As those brows disappeared under the wraparounds again, V thought, man, even though the king was fully blind, he still appeared to focus like he always did. Which kind of made you feel like you had a gunsight trained on your frontal lobe.
V started laying out little white squares. “It’s that human surgeon.”
“Oh . . . for shit’s sake.” Wrath popped his sunglasses onto his forehead and rubbed his eyes. “Do not crank my crap out and tell me they’ve hooked up.”
V remained silent, grabbing the pouch and busying himself with the pinching stage of things.
“I’m waiting for you to tell me I got it wrong.” Wrath let his glasses fall back into place. “Still waiting.”
“She’s in love with him.”
“And you’re okay with this?”
“Of course not. But she could date a Brother and the motherfucker wouldn’t be good enough for her.” He picked up one of the loaded papers and began rolling. “So . . . if she wants him, I say live and let live.”
“V . . . I know what angle you’re going to take and I can’t allow it.”
Vishous stopped in mid-lick and considered bringing Beth into the happy convo. But the king already looked like he was getting a headache. “The hell you can’t allow it. Rhage and Mary—”
“Rhage got beaten, remember? For a reason. Besides, times are changing, V. The war is heating up, the Lessening Society is recruiting like a motherfucker—and on top of that, there’s the sliced-not-diced, halvsie shit you found downtown last night.”
Goddamn it, V thought. Those slaughtered slayers . . .
“Plus I just got this.” Without looking, Wrath patted to the left and held up a page of Braille. “It’s a copy of a letter that was e-mailed to what’s left of the Founding Families. Xcor has relocated with his boys—which was why you found those lessers in the condition you did.”
“Fucking . . . hell. I knew it was him.”
“He’s setting us up.”
V stiffened. “For what?”
Wrath sent a get real over the desk. “People have lost entire branches of their families. They’ve fled their homes, but they want to come back here. Meanwhile, things are getting more dangerous, instead of safer in Caldwell. Nothing should be taken for granted right now.”
Read: He wasn’t assuming his throne was secure. No matter what he happened to be sitting on.
“So it’s not that I don’t understand where Payne’s at,” Wrath said. “But we’ve got to circle the wagons and hunker down. Now is not the time to layer on the complication of a human in here.”
Things grew quiet for a moment.
As V considered his counterpoints, he picked up another square, rolled it tight, licked the flap, twisted. “He helped my Jane last night. When the Brothers and I came back here after the melee in that alley, Manello was hands-on and then some. He’s a spectacular surgeon—and I should know. He operated on me. He’s far from useless.” V looked across the desk. “If the war intensifies further, we could use an extra set of surgical hands down in the clinic.”
Wrath cursed in English. And then in the Old Language. “Vishous—”
“Jane is awesome, but there’s only one of her. And Manello has technical skills she doesn’t.”
Wrath popped up his glasses again and rubbed. Hard. “You telling me that guy is going to want to live here in this house day and night for the rest of his life? Lot to ask.”
“So I’ll ask him.”
“I don’t like this.”
Loooong silence. Which told V he was making headway. He knew better than to push, however.
“I thought you wanted to kill the bastard,” Wrath groused. As if that would be preferable as a goal.
Abruptly, the image of Manello on his knees in front of Payne blazed into V’s mind, until he wanted to snag a pen and poke his own eyes out. “I still do,” he said darkly. “But . . . he’s who she wants, true. What am I gonna do.”
Another loooong silence, during which he made a satisfyingly tall pile of light-ables.