Black Dagger Brotherhood 11 - Lover at Last (129 page)

to show your back to a Chosen, and he figured the display of protocol couldn’t hurt.

Closing the door behind him, he leaned back against it. The only person he wanted to see was the

one guy in the house who had no interest in—

“What’s going on?”

Blay’s voice was such a shock that he figured he’d imagined it. Except then the male himself

stepped into the doorway of the second-floor sitting room. As if he’d been waiting there all along.

Qhuinn rubbed his eyes and then started walking, his body seeking out the very thing he had been

praying for.

“She’s losing it,” Qhuinn heard himself say in a dead voice.

Blay murmured something in return, but it didn’t register.

Funny, the miscarriage hadn’t seemed real until this moment. Not until he told Blay.

“I’m sorry?” Qhuinn said, aware that the guy seemed to be waiting for an answer.

“Is there anything I can do?”

So funny. Qhuinn had always felt as though he’d come out of his mother’s womb an adult. Then

again, there had never been any cootchie-coo crap for him, no darling-little-boy stuff, no hugs when he hurt himself, no coddling when he was frightened. As a result, whether it was character or the way he’d been brought up, he’d never regressed. Nothing to go back to there.

Yet it was in the voice of a child that he said, “Make it stop?”

As if Blay alone had the power to work a miracle.

And then…the male did.

Blay extended his arms wide, offering the only haven Qhuinn had ever known.

“Make it stop?”

Blay’s body started to shake as Qhuinn uttered those words: After all these years, he’d seen the

guy in a lot of moods and in a lot of circumstances. Never like this, though. Never…so completely

and utterly ruined.

Never like a child, lost.

In spite of his need to keep really and truly far away from any emotional anything, his arms

opened of their own accord.

As Qhuinn stepped in against him, the fighter’s body seemed smaller and frailer than it actually

was. And the arms that wound around Blay’s waist simply lay against him as if there were no strength in the muscles.

Blay held them both up.

And he expected Qhuinn to pull back quickly. Usually, the guy couldn’t handle any kind of intense

connection other than a sexual one for longer than a second and a half.

Qhuinn didn’t. He seemed prepared to stand in the doorway to the sitting room forever.

“Come here,” Blay said, drawing the male inside and shutting the door. “Over on the couch.”

Qhuinn followed behind, shitkickers shuffling instead of marching.

When they got to the sofa, they sat down facing each other, their knees touching. As Blay looked

over, the resonant sadness touched him so deeply, he couldn’t stop his hand from reaching out and

stroking that black hair—

Abruptly, Qhuinn curled in against him, just collapsed, that body folding in half and all but

pouring into Blay’s lap.

There was a part of Blay that recognized this was dangerous territory. Sex was one thing—and

hard enough to handle, fuck him very much. This quiet space? Was potentially devastating.

Which was precisely why he’d gotten the hell out of that bedroom the day before.

The difference tonight, however, was that he was in control of this. Qhuinn was the one seeking

comfort, and Blay could withdraw it or give it depending on how he felt: Being relied on was

something altogether different from receiving—or needing.

Blay was good with being relied on. There was a kind of safety in it—a certainty, a control. It

was not the same as falling into the abyss. And hell, if anyone would know that, it was him. God knew he’d spent years down there.

“I would do anything to change this,” Blay said while stroking Qhuinn’s back. “I hate that you’re

going through…”

Oh, words were so damned useless.

They stayed that way for the longest time, the quiet of the room forming a kind of cocoon.

Periodically, the antique clock on the mantel chimed, and then after a long while, the shutters began to descend over the windows.

“I wish there was something I could do,” Blay said as the steel panels locked into place with a

chunk
.

“You probably have to go.”

Blay let that one stand. The truth was not something he wanted to share: Wild horses, loaded guns,

crowbars, fire hoses, trampling elephants…even an order from the king himself could not have pulled him away.

And there was a part of him that got angry over that. Not at Qhuinn, but at his own heart. The

trouble was, you couldn’t argue with your nature—and he was learning that. In the breakup with

Saxton. In coming out to his mom. In this moment here.

Qhuinn groaned as he lifted his torso up, and then scrubbed his face. When he dropped his hands,

his cheeks were red and so were his eyes, but not because he was crying.

Undoubtedly his decade’s allotment of tears had come out the night before as he’d wept in relief

that he’d saved a father’s life.

Had he known that Layla wasn’t doing well then?

“You know what the hardest thing is?” Qhuinn asked, sounding more like himself.

“What?” God knew there was a lot to choose from.

“I’ve seen the young.”

The fine hairs on the back of Blay’s neck tingled. “What are you talking about.”

“The night the Honor Guard came for me, and I almost died—remember?”

Blay coughed a little, the memory as raw and vivid as something that had happened an hour ago.

And yet Qhuinn’s voice was even and calm, like he was referencing an evening out at a club or

something. “Ah, yeah. I remember.”

I gave you CPR at the side of the goddamn road,
he thought.

“I went up to the Fade—” Qhuinn frowned. “Are you okay?”

Oh, sure, doing great. “Sorry. Keep going.”

“I went up there. I mean, it was like…what you hear about. The white.” Qhuinn scrubbed his face

again. “So white. Everywhere. There was a door, and I went up to it—I knew if I turned the knob I

was going in, and I was never coming out. I reached for the thing…and that’s when I saw her. In the door.”

“Layla,” Blay interjected, feeling like his chest had been stabbed.

“My daughter.”

Blay’s breath caught. “Your…”

Qhuinn looked over. “She was…blond. Like Layla. But her eyes—” He touched next to his own.

“—they were mine. I stopped reaching forward when I saw her—and then suddenly, I was back on

the ground at the side of the road. Afterward, I had no clue what it was all about. But then, like, so much later, Layla goes into her needing and comes to me, and everything fell into place. I was like…

this is
supposed
to happen. It felt like fate, you know. I never would have lain with Layla otherwise. I did it only because I
knew
we were going to have a little girl.”

“Jesus.”

“I was wrong, though.” He rubbed his face a third time. “I was totally fucking wrong—and I

really wish I hadn’t gone down this path. Biggest regret of my life—well, second-biggest, actually.”

Blay had to wonder what the hell could be worse than where the guy was at.

What can I do?
Blay wondered to himself.

Qhuinn’s eyes searched his face. “Do you really want me to answer that?”

Apparently he’d spoken out loud. “Yeah, I do.”

Qhuinn’s dagger hand reached out and cupped the side of Blay’s jaw. “You sure?”

The vibe instantly shifted. The tragedy was still very much with them, but that powerful sexual

undertow came back between one heartbeat and the next.

Qhuinn’s stare started to burn, his lids dropping low. “I need…an anchor right now. I don’t know

how else to explain it.”

Blay’s body responded instantly, his blood spiking to the boiling point, his cock thickening,

growing long.

“Let me kiss you.” Qhuinn groaned as he leaned in. “I know I don’t deserve it, but please…it’s

what you can do for me. Let me feel you….”

Qhuinn’s mouth brushed his own. Came back for more. Lingered.

“I’ll beg for it.” More with the caress of those devastating lips. “If that’s what it takes. I don’t give a fuck, I’ll beg….”

Somehow, that wasn’t going to be necessary.

Blay allowed his head to get tilted so there was more room to maneuver, Qhuinn’s hand on his

face both gentle and in command. And then there was more of the mouth-on-mouth, slow, drugging,

inexorable.

“Let me inside you again, Blay….”

THIRTY-NINE

Assail got home about half an hour before dawn. Parking his Range Rover in the garage, he had

to wait until the door went down to get out.

He had always considered himself an intellectual—and not in the
glymera
sense of the

word, where one sat tall with self-importance and pontificated about literature, philosophy,

or spiritual matters. It was more that there was little in life he could not apply his reasoning to and understand in its totality.

What in the hell had that woman done at Benloise’s?

Clearly, she was a professional, with both the proper equipment and know-how, and a practiced

approach to infiltration. He also suspected she’d either gotten plans to the house or had been in there previously. So efficient. So decisive. And he was qualified to judge: He’d followed her the whole

time she’d been inside, ghosting through the window she’d opened, sticking to the shadows.

Tracking her from behind.

But this he did not understand: What kind of thief went to the trouble of breaking into a secured

house, finding a safe, burning it open, and discovering plenty of portable wealth to lift…but didn’t take anything? Because he’d seen full well what she’d had access to; as soon as she’d left the study, he’d hung back, freed the shelving section as she had done, and used his own penlight to glance in the safe.

Just to find out what, if anything, she’d left behind.

When he’d come back out into the house proper, avoiding any pools of light, he’d watched as

she’d stood for a moment in the front hall, hands on her hips, head rotating slowly, as if she were considering her options.

And then she’d gone over to what had to be a Degas…and pivoted the statue only an inch or so to

the left.

It made no sense.

Now, it
was
possible that she’d gone into the safe looking for something specific that was not in fact there. A ring, a bauble, a necklace. A computer chip, a SanDisk, a document like a last will and testament or an insurance policy. But the delay in the hall had not been characteristic of her previous alacrity…and then she’d moved the statue?

The only explanation was that it had to be a deliberate violation of Benloise’s property.

The problem was, when it came to vendettas against inanimate objects, it was hard to find much

significance in her actions. Knock the statue over, then. Take the damn thing. Spray-paint it with

obscenities. Beat it with a crowbar so it was ruined. But a minuscule turn that was barely noticeable?

The only conclusion he could draw was that it was a kind of message. And he didn’t like that at

all.

It suggested she might know Benloise personally.

Assail opened the driver’s-side door—

“Oh, God,” he hissed, recoiling.

“We were wondering how long you were going to stay in there.”

As the dry voice drifted over, Assail got out and looked around the five-car garage in distaste.

The stench was somewhere between three-day-old roadkill, spoiled mayonnaise, and denatured

cheap perfume.

“Is that what I think it is?” he asked the cousins, who were standing in the doorway from the

mudroom.

Thank the Scribe Virgin, they came forward and closed the way into the house—or that hideous

smell was going to flood the interior.

“It’s your drug dealers. Well, part of them, at any rate.”

What. The. Hell.

Assail’s long strides took him in the direction Ehric was pointing to—the far corner, where there

were three dark green plastic bags thrown in a heap without care. Getting down on his haunches, he

loosened the yellow tie of one, yanked apart the neck, and…

Met the sightless eyes of a human male he recognized.

The still-animated head had been severed cleanly from the spine about three inches below the

jawline, and had oriented itself so that it could look out of its loosey-goosey coffin. The dark hair and ruddy skin were marked with black, glossy blood, and if the smell had been bad over by the car, up

close and personal it made his eyes water and his throat tighten in protest.

Not that he cared.

He opened the other two bags and, using the Hefty plastic as a skin barrier, rolled the other heads into the same position.

Then he sat back and stared at the three of them, watching those mouths gape impotently for air.