Lover Unleashed

“Anything,” she gasped. “Anything to feel my legs.”

Except even as the words left her, she sensed that what drove her was less her paralysis and more a greed for him and his sex—

“Healer!”

The sensation of her breast being captured in a gentle caress was a wondrous shock, and she jerked up, her thighs spreading, her heels pressing into the mattress beneath them both. And then his thumb passed up and over her nipple, the stroke shooting a blast of fire to her core.

Her legs sawed on the bed, the tight coil in her sex driving them. “I’m moving,” she said roughly—and almost as an afterthought. What seemed important now was joining with him and having him . . . come . . . inside of her.

“I know, bambina,” he avowed. “And I’m going to make sure you keep it up.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

Downtown, Butch parked the Escalade in the underground parking garage of the Commodore and took the internal elevator all the way up the spine of the building. He had no fucking clue what he was going to walk into when he got to V’s place, but that was where the GPS signal was coming from, so that was where he was going.

In the pocket of his leather coat, he had all the keys to Vishous’s private space: the plastic swipe card to get into the parking garage; the silver one you used in the elevator to punch the top button; the copper job that got you past the dead bolts on the doors.

His heart beat hard as a little ding sounded and the elevator opened silently. All-access was taking on a whole new meaning tonight, and as he stepped out into the hall, he wanted a drink. Badly.

At the door, he took out the copper key, but used his knuckles first. A couple of times.

It was a good minute later when it dawned on him that there was no answer.

Fuck the knuckles. He pounded with his fist.

“Vishous,” he barked. “Answer the goddamn door or I’m coming in.”

One, Mississippi. Two, Mississippi—

“Fuck this.” He shoved the key into the lock and cranked it before throwing his shoulder into the solid metal door and shoving it wide.

Bursting into the place, he heard the alarm beeping quietly. Which meant V couldn’t be here. “What the hell . . . ?”

He put the code in, shut the thing off, and locked the dead bolt behind himself. No remnants of lit candlewicks . . . no scent of blood . . . nothing but cool, clean air.

He flipped on the light switch and blinked in the glare.

Yeah, wow . . . Lot of memories in here . . . him coming and crashing after the Omega had gotten into him and he’d left quarantine . . . V losing his ever-loving mind and jumping off the damn terrace . . .

He went over to the wall of “equipment.” A fuckload of other things had happened here, too. Some of which he couldn’t imagine.

As he went down the display of metal and leather, his shitkickers echoed up to the ceiling, and his mind all but bounced around his skull. Especially as he got to the far end: In the corner, a set of iron cuffs hung from the ceiling by thick chains.

You got someone on them, you could lift them up and dangle ’em like a side of beef.

Reaching out, he fingered one of them. No cushioning on the inside.

Spikes. Dull spikes that would grip the flesh like teeth.

Getting himself back with the program, he marched through the place, checking in all the nooks and crannies . . . and found a little tiny computer chip on the kitchen counter. It was the kind of thing that no one but V would know how to remove from a cell.

“Son of a bitch.”

So there was no way of knowing where—

When his phone went off, he checked the screen. Thank God. “Where the hell are you?”

V’s voice was tight. “I need you down here. Ninth and Broadway. Stat.”

“Fuck that—why is your GPS in your kitchen.”

“Because that’s where I was when I took it out of my phone.”

“What the hell, V.” Butch tightened his grip on his cell and wished there were an app that let you reach through a phone and bitch slap someone. “You can’t—”

“Get your ass down here to Ninth and Broadway—we’ve got problems.”

“You’re kidding me, right? You go untraceable and—”

“Someone else is killing lessers, cop. And if it’s who I think it is, we’ve got problems.”

Pause. Big-time. “Excuse me?” he said slowly.

“Ninth and Broadway. Now. And I’m calling in the others.”

Butch hung up and rushed for the door.

Leaving the SUV in the parking garage, he took a mere five minutes to run over to the correct coordinates on Caldwell’s street grid. And Butch knew when he was getting close because of the sickening scent in the air and the tingling resonance of the enemy deep inside of him.

As he rounded the corner of a short-and-squat, he hit a wall of mhis and penetrated the shit, coming out on the other side to a whiff of Turkish tobacco and a tiny orange flare in the way- back of the alley.

He jogged over to V, slowing only when he got to the first of the bodies. Or . . . part of the first. “Hello, halvsies.”

As Vishous came up and offed his glove, Butch got a quick impression of dead-meat legs and leaking innards. “Yum.”

“Clean cut,” V muttered. “Real hot-knife-through-butter time.”

The brother was too right. It was practically surgical.

Butch knelt down and shook his head. “Can’t be the result of Lessening Society politics. They’d never leave the bodies out in the open like this.”

God knew, the slayers regularly went through shifts in leadership, either because the Omega got bored, or because of internal power struggles. But the enemy was incented to keep their biz off the human radar screens as much as vampires were—so no way would they have abandoned this mess for the CPD to find.

As Butch sensed the arrival of the other brothers, he rose to his feet. Phury and Z came out of the ether first. Then it was Rhage and Tohr. And Blay. That was everyone for tonight: Rehvenge often fought with the Brotherhood, but this evening, he was up in the symphath colony playing King of the Damned, and it was Qhuinn’s, Xhex’s, and John Matthew’s rotation off.

“Tell me I’m not seeing this,” Rhage said grimly.

“Your eyes are working just fine, true.” V stabbed his hand-rolled out on the sole of his boot. “I couldn’t believe it, either.”

“I thought he was dead.”

“He?” Butch asked, glancing at the pair. “Who’s ‘he’?”

“Where to start on that one,” Hollywood muttered as he checked out another hunk of lesser. “You know, if I had a stake, we could make lesser- kebabs.”

“Only you could think of food at a time like this,” someone drawled.

“I’m just sayin’.”

If there was more conversation at that point, Butch didn’t hear it because his internal alarm suddenly started