Lover Mine (41 page)

Well, wasn’t this going to be the test.

If the kid went in and just partied, Lash had been wrong about the fucker’s smarts . . . and the Omega had gotten himself nothing other than a good lay. But if Lash was right, and the SOB had more to him than that, the party was going to get interesting.

Lash drew his lapels closer to the raw meat that was now his neck and tried to ignore how jel he was. He’d been in the sweet spot where that kid was. Reveled in the I’m-so-specials and assumed that glow would last forever. But whatever. If the Omega was willing to kick his own flesh and blood to the curb, this previously human piece of shit wasn’t going to last long.

When one of the lushes inside stared out the window in Lash’s direction, he supposed he was taking a chance getting this close to the hub, but he didn’t give a crap. He had nothing to lose, and wasn’t really looking forward to spending the rest of his days as nothing more than animated beef jerky.

Ugly and weak and leaky was not hot.

As the cold wind made his teeth rattle, he thought of Xhex and warmed himself with the memories. On some level, he couldn’t believe that his time with her had been mere days ago. Felt more like ages since he’d had her under him. For fuck’s sake, finding that first lesion on his wrist had been the beginning of the end . . . he just hadn’t known it at the time.

Just a scratch.

Yeah, right.

Lifting his hand to push at his hair, he hit the bill of the baseball cap and was reminded that he had nothing to fuss with anymore. All he had left up there was a bone dome.

If he’d had more energy, he would have started ranting and raving at the unfairness and the cruelty of his decaying destiny. Life wasn’t supposed to be like this. He wasn’t supposed to be looking in from the outside. He had always been the focus, the driver, the special one.

For some stupid reason, he thought of John Matthew. When the motherfucker had come into the training program for soldiers, he’d been a particularly small pretrans with nothing but a Brotherhood name and a star scar on his chest. He’d been the perfect target to ostracize and Lash had gotten off on riding the kid hard.

Man, back then, he’d had no idea what it was like to be the odd man out. How it made you feel like worthless crap. How you looked at the other people who had it going on and would trade anything to be in with them.

Good thing he hadn’t had a clue how it was. Or he might have thought twice about fucking with the cocksucker.

And here and now, leaning against the shaggy, cold bark of an oak tree and watching through the windows of the farmhouse as some other golden boy lived his life, he felt his plans shifting.

If it was the last thing he did, he was going to take that little shit down.

It was even more important than Xhex.

That the guy had dared to mark Lash for death wasn’t the driver. It was the need to send a message to his father. He was, after all, a rotting apple that didn’t fall far from the tree, and payback was a bitch.

“T
hat’s Bella’s old house,” Xhex said after she took form in a meadow beside John Matthew.

As he nodded, she looked around at the pastoral spread. Bella’s white farmhouse with its wraparound porch and its red chimneys was picture-perfect in the moonlight, and it seemed a shame that the place was left empty with nothing but exterior security lights on.

The fact that its outbuilding had a Ford F- 150 parked in its gravel drive and windows that were glowing seemed to make the sense of desertion even more acute.

“Bella was the one who first found you?”

John made an equivocal motion with his hand and pointed over to another little house on the lane. As he started to sign and then stopped himself, his frustration over the communication barrier was obvious.

“Someone in that house . . . you knew them and they put you in touch with Bella?”

He nodded as he reached into his jacket and brought out what appeared to be a handmade bracelet. Taking it from him, she saw that symbols in the Old Language had been carved into the hide.

“Tehrror.” When he touched his chest, she said, “Your name? But how did you know?”

He touched his head, then shrugged.

“It came to you.” She focused on the smaller house. There was a pool in the back and she sensed that his memories were sharpest there, because every time his eyes passed over that terrace, his emotional grid fired up, a switchboard with a lot of circuits flaring.

He’d come here at first to protect someone. Bella had not been the reason.

Mary, she thought. Rhage’s
shellan
, Mary. But how had they met?

Odd . . . that was a blank wall. He was shutting her off from that part.

“Bella got in touch with the Brotherhood and Tohrment came for you.”

When he nodded again, she gave him back the bracelet, and while he fingered the symbols, she marveled at the relativity of time. Since they’d left the mansion, only an hour had passed, but she felt as though they’d spent a year together.

God, he’d given her more than she’d ever expected . . . and now she knew precisely why he’d been so helpful as she’d flipped out in the OR.

He’d endured a hell of a lot, having not so much lived through his early life as been dragged through it.

The question was, How had he gotten lost to the human world in the first place? Where were his parents? The king had been his
whard
when he’d been a pretrans—that was what his papers had said when she’d first met him in ZeroSum. She’d assumed his mother had died, and the visit to the bus station didn’t disprove that . . . but there were holes in the story. Some of which she got the impression were deliberate, others of which he didn’t seem to be able to fill.

With a frown, she sensed his father was still very much with him, and yet he didn’t appear to have ever known the guy.

“You’re taking me to one last place?” she murmured.

He seemed to take a final look about and then he poofed off and she followed him, thanks to all the blood of his that was in her system.

When they resumed form in front of a stunning modern house, his sadness overwhelmed him to such a degree that his emotional superstructure actually started to cave in on itself. With force of will, however, he managed to stop the disintegration in time, before it couldn’t be righted.

Once your grid collapsed, you were cooked. Lost to your inner demons.

Which made her think of Murhder. On the day that he had learned her truth, she could remember exactly how his emotional construct had appeared to her: The steel girders that were the basis of mental health had been nothing but a crumbled mess.

She had been the only one who hadn’t been surprised when he went insane and took off.

With a nod to her, John walked up to the formal front door, put in a key and opened the way in. As a draft ushered out to meet them, she could smell the dust and the damp, indicating that this was another structure that was empty. But there was nothing rotten inside, unlike John’s former apartment building.

As he turned on the light in the foyer, she nearly gasped. On the wall, to the left of the door, was a scroll proclaiming in the Old Language that this was the home of the Brother Tohrment and his mated
shellan
, Wellesandra.

Which explained why it pained John so much to be here. Wellesandra’s
hellren
wasn’t the only one who had saved the pretrans from the projects.

The female had mattered to John. A helluva lot.

John walked down the hall and flicked on more lights as he went, his emotions a combination of bittersweet affection and roaring pain. When they came to a spectacular kitchen, Xhex went over to the table in the alcove.

He had sat here, she thought, putting her hands on the back of one of the chairs . . . on his first night in this house, he had sat here.

“Mexican food,” she murmured. “You were so afraid of offending them. But then . . . Wellesandra . . .”

Like a bloodhound following a fresh trail, Xhex tracked what she sensed of his memories. “Wellesandra served you ginger rice. And . . . pudding. You felt full for the first time and your stomach didn’t hurt and you . . . you were so gateful you didn’t know how to handle it.”

When she looked across the way at John, his face was pale and his eyes a bit too shiny and she knew he was back in his little body, sitting at the table, all curled into himself . . . becoming overwhelmed at the first kindness anyone had shown him in a very long time.

A footstep out in the hall brought her head up and she realized Qhuinn was still with them, the guy loitering about, his bad mood a tangible shadow around him.

Well, he didn’t have to tag along any longer. This was the end of the road, the final chapter in John’s story that pretty much caught her up-to-date. And unfortunately, it meant by all which was right and proper, they should go back to the mansion . . . where no doubt John would make her eat some more and try to get her to feed again.

She didn’t want to return there, though, not yet. In her mind, she’d decided to take one night off, so these were her last few hours before she got on the vengeance trail . . . and lost this soft connection between her and John, this profound understanding they now had of each other.

Because she wasn’t going to fool herself: The sad reality was the powerful tie that linked them was nonetheless so fragile, she didn’t doubt it was going to snap once the present came back into better focus than the past.

“Qhuinn, will you excuse us, please.”

The guy’s mismatched eyes shot over to John, and a series of hand motions got traded between them.

“Fuckin’ A,” Qhuinn spat before turning on his heel and marching out the front door.

After the slam finished echoing through the house, she stared at John. “Where did you sleep?”

When he swept his hand to a corridor, she went with him past many rooms that had modern fixtures and antique art. The combination made the place feel like an art museum you could live in and she explored a little, ducking her head into the open doors of parlors and bedrooms.

John’s crib was all the way at the other end of the house, and as she walked in to it, she could only imagine the culture shock. Squalor to splendor, all in the change of a zip code: Unlike the crappy studio apartment, this was a navy blue haven with sleek furniture, a marble bathroom, and a carpet that was as thick and full as a marine’s brush cut.

Plus it had a sliding glass door that led out onto a private terrace.

John went over and opened the closet, and she looked over his strong, heavy arm to the small clothes that hung on wooden hangers.

As he stared at the shirts and fleeces and pants, his shoulders were tight and one of his hands was curled into a fist. He was sorry about something he’d done or the way he’d acted and it didn’t have anything to do with her. . . .

Tohr. It was about Tohr.

He was regretting the way things had been lately between them.

“Talk to him,” she said softly. “Tell him what’s doing. You’ll both feel better.”

John nodded and she could sense his resolve sharpening.

God, she wasn’t quite sure how it happened—well, the mechanics were pretty damn simple, but what was surprising was the fact that once again, she found herself going over and hugging him, her arms wrapping around his waist from behind. Laying her cheek between his shoulder blades, she was glad when she felt his hands covering hers.

He communicated in so many different ways, didn’t he. And sometimes touch was better than words for saying what you meant.

In the silence, she drew him back to the bed and they both sat down.

As she just stared at him, he mouthed,
What?

“You sure you want me to go there?” When he nodded, she looked him right in the eye. “I know you left something out. I can sense it. There’s a gap between the orphanage and that apartment building.”

Not one facial muscle moved or even twitched on him and he didn’t blink, either. But the tells of a male who was good at covering up his reactions were irrelevant. She knew what she knew about him.

“It’s okay, I’m not going to ask. And I’m not going to press.”

His faint blush was something she would remember long after she was gone . . . and the thought of leaving him was what brought her fingertips to his lips. As he jerked in surprise, she focused on his mouth.

“I want to give you something of me,” she said in a low, deep voice. “It’s not about making the score even, though. It’s just because I want to.”

After all, it would have been great if she could have taken him to her places and walked him through her life, but his knowing more about her past was just going to make her suicide mission harder for him: however she felt about John, she was going after her captor and she wasn’t about to fool herself on the odds of her surviving that showdown.

Lash had tricks.

Bad tricks that he did bad things with.

Memories of the bastard came back to her, horrible ones that made her thighs tremble, ugly ones that nonetheless served to push her into something that she might not really be ready for. But she couldn’t go to her grave with Lash having been her last.

Not when she had the one male she’d ever love in front of her.

“I want to be with you,” she said hoarsely.

John’s shocked blue eyes traced her face like he was looking for signs that he might be reading her wrong. And then a hot, hard lust broke through all his emotions, shattering them and leaving nothing behind but a full-blooded male’s urge to mate.

To his credit, he did his best to beat back the instinct and hold on to some semblance of rationality. But all that meant was that she was the one who ended the battle between sense and sensibility—by putting her mouth against his.

Oh . . . God, his lips were soft.