The Jackal (Black Dagger Brotherhood - Prison Camp 1)

And then he was going to get her the hell out of here.

Three nights later, close unto the dawn, Rhage sat back upon Jabon’s guest bed, the covers rolled down to just above his sex, the banding of gauze that covered the wound on his side peeled back. As he studied the contours of the fierce red ring around the surgical slice, he tried to ascertain any minute change to the landscape of infection. Bigger? Smaller? Improved over on the left edge? A little worse upon the right?

Cursing, he re-covered the ugly, angry patch of skin. The damn thing was like another appendage, a third arm that had sprouted and promptly been sprained so that it required constant accommodation. In addition to his infernal monitoring of the snail’s pace of healing, he had to watch how he sat, how he stood, how he walked, how he slept, to avoid upsetting its precious little sensibilities. Indeed, the whinging was rather constant, and he was beyond annoyed by its persistence.

Verily, he had come to feel as though he were in a prison in this mansion, and the key to his cell door was the wound. The warden was Jabon, and his guards were the relentless stream of obsequious doggen. Catered and comfortable did not matter when one could not voluntarily leave a place, and the walls closed in upon him regularly, no matter that they were covered with silk and hung with oil paintings of pastoral sheep and running streams.

Yet surely the tide would soon turn in his favor—and he would have left against the advice of Havers, et al. The trouble was, his legs were loose, his balance unreliable, and in fact, he did feel unwell, even though he was not upon death’s door. No, he was in that purgatory between overwhelming illness and relative health, just infirm enough to have his activities curtailed, but not delirious and flat upon his back such that he was unaware of time’s languorous passing.

He would almost have preferred the latter. For him, the hours crawled, and he was painfully aware of their pernicious laziness.

Returning the sheeting over his abdominals, he grunted as he twisted and reached for the oil lamp on the bedside table. As he extinguished the low-seated flame, he fully reclined and held his limbs in strict stillness to avoid any conversation from his wound. Whilst he became as a statue, frozen save for his breathing, he tried not to dwell on the fact that one night, perhaps sooner or maybe much later, he would be thus for eternity, dead and gone, his soul unto the Fade.

As he contemplated the afterlife, he wondered if it would be thus. An eternal lie-in, every need met, no future to worry about because there was a forever too vast to comprehend ahead of oneself, and that meant one had the present and nothing else. After all, it was the rarity of time that led the mortal to be concerned with things like fate and destiny, and perhaps the relief of that worry and angst was the point of the Fade, the reward for the struggle upon the earth. But after this experience herein? Rhage was not sure how much of a boon would be granted upon one’s last breath. Timelessness struck him as a bore.

If he’d had a shellan, though . . .

Well, if he had found a true love, someone who alit his heart and not just his sex, a female of strength and intelligence to complement him, then the prospect of eternity would have been wholly different. Who wouldn’t wish to be with their beloved forever?

But love for him was like Darius’s communal fantasy.

Never a reality, ever a dream.

That male of worth could build a hundred houses on a hundred hills—the Brotherhood was never going to show up and fill those rooms. Just as Rhage could ever imagine a love that went deeper than sex, but that didn’t mean it was going to come and find him—

The door to the guest room opened, and the slice of light that pierced through the darkness got him right in the aching head.

With a curse, he lifted his forearm to shield his eyes.

“No,” he snapped, “I require naught. Please leave me thus.”

When the doggen did not readily accept the relief of their duties, he lowered his arm and glared into the illumination. “If I must get up to close that door myself, I will not thank you for forcing me unto the effort of rising from this bed.”

There was a pause. And then a female voice, a young female voice, made a reedy inquiry. “Are you unwell then?”

As he recognized who it was, the scent affirming his identification of the voice, he wanted to curse. ’Twas the unmated daughter of fine breeding, the one who had come in with her mahmen and Jabon when Darius had been reviewing the renderings of that mansion.