Lover Avenged (Black Dagger Brotherhood 7)

Marissa nodded. "I think she wanted to go back to where things started."

"Is she alone?"

"As far as I know."

"Jesus Christ, she's already been abducted once," he snapped. As Marissa recoiled, he cursed himself. "Look, I'm sorry. I'm not real rational right now."

After a moment, Marissa smiled. "This is going to sound bad, but I'm glad you're frantic. You deserve to be."

"Yeah, I was a shit. Big-time."

Marissa tilted her head up to the sky. "On that note, a word of advice when you go over to her."

"Hit me."

Her perfect face leveled again, and as she refocused on him, her voice grew rueful. "Try not to be angry. You look like an ogre when you're pissed, and right now, Beth needs to be reminded of why she should let her guard down around you, not why she shouldn't."

"Good point."

"Be well, my lord."

He nodded to her with a quick bob of the head and dematerialized directly to the Redd Avenue address where Beth had had an apartment when they'd first met. As he went, he got a good goddamn taste of what his shellan had to deal with every night he was out in the city. Dearest Virgin Scribe, how did she deal with the fear? The idea that everything might not be all right? The fact that there was more danger to be found out where he was than safety?

As he took form in front of the apartment building, he thought of the night he had gone to find her after her father's death. He'd been a reluctant, unsuitable savior, tasked by his friend's last will and testament to see her through her transition-when she hadn't even known what she was.

His first approach hadn't gone well, but the second time he'd tried to talk to her? That had gone very well.

God, he wanted to be with her again like that. Naked skin on naked skin, moving together, him deep inside of her, marking her as his.

But that was a long way off, assuming it ever even happened again.

Wrath walked around to the backyard; his shitkickers were quiet, his shadow large on the frosty ground beneath his feet.

Beth was huddled on a rickety picnic table he'd once sat on himself, and she was staring into the apartment straight ahead just as he had when he'd come for her. Cold wind blew her dark hair around, making it seem as if she were underwater and swimming amid strong currents.

His scent must have carried over to her, because her head snapped around. As she looked at him, she sat up straighter and kept her arms locked around the North Face parka he'd bought her.

"What are you doing here?" she said.

"Marissa told me where you were." He glanced at the apartment's sliding glass door, then back at her. "Mind if I join you?"

"Ah...okay. That's fine." She shuffled over a little as he came to her. "I wasn't going to be here long."

"No?"

"I was going to come see you. I wasn't sure when you were going out to fight and thought maybe there was time before...But then, I don't know, I..."

As she let the sentence drift, he got up on the table beside her, the supports squeaking as the thing accepted his heft. He wanted to put an arm around her, but hung back and hoped the parka was doing its job to keep her warm enough.

In the silence, words buzzed in his head, all of them of the apologetic variety, all of them bullshit. He'd already said he was sorry, and she knew he meant it, and it was going to be a long time before he stopped wishing there were more he could do to make it up to her.

On this cold night, as they sat suspended between their past and their future, all he could do was sit with her and stare at the darkened windows of the apartment she had once lived in...back before fate had put them together.

"I don't remember being especially happy in there," she said softly.

"No?"

She swept her hand across her face, clearing wisps of hair from her eyes. "I didn't like coming home from work and being there alone. Thank God for Boo. Without that cat? I mean, TV only does so much for a person."

He hated that she had been on her own. "So you don't wish you could go back?"

"Christ, no."

Wrath exhaled. "I'm glad."

"I was working for that leering ass**le, Dick, at the paper, doing the jobs of three people, getting nowhere because I was a young woman and the good old boys didn't have a club-they were in a cabal." She shook her head. "But you know what the worst of it was?"

"What?"

"I was living with this sense that there was something going on, something important, but I didn't know what it was. It was like...I knew the secret was there, and it was a dark one, but I just couldn't reach it. Nearly drove me mad."

"So finding out you weren't just a human was-"

"These last months with you have been worse." She looked over at him. "When I think back over the fall...I knew something was wrong. In the back of my mind, I knew it, I could absolutely sense it. You stopped coming to bed regularly, and if you did, it wasn't to sleep. You couldn't settle. You didn't really eat. You never fed. The kingship always stressed you, but these last couple of months have been different." She went back to staring at her old apartment. "I knew it, but I didn't want to face the reality that you might actually be lying to me about something as significant and terrifying as you going out alone to fight."

"Shit, I didn't mean to do that to you."

Her profile was both beautiful and hard as she continued. "I think that's part of the head f**k I've got going on now. The whole thing takes me back to the way I used to live every day of my life. After I went through the change and you and I moved in with the Brothers, I was so relieved, because I finally knew for sure what I'd always wondered about. The truth was incredibly grounding. It made me feel safe." She turned back to him. "This thing with you? The lying? I don't feel like I can trust my reality again. I just don't feel safe. I mean, my whole world is about you. My whole world. It's all based on you, because our mating is the foundation of my life. So this is about so much more than you fighting."

"Yeah." Fuck. What the hell did he say?

"I know you had your reasons."

"Yeah."

"And I know you didn't mean to hurt me." This was spoken with a lift at the end, the words a question, rather than a statement.

"I absolutely didn't mean to."

"But you knew it would, didn't you."

Wrath put his elbows on his knees and leaned into his heavy arms. "Yeah, I did. That's why I haven't been sleeping. It felt wrong not to tell you."

"Were you afraid I'd refuse to let you go out or something? That I'd turn you in for violating the law? Or...?"

"Here's the thing... At the end of every night I came home and told myself I wasn't doing it again. And every sunset I found myself strapping on my daggers. I didn't want you to worry, and I told myself I didn't think it would continue. But you were right to call me on that. I had no plans to stop." He rubbed his eyes under his wraparounds as his head started to pound. "It was so wrong, and I couldn't face up to what I was doing to you. It was killing me."

Her hand went to his leg and he froze, her kind touch more than he deserved. As she stroked his thigh a little, he dropped his sunglasses back in place and carefully captured her hand.

Neither said a thing as they held on to each other, palm-to-palm.

Sometimes words were less valuable than the air that carried them when it came to getting close.

As the cold wind blew across the backyard, causing some brown leaves to crackle by in front of them, the lights went on in Beth's old place, illumination flooding the galley kitchen and the single main room.

Beth laughed a little. "They put their furniture right where mine was, the futon against that one long wall."

Which meant they had a full view of the couple who came stumbling into the studio and beelined for the bed. The humans were locked lip-to-lip, hip-to-hip, and they landed on the futon in a messy scramble, the man mounting the woman.

As if embarrassed by the show, Beth got off the table and cleared her throat. "I guess I'd better get back to Safe Place."

"I'm off rotation tonight. I'll be at home, you know, all night."

"That's good. Try to get some rest."

God, the distance was horrid, but at least they were talking. "You want me to see you back there?"

"I'll be fine." Beth burrowed into her parka, her face sinking into the down collar. "Man, it's cold."