Lover Revealed (Black Dagger Brotherhood 4)

The doggen nodded, totally unappeased.

When she stepped into the garage, she stopped dead and wondered what the hell she'd walked into. There were no cars inside the six-bay space. No room for them. Good God... crates and crates and crates. No... not crates. Coffins? What was this?

"Mistress, your things are over here." From behind her, Fritz's voice was respectful but very firm, as if all those pine boxes were none of her business. "Please to follow me?"

He led her over to her four wardrobe trunks and her luggage and her boxes. "Are you sure I may not bring dresses up for you?"

"Yes." She touched the brass lock on one of her Vuittons. "Would you... leave me?"

"Of course, mistress."

She waited until she heard the door shut and then she freed the latch on the wardrobe trunk in front of her. As she pulled the two halves apart, skirts burst free, multihued, lush, beautiful. She remembered wearing the gowns to balls and Princeps Council meetings and her brother's dinners and...

Her skin crawled.

She went to the next trunk. And the next. And the last. Then she started again with the first and went through each one again. And then again.

This was ridiculous. What did it matter what she wore? Just pick something.

She reached and grabbed... No, she'd had this on feeding from Rehvenge that first time. What about this one? No... that was the dress she'd worn at her brother's birthday party. Then what about...

Marissa felt the anger come upon her like a fire. Fury blew into her, overheated her, blazed through her blood. She grabbed gowns randomly and yanked them from their padded hangers, searching for one that didn't trigger a memory of being subjugated, caged, made fragile in fine cloth. She moved to another trunk and more dresses went flying, her hands wrenching, material ripping.

Tears began to flow and she wiped them away with impatience - until she couldn't see anything and had to stop. She scrubbed her face with her hands, then dropped her arms, just standing in the midst of a rainbow mess.

It was then that she spied a door in the far corner.

And beyond it, through its glass panes, she saw... the back lawn.

Marissa stared out at the patchy snow. Then she looked to the left, at the riding mower parked next to the door - and the red can sitting on the floor next to it. Her eyes kept going, moving over weed whackers and bins of what looked like fertilizer until they landed on a gas grill, which had a little box resting on its lid.

She glanced at the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of haute couture.

It took her a good twenty minutes to drag each one of her gowns out into the backyard. And she was careful to include the corsets and the shawls in the pile as well. When she was finished, her clothes were ghostly in the moonlight, muted shadows of a life she would never go back to, a life of privilege... restriction... and gilded degradations.

She pulled out a sash from the tangle, a pale pink strip of satin, and went back into the garage. Picking up the gas can, she grabbed the box of matches and didn't hesitate. She walked out to the priceless swirl of satins and silks, doused them with that clear, sweet accelerant and positioned herself upwind as she took out a match.

She lit the sash. Then threw it.

The explosion was more than she'd expected, knocking her back, scorching her face, flaring into a great fireball.

As orange flames and black smoke rose, she screamed at the inferno.

Butch was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling, when the alarms started going off. Shooting himself out of bed, he pulled on some boxers and slammed into Vishous as the brother bolted out of his bedroom and into the hallway. Together they scrambled to the computers.

"Jesus Christ!" V barked. "There's a fire on the back lawn!"

Some sixth sense sent Butch out the door immediately. Running barefoot across the courtyard, not even feeling the cold air or the pebbles under his feet, he cut around the front of the main house and ran into the garage. Oh, shit! Through the windows on the far side, he could see a great orange fury in the backyard.

And then he heard the screams.

As he burst through the rear door, Butch was overcome by the treacle smells of gasoline and burning cloth. And he wasn't half as close as the figure right in front of the inferno.

"Marissa!"

Her body was angled forward toward the fire, her mouth wide open, her shrill hollering cutting through the night as surely as the flames did. She was crazed, roaming around the periphery... now running.

No! The robe! She was going to trip -

With horror, he saw it happen. His long, bloodred robe twisted around one of her legs and tangled up her feet. Lurching forward, she started to fall facefirst into the fire.

As panic hit Marissa's expression and her arms went out into thin air, everything went slo-mo: Butch ran hard, yet seemed not to move at all.

"No!" he screamed.

Just before she was lost to the flames, Wrath materialized behind her and scooped her up into his arms. Saving her.

Butch skidded to a halt, a paralytic weakness making his legs go jelly on him. With no air left in his lungs, he fell to the ground... just collapsed.

So he was on his knees, staring up as Wrath held Marissa in his arms and she sagged all over him.

"Thank God my brother got there in time," V muttered from somewhere close by.

Butch pushed himself to his feet, wobbling like he was on rocky ground.

"You okay?" V asked, reaching out.

"Yeah. Fine." Butch stumbled back to the garage and kept going, tripping through random doors, banging into walls. Where was he? Oh, inside the kitchen. Blindly, he looked around... and saw the butler's pantry. Pushing his way into the little room, he leaned back against the shelves and shut himself in with all the canned goods and the flour and the sugar.

His whole body started to shake until his teeth rattled, and his arms flapped like bird wings. God, all he could think about was Marissa burning. On fire. Helpless. In agony.

If it had been just him going for her, if Wrath hadn't somehow seen what was happening and dematerialized right to her, she would be dead now.

Butch wouldn't have been able to save her.

The thought naturally shot him right back to the past. With horrible precision, flashes of his sister getting in that car two and a half decades ago pinged around his skull. Shit, he hadn't been able to save Janie, either. Hadn't been able to pull her out of that Chevy Chevette in time.

Hell, maybe if Wrath had been around back then, the king could have rescued his sister, too.

Butch rubbed at his eyes, telling himself that the blurriness was just the aftereffects of all the smoke.

A half hour later, Marissa sat on the bed in the blue toile room, enveloped by a fog of mortification. Damn it, she'd taken her rule number one way too far.

"I'm so embarrassed."

Wrath, who was standing in the doorway, shook his head. "You shouldn't be."

"Well, I am." She tried to smile at him and missed the mark by a million miles. God, her face felt stiff, the skin tight from having been so close to all that heat. And her hair - her hair smelled like gas and smoke. So did the robe.

She shifted her eyes over to Butch. He was out in the hall, leaning back against the wall. He hadn't said a thing since appearing there a few minutes ago and he didn't look like he was coming into the room, either. He probably thought she was crazy. Hell, she thought she was crazy.

"I don't know why I did that."

"You're under a lot of stress," Wrath said, even though he wasn't the one she was looking at.

"That's no excuse."

"Marissa, don't take this the wrong way, but no one cares. We want you safe and well. We could give a shit about the lawn."

When she just stared past Wrath at Butch, the king glanced over his shoulder. "Yeah, I think I'll leave you two alone. Try and get some z's, okay?"

As Wrath turned around, Butch said something that didn't carry. In response, the king clapped a hand to the back of the man's neck. More quiet words were shared.

After Wrath left, Butch came forward, but only as far as the doorway. "You going to be all right?"

"Ah, yes. After I have a shower." And a lobotomy.

"Okay. I'm going back to the Pit."

"Butch... I'm sorry I did what I did. It was just... I couldn't find one gown that wasn't contaminated with memories."

"I can understand that." Except clearly he didn't. He looked completely numb, as if he'd unplugged himself from everything. Especially her. "So... take care of yourself, Marissa."