And that would be that.
On the way unto this facility, she had been too scared to speak, especially as so many things were done to Nate, so many… tubes, patches, cuffs, and machines connected, implanted, stuck into him. The two males treating him had spoken in a volley of words, the syllables outside her understanding, a language foreign.
It had been a lifetime, the traveling, yet a clock with red, glowing numbers, mounted atop a glass-fronted casing of supplies, had informed her that only seventeen minutes passed. When their destination had been reached, the lumbering, rumbling vehicle of healing had come to a stop. As the double doors had been opened a woodland landscape was revealed and the scent of pine and earth had flooded in, replacing the blood smell and the heat. Rahvyn had followed behind as Nate had been removed upon a rolling table along with a host of beeping, flashing equipment and those wires, those tubes.
From what had appeared to be an earthen mound, a male with tortoiseshell glasses and a white coat had thrown open a well-disguised door, exposing a brightly lit interior. Females in white uniforms had accompanied him. Brothers had come forward.
And so had Sahvage.
Her cousin had rushed to embrace her and she had collapsed into him, babbling details about what had occurred that were not terribly relevant. The one bullet was all that mattered. Well, that and whatever happened next.
Nate and the various uniformed attendants had gone down in a steel box first. Then she and Sahvage and the Brothers had followed, a mechanized contraption lowering them into the earth.
They had been so kind to her, the fighters. And in the face of their gentle compassion, so at odds with their weapons and their protective leather clothing, she had finally cried, tucking her face into Sahvage’s chest, just as she had when they had been youngs…
When her pony had died from eating that weed. And her cat had wandered off.
And her parents had been killed.
Now she was here, sitting on this tiled floor, in a maze of lemon-scented hallways and closed white doors, wishing she had not left the club when she had. If she had waited only a moment longer—either when Nate had suggested their departure or perhaps right before they had stepped out onto the street.
A moment was all it took to change the course of everything. The problem was… one never knew which moment was going to matter, and there were so many, so very many, even in the lives of mortals—
The muffled scream from inside the treatment room rippled out from behind the closed door like a shock wave, the bodies of the Brothers weaving as they put dagger hands unto their faces, the fronts of their throats. Their hearts.
There followed the weeping of the mahmen.
Horrible, ear-stinging weeping from her, behind that closed door.
He was gone. Rahvyn did not need to be told.
As tears welled in her eyes and slipped down her cheeks, she too placed her hands unto her cheeks in a vain attempt to hold herself together, contain the horror, understand how an evening on a whim had ended in a life-defining tragedy.
And then it happened.
From the forest of strong-backed Brothers, their sadness a stain upon the still air around them, her cousin Sahvage’s head slowly turned unto her.
His eyes burned with emotion as he looked down the long bare corridor toward her.
Whate’er is he asking of me, she thought with heartbreak.
And yet… she knew.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The solitude of the collector was almost never a burden.
Sometimes, you just wanted to be alone with your shit, you needed that special time.
Tonight was not it.
As Devina walked up and down the aisles created by her hanging racks, she was way too alone, and nothing, not her newest bouclé jacket from Chanel, not even her oldest acquisition, either, was filling the void. Which, of course, was not the way hoarding normally worked for her.
Worse? She didn’t want to buy anything else. So her shopping addiction was failing her, too.
It was a while before she realized what was bothering her—or maybe it was more like it took a while before she could stand to acknowledge the problem: She was here again, dumped by a male. Dumped by a male who so completely couldn’t stand her, he’d slit his own throat to get away from her—
No, wait, it was even worse. That Bastard Balthazar had killed himself to save the female he really wanted, and Devina had been part of the measure of how much he cared about his little chippie. He hated Devina, but he’d been willing to get stuck with her in Hell for an eternity just to protect Little Miss Homicide Detective.
It was downright insulting, really.
Devina couldn’t believe the whole damned thing. Okay, yeah, sure, she could be a thundercunt, but she wasn’t all bad.