Lover Avenged (Black Dagger Brotherhood 7)

Finally, she pictured John Matthew's dark blue eyes and short-cropped military-style hair...felt him moving deep inside of her...heard his heavy breathing as his warrior body had given her what she'd wanted and hadn't been able to handle.

They were all gone, even though at least two of them were still alive on the planet. But people didn't have to be dead to be out of your life.

She looked down at the viciously sharp, shiny blade and angled the thing so that it caught the weak sunlight in a flash that momentarily blinded her. She was good with knives. They were her favorite weapon, actually.

The knock on her door brought her head up.

"You okay in there?"

It was iAm-who not only had acted as Rehv's mail carrier, but was evidently charged with babysitting. She'd tried to throw him out of her house, but he'd just shadowed on her, taking a form that she couldn't get hold of, much less bootlick out the damn door.

Trez was sitting in the hunting cabin's main room, as well, but talk about role reversal. When she'd locked herself in her bedroom, he'd been stock-still in a hard-backed chair, staring out over the river in a heavy silence. In the wake of the tragedy, the brothers had traded personalities, iAm being the only one who talked: As far as she recalled, Trez hadn't said one thing since the news had droppped.

All that quiet was not about Trez mourning, though. His emotional grid was marked with anger and frustration, and she had a feeling Rehv, in all his cock-sucking wisdom, had found a way to trap Trez into inaction, too. Like her, the Moor was trying to find a way out, and knowing Rehv, there wouldn't be one. He was a master at manipulation-always had been.

And he'd put a lot of thought into this exit strategy. According to iAm, everything was all set up, not only on the personal levels, but the financial ones, too. iAm got Sal's; Trez got the Iron Mask; she got a chunk of cash. Ehlena was provided for as well, although iAm said he would handle that. The bulk of the family estate went to Nalla, with millions and millions of dollars passing to the young, along with all the heirlooms that, according to primogeniture, had been owned by Rehv, not Bella.

He'd exited beautifully, wiping clean ZeroSum's drug and bookie businesses entirely. The Mask still had girls for hire, but none of the other stuff was going to go down there or at Sal's. With the Reverend gone, the bunch of them were almost clean.

"Xhex, say something so I know you're alive."

There was no way iAm could get through the door or dematerialize inside to check and see if she was still breathing. The room was a steel safe, utterly impenetrable. There was even fine mesh skirting around the doorjamb so that he couldn't shadow his way in.

"Xhex, we already lost him tonight. You make it two for two and I'm going to kill you all over again."

"I'm fine."

"None of us is fine."

When she didn't reply, she heard iAm curse and move away from the door.

Maybe later she could help the two of them. They were, after all, the only people who knew what she felt like. Even Bella, who'd lost her brother, didn't know the exquisite torture the three of them were going to have to live with for the rest of their days. Bella thought Rehv was dead, so she could go through the mourning process and come out the other side and get on with her life in some fashion.

For Xhex, iAm, and Trez? They were going to be stuck in the limbo-hell of knowing the truth and being able to do nothing to change it-with the result being that the princess was free to torture Rehvenge for as long as he had a heartbeat.

As Xhex thought about the future, her grip on the dagger hilt tightened.

And got stronger as she brought the weapon downward onto her skin.

With her mouth screwed down tight to keep her pain inside, Xhex shed her own blood instead of tears.

Although what was the difference, really. Symphaths cried red, in the manner of the vein anyway.

Chapter SIXTY-ONE

Rehv's brain came back online in a slow wave of flickering consciousness. Awareness flared and faded and returned, spreading from the base of his skull up into his front lobe.

His shoulders were on fire. Both of them. Head was killing him from when that symphath had sweet-dreamed him with the sword hilt. And the rest of him felt curiously weightless.

On the other side of his closed lids, light twinkled around him and registered deep red. Which meant the dopamine was fully out of his system and he was now who he would forever be.

Breathing in through his nose, he smelled...earth. Clean, damp earth.

It was a while before he was ready to do a look-see, but eventually he needed some other reference point than the pain in his shoulders. Opening his eyes, he blinked. Candles as long as his legs were set up at the far reaches of what appeared to be some kind of cave, the tremulous flames atop each one bloodred and reflecting over walls that seemed fluid.

Not fluid. There were things crawling on the black stone...crawling all over-

His eyes shot down to his body, and he was relieved to see that his feet were not touching the moving floor. A glance up and...chains held him aloft from the undulating ceiling, chains that were anchored by...bars inserted through his torso under his shoulders.

He was suspended in the midst of the cave, his naked body hovering above and below the shimmering, pulsating confines of rock.

Spiders. Scorpions. His prison was teeming with venomous guards.

Closing his eyes, he reached out with his symphath side, trying to find others of his kind, determined to get through the place where he was, to minds and emotions he could manipulate to get himself free: He might be in the colony to stay, but that didn't mean he had to keep hanging around like a chandelier.

Except all he could sense was a web of static.

The cast of hundreds of thousands that surrounded him formed an impenetrable psychic blanket, castrating his symphath side, allowing nothing into or out of the cave.

Anger rather than fear fisted in his chest, and he reached over to one of the chains and pulled on it using his massive pectoral muscles. Pain made him tremble head to foot as his body shifted in midair, but there was no budging his tether or dislodging the bolting mechanism that went through his flesh.

As he swung back to straight vertical, he heard a shifting sound, as if a door had opened behind him.

Someone came in, and he knew who, given how strong the psychic block they were putting up was.

"Uncle," he said.

"Indeed."

The king of the symphaths came shuffling around with his cane, the spiders on the floor breaking their quilt of bodies briefly to make way for him before swallowing up his path. Beneath those blood-colored imperial robes his uncle's body was weak, but the brain on top of that curved spine was incredibly strong.

Proof positive that physical strength wasn't a symphath's best weapon.

"How fare thee in thy floating repose?" the king asked, his royal headdress of rubies catching the candlelight.

"Complimented."

The king's brows lifted above his glowing red eyes. "How so?"

Rehv glanced around. "Hell of a lock and key you've got me under. Which means I'm more powerful than you're comfortable with or you're weaker than you wish you were."

The king smiled with the serenity of someone utterly unthreatened. "Do you know that your sister wished to be king?"

"Half sister. And it doesn't surprise me."

"For a time, I gave her what she wanted in my will, but I realized that I was inappropriately swayed and I changed everything. That was what your tithes were for. She was using them to transact business with humans, of all things." The king's expression suggested this was akin to inviting rats into one's kitchen. "That alone indicates she is utterly unworthy to rule. Fear is far more useful to motivate subjects-money being comparatively irrelevant if one is looking to gain power. And killing me? She presumed she could best my succession plan that way, which vastly overestimates her capabilities."

"What did you do with her?"

More of that serene smile. "What was fitting."

"How long are you going to keep me here like this?"

"Until she is dead. Her knowledge that I have you and that you are alive is part of her punishment." The king looked around at the spiders, something close to true affection flaring in his white Kabuki face. "My friends will guard you well, worry not."

"I'm not."

"You will be. I promise you." The king's eyes returned to Rehv's, his androgynous features shifting into something demonic. "I didn't like your father and was quite pleased that you killed him. That being said, you are not getting that chance with me. You live solely as long as your sister does, and then I shall follow your fine example and reduce the number of my kin."