Lover Unbound (Black Dagger Brotherhood 5)

When Phury was finished with the computer, he jogged down the SICU floor. As he went, he fritzed out the security cameras that were embedded at regular intervals in the ceiling so all they'd show was fuzz.

Just as he came up to the room six, the door opened. Vishous was death warmed over in Butch's arms, the brother pale and shaky and in pain, his head tucked into the cop's neck. But he was breathing and his eyes were open.

"Let me take him," Phury said, thinking Butch looked almost as bad.

"I've got him. You deal with our management issue and ride hard on the security cameras."

"What management issue?"

"Wait for it," Butch muttered as he headed for a fire door at the far end of the hall.

A split second later, Phury got a load of the problem: Rhage walked out into the hall with a rip-shit human female in a choke hold. She was fighting him tooth and nail, the muffled yelling suggesting she had a vocabulary like a trucker.

"You gotta knock her cold, my brother," Rhage said, then grunted. "I don't want to hurt her, and V said she had to come with us."

"This was not supposed to be kidnap operation."

"Too f**king late. Now knock her out, would ya?" Rhage grunted again and switched his grip, his hand leaving her mouth to catch one of her flailing arms.

Her voice came through loud and clear. "So help me, God, I'm going to - "

Phury took her chin in his hand and forced her head up. "Relax," he said softly. "Just ease up."

He locked his stare on hers and began to will her into calmness... will her into calmness... will her into -

"Fuck you!" she spat. "I'm not letting you kill my patient!"

Okay, this wasn't working. Behind those rimless glasses and dark green eyes, she had a formidable mind, so with a curse he brought out the big guns, mentally shutting her down completely. She sagged like a mop.

Removing her glasses, he folded them up and put them in the breast pocket of his coat. "Let's bust out of here before she comes around again."

Rhage flipped the woman over, draping her like a shawl off his heavy shoulder. "Get her bag from the room."

Phury ducked in, picked up a leather tote and the folder marked with the name Klosnick, then beat feet from the room. When he came back into the hall, Butch was having a run-in with a nurse who'd come out of a patient room.

"What are you doing!" the woman said.

Phury got on her like a tent, jumping in front of her, staring her into a stupor, planting the urgent need to get to a staff meeting in her frontal lobe. By the time he caught up with the evac again, the woman in Rhage's arms was already throwing off the mind control, shaking her head back and forth as it bobbed to the beat of Hollywood's get-up-'n-go.

As they came up to the stairwell's fire door, Phury barked, "Hold up, Rhage."

The brother stopped on a dime; and Phury clamped his hand on the side of the woman's neck, putting her out cold with a pressure lock.

"She's gone. S'all good."

They hit the back stairs and hauled ass. Vishous's rasping breath was testimony to how much the express-train action was killing him, but he was hard-core as always, hanging in, in spite of the fact that he'd turned the color of pea soup.

Each time they came to a landing, Phury pulled a little scramble with a security camera, running an electrical surge through the things so they blinked out. His big hope was that they'd make it to the Escalade without tangling with a bunch of security guards. Humans were never targets for the Brotherhood. That being said, if there was a risk of the vampire race being exposed, there was nothing that wouldn't be done. And as hypnotizing large groups of agitated and aggressive humans had a low success rate, that left fighting. And death for them.

Some eight flights down the stairwell bottomed out, and Butch stopped in front of a metal door. Sweat poured down his face and he was weaving, but his face was soldier-strong: He was going to get his buddy out, and nothing was going to stand in his way, even his own physical weakness.

"I'll do the door," Phury said, jumping to the head of the pack. After taking care of the alarm, he held the slab of steel open for the others. On the far side, a maze of utility halls branched out.

"Oh, shit," he muttered. "Where the hell are we?"

"Basement." The cop marched ahead. "Know it well. Morgue's on this level. Spent a lot of time here in my old job."

Some hundred yards farther, Butch hooked them up with a shallow corridor that was more a shaft full of HVAC piping than any kind of hallway.

And then there it was: salvation in the form of an emergency access door.

"Escalade's out here," the cop said to V. "Sitting pretty."

"Thank... God." V's lips pressed flat, again, like he was trying not to throw up.

Phury did another jump ahead, then cursed. This alarm setup was different from the others, operating on a more complex circuitry. Which he should have expected. Exterior doors were frequently wired more heavily than interior ones. Trouble was, his little mental tricks weren't going to work here, and it wasn't like he could call a time-out to disarm the thing. V was looking roadkill bad.

"Brace yourself for a screamer," Phury said before punching the bar handle.

The alarm went off like a banshee.

As they rushed out into the night, Phury wheeled around and looked up at the ass end of the hospital. He located the security camera over the door, got it to misread, and stayed locked with its blinking red eye as V and the human female were dumped inside the Escalade and Rhage got behind the wheel.

Butch took shotgun and Phury hopped into the back with the cargo. He checked his watch. Total elapsed time from when they'd first parked back here to Hollywood's foot slamming down on the gas pedal was twenty-nine minutes. The op had been relatively clean. All that was left to do now was get everyone to the compound in one piece and scrap the plates on the SUV.

There was just one complication.

Phury shifted his eyes to the human woman.

One big, huge complication.

Chapter Ten

John was antsy as he waited in the mansion's brilliantly colored foyer. He and Zsadist always went out for an hour before dawn, and there had been no change of plans as far as he was aware. But the Brother was nearly half an hour late.

To kill some more time, John took another trip across the mosaic floor. As always he felt as if he didn't belong in all the grandeur, but he loved and appreciated it. The foyer was so outrageously fancy it was like standing in a jewelry box: Columns in red marble and some kind of green-and-black stone supported walls festooned with gold-leafed curlicue thingies and light fixtures with crystals. The staircase up was a majestic expanse of red carpet, the kind of thing a movie star would pause dramatically at the top of, then swoop down to a black-tie party. And the pattern beneath your feet was of an apple tree in bloom, the bright palate of spring resplendent and glimmering thanks to millions of sparkling pieces of colored glass.

His favorite thing, though, was the ceiling. Three stories up there was an astonishing stretch of painted scenes, with warriors and stallions leaping to life as they went into battle with black daggers. They were so real it was as if you could reach up and touch them.

So real it was as if you could be them.

He thought back to when he'd first seen it all. Tohr had been taking him to meet Wrath.

John swallowed. He'd had Tohrment for such a short time. Mere months. After a lifetime of feeling ungrounded, after having floated along for two decades without any family-gravity to anchor him, he'd been given a glimpse of what he'd always wanted. And then with one bullet both his adoptive father and mother were gone.

He'd like to be big enough to say he was grateful he'd known Tohr and Wellsie for the time he had, but that was a lie. He wished he'd never met them. The loss of them was so much harder to bear than the amorphous ache he'd had when he'd been by himself.

Not really a male of worth, was he?

Without warning, Z strode out of the hidden door under the grand staircase, and John stiffened. He couldn't help it. No matter how many times he saw the Brother, Zsadist's appearance always made him think twice. It wasn't just the facial scar or the skull trim. It was the deadly air that hadn't been lost, even though he was now mated and going to be a father.

Plus tonight, Z's face was cast-iron tight, his body even tighter. "You good to go?"

John narrowed his eyes and signed, What's going on?

"Nothing you need to worry about. Are you ready." Not a question, a command.