kind of standstill with the Queen pregnant. Such fanfare, as there had been only one other pregnancy in the two centuries of the current monarch’s reign—and that had yielded the Princess. Of course, the fact that the current conception had been by the Queen’s executioner had been far less momentous and never publicly acknowledged. Better that it had been an aristocrat. A second cousin of royal blood. A male marked as significant by his birthing charts.

Or even better, some kind of immaculate miracle.

Alas, no. The sire had been he who had started as a servant and gained trust, access, and, much later, the sacred act of sex. But that was all largely insignificant in their matriarchal tradition; the male was as always a secondary afterthought. The result—the infant—and the mother were the most important.