The Wolf (Black Dagger Brotherhood: Prison Camp #2)(53)

The other had been cut off long ago—but in his brain, his wires got twisted. Sharp things in that area opened up a floodgate of pain, old pain, the kind that was so toxic, you gagged.

This was where he had to go, he realized.

He’d thought it was about simple restraints and submission tonight, but . . . no, it was deeper than that. He had to go to the seat of his weakness, further down from being possessive over his roommate, further still than anything that had to do with conventional masculinity.

He had to go back to the beginning.

The origin story of his pain.

Only by glimpsing at the core of the hurt could he rebuild his strength. And maybe not get so fucking rattled over what was really nothing.

Jane in the white latex mask turned her head to him, nothing but lips and eyes and a skull. In the back of his mind, he recognized what the pause was all about. She was giving him a chance to say the word that would stop all of this . . . the three-syllable word that would get him out, no more restraints, no more mask, his beautiful female holding him, soothing him, as she removed the clips one by one.

But no. He wanted to go into the mouth of the beast. He wanted to open up the coffers that were filled with sacred, tarnished terror from the abuse he had suffered. He needed to release the pressure that had gathered there, and there was only one way to do that.

He needed blood to flow.

Glancing over, he stared at his roommate who was not really there.

Sorry, Butch, he thought at the apparition of his memory. You have to go. This is too private, even for you.

As much as V needed the cop in his life, as close as he was to the brother, there was one and only one person on the planet who was going to see this part of him. And of course, the vision nodded—although that acquiescence wasn’t just because V was doing the visualizing. The real Butch would have understood the way things had to be.

Not Really There Cop got up and lifted his hand, as if he were saying goodbye to Jane, as if the two of them had come together and planned this. Then he nodded at V with a grave kind of love in his face. When he turned away and opened the door out—it appeared that an Almost Marissa was waiting just outside in the corridor, a worried look on her face as if she were hoping V was okay, and worried that maybe he might not be.

She also nodded at Jane and lifted her hand to Vishous. I love you, she seemed to mouth to him.

“I love you both, too,” he said to the couple.

Then the door was closing and the outside world was closed off and it was just Jane and him . . . and the black hole in the center of his soul, that vast barren landscape that she had done so much to heal, but which nobody and nothing, not even her true love, could eradicate.

Into the mouth of the beast, he thought. Swallowed whole and digested.

And after that? He would feel better, like a lancing of an infection had occurred.

V looked back at Jane. Except she wasn’t Jane. She was the gate-keeper of his nightmare poison, and he needed her to open that fucking vault.

Yet she waited. And waited. In the great, terrible pause, his anger grew inside his skin, her anonymity making it possible for him to set other faces to hers, other visages that belonged to enemies that had nothing to do with the Lessening Society and the war, and everything to do with wanting to break him down when he’d been a young.

Like that of his sire, the Bloodletter.

Baring his fangs, V growled, “Fuck you—”

He screamed so loud, his own ears hurt.





Rio had wanted a shower during her field trip to that clean, yet ancient bathroom. She didn’t get one, but the toothbrushing had been transformative. And now she was alone in the hospital bed, a stalk of incense burning next to her, the patient at the other end of the lineup of beds breathing roughly behind the curtains. The nurse in the robes had been back when they’d returned, but she was gone now. And so was Luke.

It had been clear after he’d resettled her on the horizontal, and then had a tense conversation with the woman in the far corner, that he hadn’t wanted to leave. They had both had to go, however.

Luke had told her he’d be back soon. Whatever that meant.

Lying on her side, because it was the only option with her head wound, she was exhausted but hyperaware, listening for clues, looking for shadows among the supply stacks. With every minute that went by, she was getting stronger—maybe it was the pep talks she was giving herself, maybe it was her commitment to her job. Maybe it was the fact that she could hear noises above her . . . movement, things passing from left to right, on wheels. Carts, she decided.

No voices, though. And she couldn’t say that she heard footsteps.

She really had to get out of this bed and—

The door opened, and she knew by the size of the figure that entered that Luke had come back—oh, and he had a rolling cart with him, like something you’d deliver meals on in a nursing home. Maybe more of the same was what she was hearing overhead? He was pulling it with him, the bump-bump, whrrrrrrrrrring of the sets of wheels loud in the dim quiet.

He didn’t speak until he was in range, and he kept his voice down when he did. She wasn’t sure whether it was for the other patient’s benefit—or because he was hiding from someone. Then again, she did not belong here, so he might well be protecting her.

Or himself for harboring an interloper.

“I brought the shower to you,” he said. “And food is on the way.”