Lover at Last (Black Dagger Brotherhood #11)(135)
Author: J.R. Ward

Trez looked down at his bare feet – and wondered how far, in fact, he could go if they were covered by Nike.

Pretty f**king far.

His brother was the one tie he hadn’t cut, the only thing he felt like he didn’t want to leave behind in order to save himself from a gilded life of sexual enslavement.

And in a moment like this, with the guy once again having stepped up to the plate in a big way…he wondered if it was possible that he couldn’t walk away from iAm.

Maybe he was going to have to cave in to his destiny, after all.

Fucking queen. And her goddamn daughter.

The traditions made no sense. He’d never met the young princess. No one had. That was the way it worked – the next in line to the throne was as sacred as her mother, because she was the one who was going to lead them in the future. And like a rare rose, nobody was allowed to see her until she was properly mated.

Purity and all that.

Blah, blah, blah.

Once she was hitched, however, she was free to come out to society, free to live her life – within the s’Hisbe. The sad-sack motherfucker who married the bitch? He took her place inside the palace walls, doing whatever the hell she wanted, when she wanted – assuming he wasn’t worshipping at her mother’s feet at the moment.

Yeah, that was a party.

And they thought he should feel honored to strap that yoke on?

Really.

He’d turned his body into a garbage dump in the last decade, f**king all those humans – and what was truly whacked? He wished that all those pesky Homo Sapiens diseases were the kind of thing he could pick up. No-go on that one. He’d had as much unsafe sex as he could with the other species and he was still healthy as a horse.

Pity.

"Trez?" iAm straightened. "Trez? Talk to me. Where you at?"

Trez stared at his brother, memorizing that proud, intelligent face and those bottomless, penetrating eyes.

"I’m right here," he murmured. "See?"

He held out his hands and did a little circle in his bare feet, in his robe, in his spacey, fuzzy, post-migraine haze.

"What’s going on in that mind of yours?" iAm demanded.

"Nothing. I think it’s great what you did. I’ma go pack up and get ready. They sending a car or something?"

iAm narrowed his stare, but he did answer. "Yeah. A butler named Fred? Or was it Foster?"

"I’ll be ready."

Trez walked off, the dregs of that headache draining from him as he looked into the future…and really worried about this one last tie of his.

But this move was a good thing. iAm was right: He had been fooling himself these last few years, aware that the princess was aging, and time was passing, and his day of reckoning was fast approaching.

There were things you could put off. This was not one of them.

Fucking hell, maybe he was going to have to disappear. Even if it killed him.

Besides, if his brother was with Rehv in the king’s household? iAm was going to have the kind of support he was going to need if Trez up and got ghost.

And maybe, after the way shit was going?

The guy would be relieved to get rid of him.

Chapter Sixty-nine

Qhuinn’s whole life took another corkscrew about fifteen hours after he lost his virginity. Later, he would decide that the comes-in-threes thing might be true. When the shit went down, though, all he wanted to do was live through it….

Sometime during the hours of the day, he and Blay had woken up, split up, gone their separate ways.

Qhuinn would have preferred that they return to the main house together, but he’d had to stop by Luchas’s room, and Blay had been anxious to get back to his place and shower. And in a way, it hadn’t been all that bad, because Qhuinn had had a chance to check on Layla as well.

When it came to his brother, and the Chosen, all was quiet on both fronts: The pair of them had been asleep in their respective beds – Luchas’s color was better, and for the first time, when Qhuinn had walked into Layla’s bedroom? He had sensed the pregnancy: The hormone wave had hit him as soon as he’d entered, and he’d stopped dead, it was so strong.

Which had been really good.

What he hadn’t been so happy about had been going by Blay’s door, and wanting to knock and duck inside – and go back to sleep.

Instead, he’d ended up within his own four walls all by his lonesome.

In bed. In the dark. Drifting in and out of REM-landia for the two hours he had before First Meal was served.

So when his door was thrown wide and a lineup of tall males in hooded black robes came filing in, his past and his present collided, the two becoming interchangeable – such that the attack by the Honor Guard jumped up out of the graveyard of his memory and landed right in his room at the mansion.

Unsure whether he was dreaming or any of this was real, his first thought was that he was glad Blay wasn’t with him. The guy had already found him dead at the side of the road once. No one needed a replay on that.

His second was that he was going to take out as many as he could before they finally finished the job on him.

With a battle cry, Qhuinn exploded out of his bed, his naked body going on the attack with such power, he actually plowed over the first two males. Spinning with his legs, he kicked and punched at anything that came at him, and there was a brief satisfaction as his targets cursed and jumped out of range –

Something locked around his chest from behind, and swung him around with such force, his feet popped off the ground and flew in a crazy circle –

Hellllllllllo, wall.

The impact was a three-point bulletin to his fight-back bright idea, his face, torso, and hips slamming into the plaster so hard, he no doubt left a cartoon-style 3-D rep of himself on the shit.

Instantly, he palmed the flat plane, prepared to shove his way off –

The grip that latched onto his nape and held him in place might as well have been steel. There was literally no give in the flesh and bone, even as he strained, his body refusing to be dominated –

"Chill, asswipe. Just f**king chill before I’m forced to hurt you."

The sound of Vishous’s voice made no f**king sense.

And then abruptly, from out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that a ring had formed around him, all those black robes surrounding him, just like that grip on his neck.

But they were not attacking.

"Just relax," V said into his ear. "Breathe for me, come on, now – just breathe easy. No one’s going to hurt you."

The talking helped, that cool, calm voice reaching through the fight-or-flight response and turning down the volume on his panic’s roar.

In the aftermath, Qhuinn started to shake, his muscles processing the adrenaline. "Vishous?"

"Yup. It’s me, buddy. You need to keep breathing."