Lover Reborn

From out of the corner of his eye, he watched Saxton settle in at the table, the brass lamp in front of him casting the most perfect glow over his face. Shiiiiiit, he looked like something out of a Ralph Lauren ad, with his buff-colored tweed jacket and his pointed pocket square and that button-down/sweater vest combo keeping his fucking liver cozy.

Meanwhile, Qhuinn was sporting hospital scrubs, bare feet. And sherry.

“So what’s the big project?” he asked again.

Saxton glanced over with a strange light in his eyes. “It’s a game changer, as you might say.”

“Ohhhh, supersecret king stuff.”

“Indeed.”

“Well, good luck with it. Looks like you’ve got enough to keep you busy for a while.”

“I’ll be at this for a month, maybe more.”

“What are you doing, rewriting the whole goddamn law?”

“Just a part of it.”

“Man, you make me love my job. I’d rather get shot at than do paperwork.” He poured himself a third cocksucking sherry and then tried not to look too much like a zombie as he headed for the door. “Have fun with it.”

“And you with your endeavors, dear cousin. I would be up there as well, but I have been given no time to accomplish too much.”

“You’ll get through it.”

“Indeed. I will.”

As Qhuinn nodded and then hit the stairs, he thought… Well, at least that exchange hadn’t been too bad. He hadn’t imagined anything X-rated. Or entertained visions of beating the motherfucker until he bled out all over his nice threads.

Progress. Yay.

Up on the second story, the double doors of the study were wide-open, and he paused when he got a gander at the size of the crowd. Holy crap… everyone was there. As in not just the Brothers and the fighters, but the shellans… and the staff?

There were literally forty people in the room, packed in like sardines around the pansy-ass furniture.

Then again, maybe it did make sense. After that goddamn sharpshooter attack, the king was back behind his desk, sitting on his throne, all but risen from the dead. Kind of warranted a celebration, he supposed.

Before stepping into the fray, he went to take another haul of the sherry, but one whiff of the shit in his nose and his goiter went no-go. Leaning to the side, he tossed the stuff out into a potted plant, left the glass on the hall table and—

The instant they saw him come through the door, everyone shut up. Sure as if there were a remote to the room and someone had muted the picture.

Qhuinn froze. Glanced down at himself in case he was flashing something indecent. Looked behind him in the event there was someone important coming up the stairs.

Then he looked around the room, wondering what he had missed—

In the great, yawning absence of sound and movement, Wrath braced himself against his queen’s arm and grunted as he rose to his feet. He had a bandage around his neck, and he looked a little pale, but he was alive… and wearing an expression so intense, Qhuinn felt like he was being physically enveloped.

And then the king put the hand that bore the black diamond ring of the race to his own chest, right in the middle, directly over his heart… and slowly, gingerly, with the help of his shellan, bent over at the waist.

To bow at Qhuinn.

As all the blood drained out of Qhuinn’s head, and he wondered what the fuck the most important vampire on the planet was doing, someone started clapping slowly.

Clap. Clap. Clap!

Others joined in, until the entire assembly, from Phury and Cormia, to Z and Bella and baby Nalla, to Fritz and his staff… to Vishous and Payne and their mates, to Butch and Marissa and Rehv and Ehlena… were clapping for him with tears unshed in their eyes.

Qhuinn tucked his arms around himself as his mismatched stare bounced anywhere and everywhere.

Until it settled on Blaylock.

The redhead was over to the right-hand side, clapping like the rest of them, his blue eyes luminous with emotion.

Then again, he would know how much something like this meant to a fucked-up kid with a congenital defect whose family hadn’t wanted him around for the embarrassment and social disgrace.

He would know how hard the gratitude was to accept.

He would know how much Qhuinn just wanted to escape from the attention… even as he was touched beyond measure at this honor he did not deserve.

In the midst of all he couldn’t handle, he just looked at his old, dear friend.

As always, Blay was the anchor who kept him from being swept away.

As Xhex tooled up through the mhis on her bike, she found it hard to believe she was making the trip to the mansion under royal command: Wrath himself had extended the “invite”—and as much of an iconoclast as she was, she wasn’t about to shut down a direct order from the king.

Man, she was nauseous.

When she’d first gotten the voice mail, she’d assumed that John was dead, having been killed out on the field. A quick Hail Mary text to him had been replied to immediately, however. Short and sweet. Just Will u come @ nightfall?

That was all she got back; even after she said yes, and had expected something further from him.

So yeah, she felt like throwing up because this was probably John putting an end to them officially. The vampire equivalent of divorce was rare, but the Old Laws did provide for an out legally. And naturally, for people at John’s social level—namely, that of the blooded son of a Black Dagger Brother—the king was the only one who could give them dispensation to split.

This had to be the end.

Shit, she actually was going to throw up.

Pulling around in front of the mansion, she didn’t park the Ducati at the tail end of the orderly row of muscle cars, SUVs, and station wagons. Nope—she left the bike right at the base of the stairs. If this was a royal divorce decree, she was going to help John put an end to their misery, and then she was…

Well, she was going to call Trez and tell him she couldn’t come to work. Then she was going to lock herself in her cabin and cry like a girl. For a week or two…

So stupid. This whole thing between them was so fucking stupid. But she couldn’t change him, and he couldn’t change her, so what the hell did they have left? It had been months since they’d had anything but distance and awkard silence between them. And the trend wasn’t reversing itself; the black hole was just getting deeper and darker.…

As she mounted the steps to the grand double doors, she was breaking in half, shattering sure as if her bones had turned brittle and were collapsing under the weight of her muscles. But she kept going, because that was what fighters did. They pushed on past the pain and took out their objective—and sure as shit she and John were killing something tonight, something that had been so precious and rare she was ashamed of them both for not finding a way to nurture it in the midst of the cold, hard world.

Inside the vestibule, she didn’t step up immediately to the camera’s eye. Never a prepper-upper kind of female, she nonetheless found herself brushing fingertips under her eyes and shuffling a palm over her short hair. A quick straightening of her leather jacket—and her spine—and she told herself to suck it up.

She had gotten through legions of things worse than this.

Through pride alone, she could marshal some self-control for the next ten or fifteen minutes.

She had the rest of her natural life to lose her goddamn composure in private.

With a curse, she hit the summons button and stepped back, forcing herself to look into the camera. As she waited, she straightened her jacket again. Stomped her boots. Double-checked that her guns were where they’d