Lover Unveiled (Black Dagger Brotherhood 19)

When she came to her exit, it felt as though her car got off on its own, and the same thing happened as she approached the Shell gas station she had been stopping at every night. As the Honda rolled to a halt in front of the shop part, away from the pumps, her head turned to the ice cooler.

For a moment, things got blurry, the cartoon penguins with their red scarves disappearing in the midst of their arctic landscape.

She held the breakdown off by opening her door and getting out with her purse. Heading into the convenience shop, the young guy behind the cash register looked up from his phone.

“Oh, hey.” He stroked his scraggly beard. “The usual?”

“Yup, thanks.”

As Mae got out two twenty-dollar bills, the human did his beep, beep, beep thing at the register and the cash drawer popped out. When he handed her back twenty-seven cents in change, she put the coins in the plastic dish for someone else.

“I kept it unlocked for you,” he said as he resettled on his stool and went back into his phone. “You sure throw a lot of parties.”

“You want me to pull the chain for you and put the lock on when I’m done?”

He glanced up in surprise, like a customer helping him had never happened before. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“Take care.”

“Yeah, you too.”

Back outside, she went over to the freezer. It took her three trips back and forth to her car, and on her last one, she put her slippery, cold bundles on the pavement, ran the chain links through the pull-handles, and clicked the Master Lock in place.

Looking up into the security camera, she waved.

Through the glass wall, the man behind the cashier lifted his hand over his shoulder in response.

With a grunt, Mae gathered the final bags of ice and humped them over to the trunk. Tossing them in with the others, she slammed things closed and got back behind the wheel.

She cried all the way to her house.

To the house she and her brother had grown up in.

To the house that they now lived in together, following their parents’ deaths.

The driveway seemed to rush up to meet the front tires of her car, and as her high beams washed over the face of the one-story ranch, she saw that one of the bushes by the door had died over the winter, and there was a branch down in the side lawn. She was going to have to deal with them.

As she waited for the garage door to open, she realized that she had been noticing that bush and that branch every night when she came back with the ice. And she made the same resolution each evening. Tomorrow night? She was probably going to repeat the whole thing.

Because nothing had changed—

“Crap,” she muttered as she put things in reverse.

Out in the street again, she turned her car around, twisted to see over her shoulder, and backed the Civic in properly. Braking just before the Honda’s rear bumper hit the back wall, she turned off the car and waited for the garage doors to descend and bounce into place. After that, it was a couple of minutes before she could bear to get to work.

She kept thinking of that fighter.

And no, she wasn’t going to help him wash his back. Like she had any interest in staring at that skull while she Ivory-soaped his huge shoulder muscles and his tight waist and his—

“Do not go any further with that,” she ordered as she got out of the car.

The ritual of propping the back door open with the trash bin and going back and forth from her trunk to the place where her purse had thrown up the night before was more exhausting than it should have been.

When she was finally done, she made sure the dead bolt was thrown, and then stood over the eight bags of ice cubes. Her palms were stinging and red, and she rubbed them on her pants. She couldn’t breathe, but that wasn’t from exertion.

When she felt like she could stand it, she walked down the narrow hall and passed through the kitchen. Out in the front of the house, the living room was dark, and the corridor on the far side of it, where the upstairs bedrooms and shared bathroom were, was likewise dim.

She and her brother had always crashed down there. But for the last two weeks or so, she’d moved to the cellar spaces.

Pausing at the closed door to the communal loo, she closed her eyes. Then she knocked. “Rhoger? Rhoger, it’s me.”

She waited, for no good reason.

When she opened the way in, she kept her eyes on the tile floor until she couldn’t avoid it any longer. Shifting them to the tub, she felt a singing pain in the center of her chest.