A Warm Heart in Winter (Black Dagger Brotherhood 18.50)

So odd.

V could find nothing on Anna Sophia Laval in any of the species databases or social media groups.

Therefore, it was either a code name that she and Luchas had used when together… or she was a human. But how was the latter possible? His brother hadn’t been raised like that. Not that Qhuinn cared one way or the other—but the family’s golden son? Falling in with one of those rats without tails?

He rubbed his face as the whens, wheres, and hows jogged around the inside of his skull like they’d had cocktails made of Adderall and Pepsi.

Insomnia sucked. And he had a feeling he’d better get used to it.

On that note, he leaned to the side, reached into the bedside table, and got his contraband iPad. Before turning the thing on, he compulsively opened the second drawer and made sure that the letters were where he’d left them. Maybe he should discreetly cut the flaps and take images of the contents? You know, on a just-in-case—except that seemed like an inappropriate violation of privacy.

Yup. Still there.

But really, like they weren’t going to be?

Shaking his head at himself, he fired up the iPad and wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it—except then he remembered his previous request of Vishous. Not the one about Anna Sophia Laval earlier in the night, but the other one from the evening before. Going into his email, he scrolled down the listing of spam and Amazon order confirmations. There was only one personal missive in the bunch—it was from V and he opened the thing:

Again, I’m really sorry about your brother, son. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.

When he checked the time stamp—because he was afraid of the attachments—he saw that the brother had sent what he’d requested a mere eight minutes after he’d asked for it.

V was a good guy. No matter what he tried to portray to the contrary.

There were four attachments, marked sequentially, and Qhuinn stared at them. It was a while before he could open the first of the videos, and when he did, a sense of not being able to breathe returned.

As the screen blacked out and then flared a gray and white, he propped the iPad on his knees and felt his eyes burn. The image was of the training center’s corridor, right outside Luchas’s patient room. When things got blurry—on his end, not the security feed’s—he wiped his face. Then he pressed play with a sinking sensation in the center of his chest.

Nothing moved. Duh, because the camera was static.

No, wait, that wasn’t true; there was a counter in the lower right-hand corner with the date and time: The seconds flipped by quickly, the minutes moved slow, the hours were frozen solid. But he didn’t have to wait long. V had been efficient about editing the security camera’s recording, and in the back of Qhuinn’s mind, he had a thought that the brother had deliberately given him a little time to collect himself—

Before his brother walked out of his room.

The sight of that slight frame in the long black robe was a shock even though he’d thought he’d been prepared for it. Putting his hand over his mouth, he tucked an arm across his aching chest and just watched.

God, that rough gait. The cane.

“Oh, Luchas,” he whispered.

Reaching out, he ran his forefinger over the figure—except doing that stopped the footage. It was okay, though. For a while, he just stared at his brother’s contours. It had to be among the last moments of the male’s life.

Qhuinn thought of pulling back that hood and exposing… what had frozen beneath it.

To clear that memory, he continued with the file. When Luchas left the camera’s field, there was a cut to another feed. And another. And another, as his brother went down the corridor of the training center. And then the file ended.

The next attachment was from the subterranean tunnel, and Qhuinn witnessed his brother limp along to the right, heading for the hatch. When Luchas came up to it, he hesitated.

And glanced back over his shoulder.

That was when Qhuinn finally got to see his brother’s face from under the hood. He froze the feed. There was no fear. No anxiety. Luchas’s expression was simply… grave. “Resolved” was maybe the better word for it.

With a pounding heart, Qhuinn tried to memorize exactly what it all looked like, the turn of that ruined body, the angle of the cane, the line of the mouth, the cast of the eyes. But that was stupid, right? He could play this file anytime—and if he lost it or deleted it by mistake, not that he would, he could always ask V for another copy.

“I miss you,” he whispered. “I wish you were here…”

Yet the file had reminded him of how much pain Luchas had been in. How pervasive the agony and untenable the hours must have been. When he considered his brother’s suffering, he supposed… that it was a blessing of some kind that he could at least understand why his brother might have reached the end of his journey. But that was a sad tally of fortune, wasn’t it.

As a groundswell of regret made Qhuinn’s heart skip beats, he didn’t know how he was going to make it to the end of the files.