The King (Black Dagger Brotherhood #12)(28)
Author: J.R. Ward

“So you think I was just being hard on you?” he asked grimly.

“Of course. And I hadn’t tapped out yet—”

“Do you think for a second that would have gotten through to me.”

A fissure of fear charged the molecules around the female.

“And that is why we will never do this again.” He turned in the direction of Doc Jane. “But she’s also right. This is not your business, so stay out of it.”

“The hell I—”

“Not a request, Jane. An order. And I’ll go see V as soon as I’m out of the shower.”

“You can be a real prick, you know that, Your Highness.”

“And a murderer. Don’t forget that one.”

He started off in the direction of the door, not bothering to take George’s halter handle. When his trajectory got off, the dog course-corrected him by getting in the way and steering him to the proper exit.

“Locker room,” he grunted when they entered the concrete corridor.

George, familiar with either the word or the postworkout ritual, helped him navigate down the hall, his paws clipping along across the bald floor.

Thank God the training center was a ghost town this time of day. The last thing he wanted was to run into anybody.

With the Brothers sleeping, the extensive underground complex was empty, from the gym and its equipment rooms, to the gun range and classrooms, to the Olympic-size swimming pool and the office that ran everything—as well as Doc Jane and Manny’s operating rooms and recovery suites.

Although Payne had almost been a patient.

Shit.

Running his hand down the wall, he stopped when he got to an inset doorway. “You wanna wait here?” he asked George.

Going by the jangling of the collar and the bony tha-bump, the golden decided to sit out shower time which was fairly typical—not a big fan of hot and humid because of that long coat of his.

Pushing his way in, Wrath was able to orient well. Thanks to the closed-in acoustics and all the tile, things were easy to navigate by sound—and habit. Also, spaces that he’d spent a lot of time in back when he’d had some of his sight were so much easier to handle on his own.

Fuck. If that dog hadn’t stopped him just now?

Wrath sagged back against the slick walls, letting his head hang loose. Jesus Christ.

Scrubbing his face, his brain played tricks on him, flashing images of what the aftermath would have been like.

The moan that rose up his throat sounded like a foghorn. His brother’s sister. A fighter he respected. Ruined.

He owed that dog. As usual.

Stripping off his sweaty muscle shirt, he let it flop onto the floor as he shucked his nylon board shorts. Using his hand on the wall once again, he walked forward and knew when he got into the shower room because of the way the floor sloped. The faucet cranks were lined up on three sides and he zeroed in on them, feeling the slick circular drains under his bare feet.

Picking one at random, he turned on the water and braced himself against the cold rush that hit him square in the face.

God, that surge of anger. It was a familiar octane—but not anything he wanted back in his life again. That unholy burn had sustained him all those years between when his parents had been killed and when he’d met and mated Beth. He’d thought it was gone for good.

“Fuck,” he bit out.

Closing his eyes, he braced his palms by the showerhead and leaned into the heavy roping of his arms. His nasty mood made his head feel like it had a set of helicopter blades on it—and they were about two rotations short of separating his skull from the rest of his body.

God … damn.

He’d never thought about it before, but “insanity” was largely a hypothetical concept to the sane; a derogative slur to slam someone you didn’t respect; a descriptor applied to inappropriate behavior.

Standing in the shower, he realized that true insanity had nothing to do with PMS or “hitting the wall” or going on a bender and trashing a hotel room before you passed out. It wasn’t driving crazy or robbing a bank or temporarily taking your temper out on an inanimate object.

It was the removal of the world around you, a good-bye to sensation and awareness that was like a video camera manipulation—your internal shit got zoomed in and everything else, your mate, your job, your community, your health and well-being, went not just out of reach … but out of existence.

And the scariest part? This in-between when you had one foot in reality and the other in your own personal, living-breathing purgatory—and you could feel the former slip, slip, slippin’ away—

From out of nowhere, Wrath’s equilibrium went haywire, the whole world tilting on its axis to the point where he wasn’t sure whether he’d fallen back or not.

But then he felt a sharp blade right under his chin, and realized that someone had grabbed hold of his hair.

“At this moment in time,” came the hiss in his ear, “we know two things. But only one of them is a game changer.”

NINE

This was a bad migraine.

As iAm cracked the door to his brother’s room, the poor bastard’s suffering stained the very air, making it hard to breathe—and even see properly.

Then again, everything was dark by design.

“Trez?”

The moaned answer was nothing good, a combination of wounded animal and sore throat from throwing up. iAm lifted his wrist into the light streaming in from behind and cursed at his Piaget. By this time, the SOB should have been solidly in recovery, his body digging itself out of the headache hole that had swallowed him.

Not the case.

“You want something for your stomach?”

Mumble, mumble, groan, mumble?

“Okay, I’m sure they’ve got some.”

Mumble, moan, moan. Mutter, mutter.

“Yeah, that, too. You want some Milanos?”

Mmmmmmmmmoan.

“Roger that.”

iAm shut the door and walked back to the stairs that took him down to the juncture between the hall of statues and the second-story foyer. Like the rest of the house, everything was silent as a tomb, but as he hit the grand staircase, his chef’s nose picked up the subtle scents of First Meal being cooked in the kitchen wing.

The closer he got to the hub of doggen, the more his own stomach got to talking. Logical. After he’d finished making the Bolognese, he’d checked on his brother and then gone to the gym for hours.

Where he’d seen a hell of a lot more than just the inside of the weight room.

The last thing he’d bargained for was trying to pull the King off of that female fighter. He’d been coming to the end of his workout when he’d heard someone yelling and gone to check it out—whereupon he’d found, hello, the King pythoning that female.