As she grew quiet, he put himself in that place she had described, aware of everything, but unable to respond or speak or react.
Reaching over, he stroked her long hair back. And then he was kissing her, softly, slowly. A moment later, he rolled on top of her and found her sex with his own. As the penetration happened, as that familiar yet ever shocking tightness of her gripped him, he gave her his vow through the physical act.
Sometimes, the evil you fought wasn’t anything you could hit or shoot or dismember. Sometimes you couldn’t even hurt it.
And that was really fucking awful.
As his hips rocked and she wrapped her arms around him, he kept the rhythm sweet and careful so that he could kiss her the entire time.
Halfway through, he caught the rainwater scent of tears.
They were both crying.
Down in the training center’s gym, Rhage was running like he was being chased by his own beast.
The treadmill was not feeling it. He was pretty sure that the scream coming from the belt—which was loud enough that he could hear it over the T.I. he was pumping into his ears like the shit was heroin—meant the machine was going to check out at any moment. But he didn’t want to break stride long enough to move to the one next door.
When the thing began to smell like a lesser, however, he knew the decision had been made for him. Jumping to the side rails, he pulled out the red Stop card and the slow-down was pretty instantaneous. Either that or he had timed his get-off with the machine’s functional demise.
Catching his breath, he mopped his face with one of the scratchy white quarter towels. The things were pretty much sandpaper, but they all preferred ’em that way. Fritz had tried, from time to time, to switch the old schools out to something softer, but he and his brothers always protested. These were gym towels. They were supposed to be thin and mean, the terry-cloth equivalent of coyotes.
When you were sweating like a pig and couldn’t feel the bottoms of your feet from exertion, you didn’t want to pat yourself down with a Pomeranian.
Had he really done twenty-four miles?
Shit, how long had he been down here?
Popping off his Beats, he realized that not only had his high-steppers gone numb, but his groin muscles were on fire, and that shoulder he’d injured a good five nights ago was cranked off.
He ended up parking it on one of the wooden benches that ran down the far side of the room. As his breath gradually came back to him, he felt as if he were surrounded by his brothers even though he was alone: Whether it was the bench press that was still set to the six-hundred-pound load Butch had put it at yesterday or the barbell that Z had been doing curls with or the chin bar that Tohr had been crunching up and down on, he could picture each of the fighters with him, hear their voices, see them walk by, feel their eyes on him as they talked.
And all that should have made him feel more connected, instead of less so.
But the reality was, even if the forty-by-sixty-foot space had been crammed tight with all those big bodies, he would still have felt isolated.
Passing that towel over his face again, he closed his eyes and was transported to a different place, a different time … to a memory that he knew now was what he had been trying to put behind him ever since it had threatened to resurface.
Bella’s white farmhouse. That porch of hers, the wraparound one that was so New England cozy you wanted to either vomit … or cop a squat and eat some apple pie on the bitch. Him walking out that front door, head hanging like he had been decapitated and only the gristle of his neck was keeping his basketball still on.
His beloved Mary upstairs in that bedroom, having just told him to fuck off.
Although, of course, she hadn’t been so crude.
His life had been over as he’d left that house. Even though he’d been ostensibly alive, he had been a dead male walking …
… until suddenly she had exploded out of that doorway in her bare feet.
I’m not okay, Rhage. I’m not okay …
“Why are you thinking like this, buddy.” He rubbed that hard towel over his face once more. “Just drop that shit … come on, think about something else…”
Except his brain wouldn’t be rerouted. And the next memory was even worse.
A hospital room, but not one here at the compound, or even at Havers’s clinic. A human hospital room, and his Mary was in the bed.
Shit, he could still remember the color of her skin. Wrong, all wrong. Not just pale, but beginning to go gray.
To save her, he had done the only thing he could think of, thrown the only Hail Mary he had: He had sought out the Scribe Virgin. Had left that human hospital and gone home to his room, and lowered himself down on cut diamonds until his knees had run red with blood.
He had prayed for a miracle.
With a curse, he stretched out on the bench, leaning his torso back on the unforgiving wood while keeping both feet on the floor on either side.
His Mary wasn’t coming home today. She was staying at Safe Place.
The mother of that child had been taken back to Havers’s. After slipping into a coma.
The staff had decided to keep the young at the house for the day, and Mary wanted to be with the girl.
God, he remembered that anguish of daylight when Mary had been sick in the hospital. It hadn’t been safe for him to be with her during the sunshine hours, and he had been terrified she would die when he couldn’t get to her.
Guess they could drive that young over to see her mahmen if shit came to that. As a pretrans, she could go out even at high noon.
Staring up at the ceiling, he thought of Trez and Selena. Their date. Their escape from downtown. The fun they’d had evading the human police.
That was so worth fighting for. All of it.
His Mary wasn’t coming home today, and he didn’t know how he was going to make it through the next twelve hours until he saw her in person again. And that was even knowing he could call or text, or Skype with her at any moment for as long as he liked.
That little girl was probably going to lose her mahmen.
And Trez was probably going to lose Selena.
Rhage was pretty sure all of them were praying for a miracle just as he had. And maybe that was what he was having problems with.
Why had he gotten lucky? Tohr hadn’t. Well, yes, the brother had found Autumn, and that was a blessing beyond measure. But as much as he loved that female, his losing Wellsie had nearly killed him.
He just didn’t get it. Unless the Scribe Virgin stepped in again, or someone found a cure …
Why had he and Mary been spared?
As his brain began to cramp up on that one, he had to shut the thoughts down. He didn’t want to go mad down here all by himself.
Yeah, he thought wryly. ’Cuz it was so much better to share that with your loved ones.
Scary times. Scary times.
If deaths came in threes … he thought numbly. Who was going to be the third one?
FORTY-THREE
As Xcor walked away from the cottage’s main room, Layla was prepared to follow him outside and make him feed on what passed for a lawn if she had to. But just as she was about to heft herself off the sofa, she heard the sound of … the shower.
Continuing through on the vertical impulse, she went across and around the corner to stand in front of the closed door of the bathroom.
“…fuck…” he muttered on the far side.
“Xcor?”
“Leave me be. I shall return in a moment.”
As another curse floated out through the gaps around the doorjamb, she took hold of the latch, and pulled things open.
Xcor was standing before the sink, his shirt half on and half off, his torso turned at a wrong angle as he tried to get the button down over his head—without hurting the bullet wound in his side.
“What are you doing?” he demanded. Through the folds of black fabric.
For a moment, all she could do was stare at his ribbed abdomen, the muscles striated across his belly and cut so deeply they threw shadows. But then there were his hips, hollow and jutting out from under his skin, his combat pants hanging so low only the huge muscles of his thighs were keeping them on.
He was unbelievably powerful. But also too thin.
Shaking herself into focus, she said, “I’m going to help you get that off.”
“I can handle it, just—” As he twisted again, he let out a groan of pain.
Ignoring him, she shut the door so what little heat was boiling up from the shower stayed in the bath. “Stop. You’re just going to hurt yourself.”
“I’m fine,” he snapped.
The instant she put her hand on his arm, he went dead still.
“Let me help you,” she whispered.
The good news was that he’d gotten the bulk of the shirt up over his head. So there was no way he saw her hands shake as she took hold and gently pulled upward, inching it up his arms, revealing to her eyes the fans of muscle that ran down the side of his torso and then the massive bulges of his pectorals.
His breath panted in and out of him, his chest rising and falling in a pump that got faster as she carried the shirt over his arms.
Heavy arms. Thick arms that narrowed at the elbow and then at the wrist, but plumped up everywhere else.
As what had covered him came loose, all she could think of was that he was a killer. A straight-up killer whose body reflected the work that he did.
“Wait for me out there.” He refused to meet her eyes. “I shall not take from you when I am unclean.”