arms over his chest.
“What,” he said. “Look, it’s not Mary Tyler Moore, ’kay? So you can’t give me shit.”
Vishous, the one with the black glove on his hand, glared across the room. “It’s worse than Mary Tyler Moore. And to call you an idiot would be an insult to half-wits around the fucking world.”
“Are you kidding me? Bette Midler rocks. And I love the ocean. Sue me.”
Vishous glanced at the king. “You told me I could beat him. You promised.”
“As soon as you come home,” Wrath said as he got to his feet, “we’ll hang him up by his armpits in the gym and you can use him as a punching bag.”
“Thank you, baby Jesus.”
Blond-and-Black shook his head. “I swear, one of these days I’m just going to leave.”
As one, the Brothers all pointed at the open door and let silence speak for itself.
“You guys suck.”
“Okay, enough.” Wrath came around the desk and-
Ehlena sat up sharply. His palm was gripping the handle of a harness that went around the dog’s chest, and the king’s face was forward, his chin held high, so that he couldn’t have been looking at the floor at all.
He was blind. And not in the sense of being unable to see very clearly. Given the way he was now, he couldn’t see anything at all. When had this happened, she wondered. He’d appeared to have some vision when she’d last seen him.
Respect rolled through Ehlena’s chest as she and everyone else in the room looked up at him.
“This is going to be tricky,” Wrath said. “We need to send in enough fighters to provide both cover as well as search and rescue, but we don’t want to create more disturbance than absolutely necessary. I want two teams, with the second on standby. We’re also going to need car support in the event Rehvenge is incapacitated and we have to transport him back-”
“What are you talking about?” came a female voice from the doorway.
Ehlena glanced over her shoulder and recognized who it was: Bella, mate of the Brother Zsadist, who frequently helped with Safe Place patients. The female was standing between the ornate jambs with her young in her arms, her face drained of color, her eyes hollow.
“What about Rehvenge?” she demanded, voice rising. “What about my brother?”
As Ehlena started to connect the dots, Zsadist went to his shellan.
“I think you two need to talk,” Wrath said carefully. “In private.”
Z nodded and escorted his mate and young from the room. As the pair went down the hall, Bella’s voice could be heard still, her questions peppered with increasing panic.
And then there was a “What?!” that seemed to indicate a bomb had just been dropped on the poor female.
Ehlena stared down at the lovely blue carpet. God…she knew exactly what Bella was going through right at this moment. The ripples of shock, the recasting of what she knew, the feeling of betrayal.
Hard place to be in. Hard to get out of, too.
After a door shut and the voices were dimmed, Wrath looked around the room as if giving everyone a chance to measure his resolve.
“Tomorrow night is showdown, because there isn’t enough daylight left now to get a car up there.” The king nodded to Ehlena and Xhex. “You both are staying here until then.”
So that meant she was going? Thank the Virgin Scribe. As for the overday, she would have to call her father, but given that Lusie was in the house, she wasn’t worried about being gone. “No problem for me-”
“I have to go,” Xhex said tightly. “But I’ll be back at-”
“Not an invitation. You are staying here so that I know where you are and what you are doing. And if you’re worried about weapons, we have plenty of them-hell, we got a whole crateful off the lessers just last month. You want to do this? You’re under our roof until nightfall.”
It totally was obvious that the king didn’t trust Xhex, given the mandate and the way he smiled at her so fiercely.
“So what’s it going to be, sin-eater?” he said smoothly. “My way or the highway?”
“Fine,” Xhex shot back. “Whatever you want.”
“Always,” Wrath murmured. “Always.”
An hour later, Xhex stood with her arms out straight in front of her and her boots planted eighteen inches apart. In her hands was a SIG Sauer forty that reeked of baby powder, and she was squeezing off rounds at a man-shaped target twenty yards down the Brotherhood’s shooting range. In spite of the stench, the weapon was superlative, with a sweet kick and excellent aim.
While she put the gun through its paces, she could feel the males behind her staring hard. To their credit, it wasn’t at her ass.
Nah, the Brothers weren’t interested in her tail. None of them particularly liked her, although, given their expressions of grudging respect as she’d reloaded the gun, they were viewing her spot-on aim as an asset.
In the shooting stall next door, Ehlena was proving she hadn’t lied about being good with a gun. She’d chosen an autoloader with a little less firepower, which made sense, given that she didn’t have the upper-body strength that Xhex did. Her aim was awesome for an amateur, and what was more, she handled the weapon with the kind of quiet confidence that suggested she wouldn’t mistakenly cap someone’s knees.
Xhex took off her ear protection and turned around to the Brotherhood, keeping her weapon down by her thigh. “I’ll want to try the other one out, but the pair of these should do me just fine. And I want my knife back.”
The weapon had been taken from her before she and Ehlena had been driven to the mansion in that black Mercedes.
“You’ll have it,” someone said, “when you need it.”
Against her will, her eyes did a quick check of who was kibitzing. Same cast of muscle. Which meant John Matthew hadn’t sneaked in.
Given how big the Brotherhood’s compound seemed to be, she figured he could be anywhere, including the next town, for chrissakes: When the meeting in the king’s study had finished, he’d just walked out, and she hadn’t seen him since.
Which was good. Right now she needed to be focused on what was looming over them all tomorrow night, not her crappy, castrated love life. Fortunately, everything seemed to be falling into place. She’d called iAm and Trez and left voice mails that she was taking a day off, and they’d phoned back saying it wasn’t a problem. No doubt they were going to check in with her again, but hopefully with the Brothers’ backing, she would be in and out of the colony before their babysitting impulses overwhelmed them.
Twenty minutes later, she finished trying out the other SIG and was not at all surprised when both guns were confiscated. The trip back to the mansion was long and tense, and she looked over at Ehlena to see how the other female was faring. It was hard not to approve of the resolute strength in that nurse’s face: Rehv’s female was going after her male, and nothing was going to get in her way.
Which was great…but the determination made Xhex twitchy nonetheless. She was willing to bet Muhrder had had the same kind of resolve in his eyes when he’d gone up to that colony to get her.
And look at how well that had gone.
Then again, true to his character he’d gone in rogue, without backup. At least she and Ehlena had been smart enough to get some serious-ass help, and one could only pray that made all the difference.
Back at the mansion, Xhex grabbed some food from the kitchen and was shown to a second-floor guest room that was down a long hall of statues.
Eat. Drink. Shower.
She left the light in the bath on because the room was unfamiliar, got into bed naked, and closed her eyes.
When the door opened some half an hour later, she was both shocked and unsurprised at the big shadow standing in the lee of the hallway light.
“You’re drunk,” she said.
John Matthew came inside without an invitation, and he locked the door without permission. He was indeed drunk, but that was not a news flash.
