The King (Black Dagger Brotherhood #12)(162)
Author: J.R. Ward

“That sounds like heaven.”

“Good.” He kissed her once. And then seemed to have to do it again. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“Fritz!” her husband called out. “Car!”

She made sure to pet George a couple of times and tell him where she was going before she left. And then she was out into the night, getting into the rear of the Mercedes, heading for the mansion.

Letting her head fall back against the seat, she could feel herself already begin to doze off. “I’m afraid I’m not very good company,” she said to Fritz.

“Just rest, madam.”

“Good idea, Fritz.”

As Beth departed, Wrath leaned back in the armchair, and was not at ease in the slightest.

… she died in front of me …

… held my lifeless son in my hands …

“My lord?”

“I’m sorry, what?” He shook himself. “What?”

Abalone cleared his throat. “Would you like a break, sire?”

“Yeah. Just gimme a minute.” Taking George’s halter, he said, “Kitchen.”

Walking through the flap door with his dog, he was relieved that Fritz had already left and that the brothers stayed back.

Shit, the minute he’d smelled the pain and sorrow of that civilian, he knew that all had been lost for the male—and not in a material sense. People didn’t get into that kind of agony over things. And as usual Abalone knew the full story, but Wrath preferred to let the people tell him the details in person; he wanted to hear things directly from them.

Childbirth had not actually claimed the female’s life this time.

A car accident.

Wrath had expected it to be the former, but that was not the way destiny had played out. Nope, the female had lived through the birth and so had the child. They’d been killed by a drunk driver on the way home from Havers’s clinic.

The casual cruelty of fate was sometimes a ballbuster on an epic scale.

Unbelievable.

Going over to the table, he pulled out a chair and sat down. He was pretty sure he was facing the windows—not that he could see out of them.

So many stories he’d heard, but this one … Jesus Christ, it got to him.

He didn’t know how long he sat there, but eventually V put his head in. “You okay?”

“Nope.”

“You want to reschedule, true?”

“Yeah.”

“All right.”

“V.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you remember that vision you told me about. Where I was looking up at the face in the sky and the future was in my hands?”

“Yeah.”

“What…”

Abruptly, he relived that civilian’s anguish. “Nah, never mind. I don’t want to know.”

Sometimes, information wasn’t a good thing. If that commoner could have seen the future, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome. He would have just spent the remaining time with his female and his young terrified of what was coming.

“I’ll clear the decks,” the brother said after a moment.

The flap door closed with a thump-bump.

For no apparent reason, he thought of his father and his mother, and wondered what the night of his birth had been like. They’d never spoken of it, but he’d never asked, either. There had always been something else going on—plus, he’d been too young to care about that stuff.

As he tried to picture his own child’s arrival, he couldn’t imagine the stream of events. It was a hypothetical too emotionally charged to resonate.

But there was one thing that was abruptly crystal f**king clear.

He just wasn’t sure how to get around it.

As he stewed on things, memories from the last couple of months filtered into him. Stories and problems, gifts given and received. After all the struggle he’d brought to doing the King’s job before, it had been such a revelation to actually love what he was doing.

He hadn’t even missed the fighting.

Hell, there had been too many other challenges to confront and overcome: Battles, after all, weren’t always waged in the field, and sometimes enemies weren’t armed with conventional weapons. Sometimes they were even ourselves.

Finally, he knew exactly why his father had gotten so much out of being on the throne. He totally f**king got it.

And it was funny: The one thing that so many of the people had in common was love for their family. Their mates, their parents, their children; all that seemed to come first.

Always.

Family first.

The next generation … first.

He thought back to the night his parents had been slaughtered. The one thing they had done before that door had been broken down? Hide him. Keep him safe. Preserve him—and it hadn’t been about ensuring the future of the throne. That was not at all what they’d said as they’d locked him in that crawl space.

I love you.

That had been the only message that had mattered when their time had run out.

Not, Be a good King. Not, Follow in my footsteps. Not, Make me proud or else …

I love you.

It was the tie that bound, even across the divides of death and time.

As he imagined his son coming into the world, he was pretty damn sure one of the first things he was going to say was, I love you.

“Wrath?”

He jumped and turned toward the sound of Saxton’s voice. “Yeah? Sorry, just a little in my head.”

“I’m finished with all my paperwork from last night and tonight.”

Wrath turned back to the windows he could not see. “You worked fast.”

“Actually, it’s three in the morning. You’ve been sitting there for about five hours.”

“Oh.”

And yet he didn’t move.

“Most of the Brothers left hours ago. Fritz is still here. He’s upstairs cleaning.”

“Oh.”

“If you don’t need anything—”

“There is something,” he heard himself say.

“Of course. How can I help?”

“I need to do something for my son.”

“A bequest?”

As Wrath started working the whole thing through in his head, he was a little freaked out. God, you’d think that great corners in life should come with a warning sign at the side of the proverbial road, a little yellow number that announced which direction you were going to go in, and maybe offered a “reduce speed” kind of advice.

Then again, he and his shellan had been pregnant months before her needing.