Lover Unleashed (Black Dagger Brotherhood 9)

Like wanting to be with his best friend.

Christ, he so didn’t need a mirror to see himself for the coward and the fraud he was . . . but there was nothing he could do about it. He was locked in a cage with no key that he could find, years of his family’s derision boxing him in and cramping him: The truth behind his wild side was that he was a straight-up pussy. Blay, on the other hand, was the strong one. Tired of waiting around, he’d declared who he was and found somebody to be with.

Fucking hell, this hurt . . .

With a curse, he cut off the premenstrual monologue and forced himself to get walking. With each footfall, he tightened himself up, duct-taping his messy inner workings together and fortifying his leaky pipes.

Life was about change. Blay had changed. John had changed.

And he was next on the list, apparently, because he couldn’t keep going like this.

As he entered the training center through the back of the office, he decided that if Blay could turn over a new leaf, so could he. Life was what you determined it to be; regardless of where fate put you, logic and free will meant you could make your cabbage patch anything the fuck you wanted.

And he didn’t want where he was: Not the anonymous sex. Not the desperate stupidity. Not the burning jealousy and nagging regrets that got him nowhere.

The locker room was empty, as there were no training classes going on, and he changed by himself, getting naked before pulling on black running shorts and a pair of black Nikes. The workout room was likewise an echo chamber, and that was just as well.

Firing up the sound system, he flipped through the shit with the remote. When Gorillaz’s “Clint Eastwood” came on, he went over to a treadmill and got on the thing. He hated working out . . . just despised the mindless gerbil nature of it all. Better to fuck or fight, he’d always said.

However, when you were stuck indoors because of the dawn, and were determined to try to give celibacy a shot, running to get nowhere seemed pretty frickin’ viable as an energy suck.

Juicing up the machine, he hopped on and sang along.

Focusing on the white-painted concrete across the way, he pounded one foot after another, again and again and again, until there was nothing to his mind or his body except the repetit

ive footfalls and the beat of his heart and the sweat that formed on his bare chest and stomach and back.

For once in his life, he did not go for breakneck: The speed was calibrated so that his pace was a steady churn, the kind of thing he could sustain for hours.

When you were trying to get away from yourself, you gravitated to the loud and obnoxious, to the extremes, to the reckless, because it forced you to scramble and hang on with your clawing nails to cliffs of your own self-invention.

Just as Blay was who he was, Qhuinn was the same: Even though he wished he could be out and with the . . . male . . . he loved, he couldn’t make himself go there.

But by God, he was going to stop running from his cowardice. He had to own his shit—even if it made him hate himself to the core. Because maybe if he did, he’d stop trying to distract himself with sex and drinking, and figure out what he did want.

Apart from Blay, that was.

FOURTEEN

Sitting beside Butch in the Escalade, V was a six-foot-six, two-hundred-fifty-pound contusion.

As they sped back to the compound, every inch of him was pounding, the pain forming a haze that calmed the screaming inside of him.

So he’d gotten something of what he’d needed.

The trouble was, the relief was beginning to fade already, and didn’t that get him pissed off at the Good Samaritan behind the wheel. Not that the cop seemed to care. He’d been dialing that cell phone of his and hanging up and dialing again and hanging up, like the fingers on his right hand had a case of Tourette’s.

He was probably calling Jane and thinking better of it. Thank fuck—

“Yeah, I’d like to report a dead body,” he heard the cop say. “No, I’m not giving my name. It’s in a Dumpster in an alley off Tenth Street, two blocks over from the Commodore. Looks to be a Caucasian female, late teens, early twenties . . . No, I’m not giving my name . . . . Hey, how about you get down the address and stop worrying about me. . . .”

As Butch got into it with the operator, V shifted his ass in the seat and felt the broken ribs on his right side howl. Not bad. If he needed another hit to chill him out, he could just do some sit-ups and get back on the agony-go-round—

Butch tossed his cell onto the dash. Cursed. Cursed again.

Then decided to share the wealth: “How far were you going to let it go, V? Until they stabbed you? Left you for the sun? What was going to be far enough?”

V talked around his swollen lip. “Don’t front, true.”