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Instead, he felt dread.

In his training and practice as a lawyer, he had tackled sticky problems before—especially after he had come here to this vast house and begun to function as the Blind King’s personal solicitor: The Old Laws were very convoluted, archaic not just in their wording, but in their very content—and the ruler of the vampire race was not at all like that. Wrath’s thinking was both straightforward and revolutionary, and when it came to his rule, the past and the future did not often coexist without a good deal of reframing—of the Old Laws, that was.

This was on a whole different level, however.

Wrath, as sovereign, could do fairly much what he wanted—provided the appropriate precedents were identified, recast, and recorded. After all, the king was the living, breathing law, a physical manifestation of the order necessary for a civilized society. The problem was, tradition didn’t happen by accident; it was the result of generations upon generations living and making choices based on a certain set of rules that was accepted by the public. Progressive thinkers trying to lead entrenched, conservative societies in new directions tended to run into problems.

And this…further alteration of the way things were done? In the current political environment, where Wrath’s leadership was already being challenged—

“You’re deep in thought.”

At the sound of Blay’s voice, Saxton jumped and nearly lost his Montblanc over his shoulder.

Immediately, Blay reached forward as if to calm what had been ruffled. “Oh, I’m sorry—”

“No, it’s all right, I—” Saxton frowned as he regarded the soldier’s wet and bloodied clothing. “Dearest Virgin Scribe…what happened tonight?”

Evidently in lieu of answering, Blay headed over for the bar on the antique bombé chest in the corner. As he took his time choosing between the sherry and a Dubonnet, it was rather clear he was preparing a sequence of words in his head.

Which meant it had to do with Qhuinn.

In fact, Blay cared for neither sherry nor Dubonnet. And sure enough, he helped himself to a port.

Saxton eased back in his chair and looked upward at the chandelier that hung so far above the floor. The fixture was a stunning specimen from Baccarat, made in the middle nineteenth century, with all of the leaded-glass crystals and careful workmanship one would expect.

He recalled it swinging from side to side subtly, the rainbow refractions of light twinkling all around the room.

How many nights ago had that been? How long since Qhuinn had serviced that Chosen directly above this room?

Nothing had been the same since.

“A broken-down car.” Blay took a long swallow. “Just mechanical issues.”

Is that why your leathers are wet, and there is blood down the front of your shirt? Saxton wondered.

And yet he kept the demand to himself.

He had become used to keeping things to himself.

Silence.

Blay finished his port and poured another with the kind of alacrity typically reserved for drunkards. Which he was not. “And…you?” the male said. “How’s your work?”

“I’m finished. Well, nearly so.”

Blay’s blue eyes shot over. “Really? I thought you were going to be at this forever.”

Saxton traced that face he knew so well. That stare he’d looked into for what seemed like a lifetime. Those lips he had spent hours locked onto.

The crushing sense of sadness he felt was as undeniable as the attraction that had brought him to this house, his job, his new life.

“So did I,” he said after a moment. “I, too…thought it would last far longer than it did.”

Blay stared down into his glass. “It’s been how long since you started?”

“I don’t…I can’t remember.” Saxton put a hand up and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “It does not matter.”

More silence. In which Saxton was willing to bet the very breath in his lungs that Blaylock’s mind had retreated to the other male, the one he loved like nobody else, his other half.

“So what was it?” Blay asked.

“I’m sorry?”

“Your project. All of this work.” Blay motioned his glass around elegantly. “These books you’ve been poring over. If you’re finished, you can tell me what it was all about now, right?”

Saxton briefly considered telling the truth…that there had been other, equally pressing and important things that he had been quiet on. Things that he had thought he could live with, but which, over time, had proven too heavy a burden to carry.

“You shall find out soon enough.”

Blay nodded, but it was with that vital distraction that he had had since the very beginning. Except then he said, “I’m glad you’re here.”

Saxton’s brows rose. “Indeed…?”

“Wrath should have a really good lawyer at his side.”

Ah.

Saxton pushed his chair back and got to his feet. “Yes. How true.”

It was with a strange feeling of fragility that he gathered his reams of papers. It certainly seemed, in this tense, sad moment, as though they were all that sustained him, these flimsy, yet powerful sheets with their countless words, each handwritten and crafted with care, contained neatly in their lines of text.

He did not know what he would do without them on a night like this.

He cleared his throat. “What plans have you for what little remains of the eve?”

As he waited for the reply, his heart pounded within his rib cage, because he, and he alone, seemed to realize that the assignment from the king wasn’t the only thing that was ending tonight. Indeed, the baseless optimism that had sustained him in the initial stages of this love affair had decayed into a kind of desperation that had had him grasping at straws in an uncharacteristic way…but now, even that was gone.

It was ironic, really. Sex was but a transient physical connection—and there were many times in his life when that had been all he’d been looking for. Even with Blaylock, in the beginning, such had been the case. Over time, however, the heart had gotten involved, and that had left him where he was tonight.

At the end of the road.

“…work out.”

Saxton shook himself. “I’m sorry?”

“I’m going to work out for a while.”

After you’ve had a decanter of port? Saxton thought.

For a moment, he was tempted to push for precise details on the night, the minute whos and whats and wheres—as if they might unlock some sort of relief. But he knew better. Blay was a compassionate, kind soul, and torture was something he did only as part of his job when it was necessary.

There would be no relief coming, not from any combination of sex, conversing, or silence.

Feeling as though he were bracing himself, Saxton buttoned his double-breasted blazer up and checked that his cravat was in place. A passby of his pectoral revealed his pocket square was precisely arranged, but the French cuffs of his shirt need a sharp tug, and he took care of that promptly.

“I must needs take a break before I prepare to speak with the king. My shoulders are killing me from having been at that desk all night.”

“Have a bath. It might loosen things up?”

“Yes. A bath.”

“I’ll see you later, then,” Blay said as he poured himself another and came over.

Their mouths met in a brief kiss, after which Blay turned and strode out into the foyer, disappearing up the stairs to go change.

Saxton watched him depart. Even moved forward a couple of steps so that he could see those shitkickers, as the Brothers called them, ascend the grand staircase one step at a time.

Part of him was screaming to follow the male up into their bedroom and help him out of those clothes. Emotions aside, the physical sizzle between the two of them had always been strong, and he felt like he wanted to exploit that now.

Except even that Band-Aid was fraying.

Going over and pouring himself a sherry, he sipped it and went to sit before the fire. Fritz had refreshed the wood not long ago, and the flames were bright and active over the stack of logs.

This was going to hurt, Saxton thought. But it wasn’t going to break him.

He would eventually get over this. Heal. Move on.

Hearts were broken all the time….

Wasn’t there a song about that?

The question was, of course, when did he talk to Blaylock about it.

NINE

The sound of cross-country skis traveling over snow was a rhythmic rush, repeated at a quick clip.

The storm that had drifted down from the north had cleared after dawn, and the rising sun that shone beneath the lip of the departing cloud cover sliced through the forest to the sparkling ground.

To Sola Morte, the shafts of gold looked like blades.

Up ahead, her target presented itself like a Fabergé egg sitting on a stand: The house on the Hudson River was an architectural showpiece, a cage of seemingly fragile girders holding stack upon stack of countless panels of glass. On all sides, reflections of the water and the nascent sun were like photographs captured by a true artist, the images frozen in the very construction of the home itself.

You couldn’t pay me to live like that, Sola thought.

Unless it was all bulletproof? But who had the money for that.

According to the Caldwell public records department, the land had been purchased by a Vincent DiPietro two years before, and developed by the man’s real estate company. No expense had been spared on the construction—at least, given the valuation on the tax rolls, which was north of eight million dollars. Just after building was completed, the property changed hands, but not to a person: to a real estate trust—with only a lawyer in London listed as trustee.

She knew who lived here, however.

He was the reason she’d come.

He was also the reason she had armed herself so thoroughly. Sola had lots of weapons in easy-to-reach places: a knife in a holster at the small of her back, a gun on her right hip, a switch hidden in the collar of her white-on-white camo parka.

Men like her target did not appreciate being spied on—even though she came only in search of information, and not to kill him, she had no doubt that if she were found on the property, things would get tense. Quick.

As she took her binocs out of an inside pocket, she kept still and listened hard. No sounds of anything approaching from the back or the sides, and in front, she had a clear visual shot at the rear of the house.

Ordinarily, when she was hired for one of these kinds of assignments, she operated at night. Not with this target.

Masters of the drug trade conducted their business from nine to five, but that would be p.m. to a.m., not the other way around. Daytime was when they slept and fucked, so that was when you wanted to case their houses, learn their habits, get a read on their staff and how they protected themselves during their downtime.

Bringing the house into close focus, she made her assessment. Garage doors. Back door. Half windows that she guessed looked out of the kitchen. And then the full floor-to-ceiling glass sliders started up, running down the rear flank and around the corner that turned to the river’s shoreline.

Three stories up.

Nothing moving inside that she could see.

Man, that was a lot of glass. And depending on the angle of the light, she could actually see into some of the rooms, especially the big open space that appeared to take up at least half of the first floor. Furniture was sparse and modern, as if the owner didn’t welcome people loitering.

Bet the view was unbelievable. Especially now, with the partial cloud cover and the sun.

Training the binocs on the eaves under the roofline, she looked for security cameras, expecting one every twenty feet.

Yup.

Okay, that made sense. From what she’d been told, the homeowner was cagey as hell—and that kind of relentless mistrust tended to be accessorized with a good dose of security-conscious behavior, including but not limited to personal guards, bulletproof cars, and most certainly, constant monitoring of any environment the individual spent any amount of time in.

The man who’d hired her had all those and more, for example.

“What the…” she whispered, refocusing the binoculars.

She stopped breathing to make sure nothing shifted.

This was…all wrong. There was a wave pattern to what was inside the house: What furniture she could see was subtly undulating.

Dropping the high-powered lenses, she looked around, wondering if maybe her eyes were the problem.

Nope. All the pine trees in the forest were behaving appropriately, standing still, their branches unmoving in the cold air. And when she put the magnifiers up again, she traced the rooftop of the house and the contours of the stone chimneys.

All were utterly inanimate.

Back to the glass.

Inhaling deep, she held the oxygen in her lungs and balanced against the nearest birch trunk to give her body extra stability.

Something continued to be off. The frames of those sliding glass doors and the lines of the porches and everything about the house? Static and solid. The interiors, however, seemed…pixilated somehow, like a composite image had been created to make things appear as if there were furniture…and that image had been superimposed on something like a curtain…that happened to be subjected to a soft current of air.

This was going to be a more interesting project than she’d assumed. Reporting on the activities of this business associate of a “friend” of hers had not exactly lit a fire under her ass. She much preferred greater challenges.

But maybe there was more to this than first appeared.

After all, camouflage meant you were hiding something—and she’d made a career out of taking things from people that they wanted to keep: Secrets. Items of value. Information. Documents.

The vocabulary used to define the nouns was irrelevant to her. The act of penetrating a locked house or car or safe or briefcase and extracting what she was after was what mattered.

She was a hunter.

And the man in that house, whoever he was, was her prey.

TEN

Blay had no business getting near a hand weight, much less the kind of iron that was down in the training center’s gym. Hammering back that port on an empty stomach had made him fuzzy and uncoordinated. But he had to have some kind of a direction…a plan, a destination to drag his sorry ass to. Anything other than going up to his room, sitting on that bed again, and starting the day in the same way he’d started the night—smoking and staring off into space.

Probably with a lot more port added in.

Stepping out of the underground tunnel, he walked through the office and pushed the glass door open.

As he went along, still drinking from a half-full glass, his mind was circling itself, wondering when all this bullcrap between him and Qhuinn was going to end. On his deathbed? God, he didn’t think he could last that long, assuming he had a normal life span ahead of him.

Maybe he needed to move out of the mansion. Before Wellsie had been killed, she and Tohr had been able to live in a house of their own. Hell, if he did that, he wouldn’t have to see Qhuinn except during meetings—and with so many people in and around the Brotherhood, it was easy to get out of eyeshot.

He’d been doing that for a while now, actually.

In fact, under that construct, the pair of them wouldn’t have to cross paths at all—John was always partnered with the guy because of the whole ahstrux nohtrum thing, and between the rotation schedule, and the way territory was divided up, he and Qhuinn never fought together except in an emergency.

Saxton could go back and forth to work—

Blay stopped dead at the entrance to the weight room. Through the glass window he saw a set of weights going up and down on the reclining squat machine, and he knew by the Nikes who it was.

Goddamn it, he couldn’t get a break.

Leaning in, he hit his head once. Twice. Three—

“You’re supposed to do reps on the machines—not on the door.”

Manny Manello’s voice was as welcome as a steel-toed kick in the ass.

Blay straightened up, and the world went wheeeeee a little—to the point that he had to surreptitiously put his free hand on the jamb just so that the balance issue didn’t show. He also tucked his nearly done drink out of sight

The doc probably wouldn’t think working out while under the influence was a good thing.

“How are you?” Blay asked, even though he didn’t really care—and that wasn’t a commentary on Payne’s hellren. He didn’t give a crap about much at the moment.

Manello’s mouth started to move and Blay passed the time watching the man’s lips form and release syllables. A moment later, a good-bye of some sort was exchanged, and then Blay was alone with the door again.

It seemed like a planker move to just stand there, and he’d told the good doctor he was going in. And besides, there were, what, twenty-five machines in the room? Plus barbells and free weights. Treadmills. StairMasters, ellipticals…plenty to go around.

I’m not in love with Layla.

With a curse, Blay pushed his way in and braced himself for an awkward oh-hey-it’s-you. Except Qhuinn didn’t even notice the arrival. Instead of going with the overhead music, the guy was wearing headphones that went all around his ears, and he’d moved over to the chin-up bar so he was facing away, into the concrete wall.

Blay stayed as far back as possible, hopping on a random machine—pecs. Whatever.

After putting down his glass and adjusting the pin on the stack of weights, he settled onto the padded seat, gripped the double handles, and started pushing out from his chest.

All he had to look at was Qhuinn.

Or maybe that was more because his eyes refused to go anywhere else.

The male was wearing a black wifebeater that put those tremendous shoulders of his on full display…and the muscles along them flexed up hard as he reached the apex of the pull, the ridges and contours those of a fighter…not a lawyer—

Blay stopped himself right there.

It was unfair to the point of nausea to make any comparison like that, ever. After the past year or so, he knew Saxton’s body nearly as well as his own, and the male was beautifully built, so lean and elegant—

Qhuinn ground out another lift, the weight of his heavy lower body straining the strength in those arms and that torso. And, thanks to his exertions, sweat had broken out all over his skin, making him glow under the lights.

The tattoo on the back of his neck shifted as he released and descended to hang from his grip, and then it was up again. And down. And up.

Blay thought about the way the male had looked as they’d turned over the Hummer: powerful, masculine…erotic.

This was not happening.

He was not, in fact, sitting here, eyeing Qhuinn like this—

Images filtered in from years past, turning his brain into a television screen. He saw Qhuinn bending over a human woman who had been laid out ass up on the edge of a flat table, his hips pumping as he fucked her, his hands locked onto her hips to hold her in place. He hadn’t had a shirt on at the time, and his shoulders had been tight, as they were now.

Hard body being used well.

There were so many pictures like that, with Qhuinn in different positions with different people, male and female. In the beginning, right after their transitions, there had been such a feeling of excitement as the two of them had gone on the hunt together—or rather, Qhuinn had gone trolling and Blay had taken whatever had been brought back. So much sex with so many people—although at that point, Blay had stuck only with the females.

Maybe because he’d known they were safe, that they didn’t “count” in so many ways.

So uncomplicated in the beginning. But sometime along the way, things had started to shift—and he’d begun to realize that as he watched Qhuinn with the randoms, he was picturing himself under that body, receiving what the guy was so good at giving. After a time, it hadn’t been some stranger’s mouth on Qhuinn’s cock; it was his own. And when those orgasms came, and they always did, he was the one taking them in. It was his hands on Qhuinn’s body, and his lips locked hard, and his legs that were spread.

And that had fucked everything up.

Shit, he could remember staying awake during the day and staring at his ceiling, telling himself that when they were yet again at the club, in those bathrooms, or wherever it went down, he wouldn’t do that anymore. But each time they went out, it was like an addict being offered the precise flavor of pill he needed.

Then there had been those two kisses—the first one down the hall from here, in the clinic’s examination room. And he’d had to beg for it. And then their second up in his bedroom, just before he’d gone out with Saxton for the first time.

He’d had to beg for that, too.

Abruptly, Blay gave up pretending that he was actually pumping iron and put his hands down on his thighs.

He told himself to leave. Just get the fuck off the seat and walk out before Qhuinn moved to the next thing and his cover was blown.

Instead, he found his eyes back on those shoulders and that spine, on the tight waist and tighter ass, on those muscular legs.

Maybe it was the alcohol. The afterburn of that argument in the flatbed. The whole sex-with-Layla thing…

But at the moment, he was sexed up. Hard as stone. Ready for it.

Blay looked down his chest to the front of his loose shorts—and felt like shooting himself in the head.

Oh, Jesus, he needed to get out of here right now.

As Qhuinn continued set after set of pull-ups, his hands were numb, and he felt like his biceps were being peeled from his bones with dull knives—and that was just mindless chatter in comparison to his shoulders. They were the real problem. Someone clearly had come up from behind, put varnish stripper across them, and then buffed them with an industrial sander.

No idea how many reps he’d done. No clue how many miles he’d run. No count of the sit-ups, squats, or lunges.

He just knew he was going to keep going.

Goal: total exhaustion. He wanted to pass out the moment he went upstairs and got horizontal on his bed.

Dropping from the bar, he put his hands on his hips, lowered his head, and breathed heavily. His right shoulder immediately seized up, but that was his dominant side, so he expected it. To loosen the knot of muscles, he swept his arm around in a big circle as he turned—

Qhuinn froze.

On the other side of the blue mats, Blay was on the machine closest to the door, sitting as still as the weights he was not lifting.

The expression on his face was volcanic. But he wasn’t mad.

No, he wasn’t.

He had a hard-on big enough to see from across the room. Maybe across the state.

Qhuinn opened his mouth. Shut it. Opened it again.

In the end, he decided this was a prime example of how life never failed to surprise. Of all the situations he thought they would ever be in? This was not it. Not after…well, everything.

He pulled his earphones off and let them hang from his neck, the pounding beat downshifting from concert-roar to impotent little hiss.

Is that for me? he wanted to ask.

For a split second, he thought it might be, but then how arrogant was that? The guy had just finished giving a speech about how the two of them were nothing but hourly wagers working side by side on vats of trans fat. Then Blay shows up with an arousal the size of a crowbar—and the first thing to come to his mind was it could, possibly, maybe, sort of, kind of…be for him?

What a prick he was.

And PS, what the hell would he do if he suddenly found himself in a parallel universe, with Blay pulling a hey-how-’bouta in that department?

Of course he wanted the guy.

For fuck’s sake, he’d always wanted him—to the point where he had to wonder how much of that pushing-away thing that he’d done “for Blay’s benefit” hadn’t really been for his own.

Pondering that one, he noticed the glass down by the guy’s feet. Ah, alcohol was involved—he sincerely doubted the dark inch in that squat glass was Coca-Cola.

Shit, for all he knew, Saxton had just texted him a crotch shot and a half, and that was the cause of all that erection.

And wasn’t that a deflator.

Your cousin is giving me what I need all day long, every day.

“You got something else to say to me?” Qhuinn asked harshly.

Blay shook his head back and forth once.

Qhuinn frowned. Blay was not a hothead—never had been, and that was part of the reason that, for the longest time, they’d been so tight. Balance and all that crap. At the moment, however, the guy seemed like he was a thin inch from losing it.

Trouble in paradise between the happy couple?

Nah, they were too good together.

“Okay.” Man, the idea of hanging around here while Blay amped up for another session with Saxton the Magnificent was untenable. “I’ll see you later.”

As he walked by, he felt Blay’s eyes on him—but they weren’t on the level of his face. At least, it didn’t seem like it.

What the fuck was going on here?

Pushing out into the hall, he paused to double-check that the concrete walls weren’t melting and that he didn’t suddenly have fish for hands or something. Neither were true, but a trippy sense of unreality dogged him as he went down to the locker room. A shower was mandatory; he was covered in sweat, and as much as the doggen loved a good mess, he wasn’t about to give them more work just because he’d tried to kill himself in the gym—

Hard. Aroused. Ready for sex.

As that image of Blay battered around the inside of his skull, he closed his eyes, and then hit the door into the land of tile and water fixtures. He intended to go over to the showers directly, but ended up stalling out in the front half of the room, where the lockers were stacked in orderly rows and the benches ran down the middle of the aisles.

Parking it, he unlaced his Nikes, kicked them off, and peeled his socks free.

Totally fucking aroused.

Blay had been out of his mind for it.

For some reason, Qhuinn’s last two sexual encounters popped into his head. There had been that redheaded guy at the Iron Mask—the one he’d seduced and fucked in the bathroom. He’d picked the random out of the crowd for that one defining physical characteristic, and naturally the sesh had done nothing extraordinary for him. Then again, it had been like wanting Herradura, and putting ginger ale down your throat.

And then there had been the stuff with Layla—which had been nothing but a physically demanding job, like digging a trench or building a wall….

God, he felt like a louse for thinking like that—and he meant no disrespect to the Chosen. But at least it was fairly clear she was of a similar mind.

That was it for the last year. Just those two.

Nearly twelve months of nothing, and he hadn’t been jerking off, either. He just wasn’t interested in anything, like his balls had gone into hibernation.

Funny, right after his transition he’d banged anything with two legs and a beating heart, and as he struggled to remember some of those many faces—God knew he hadn’t bothered to get names a lot of the time—an uncomfortable feeling tightened his gut.

All that anonymous, nameless, faceless fucking…in front of Blay. Always with the guy, come to think of it. At the time, it had felt like a buddy/buddy kind of situation, but now he wondered.

Yeah, screw that. He knew what it had been about.

He was such a pussy, wasn’t he.

Getting to his feet, he stripped naked and let his wifebeater and his b-ball shorts flop onto the bench in a wet mess. Walking to the shower room, he picked one of the showerheads at random, cranked the thing on, and stepped under the spray. The water was nut-shrinking cold, but he didn’t care. He faced the onslaught, shutting his lids and opening his mouth.

That redhead in the club almost a year ago? When he’d been seducing the guy into the loo, it had been Blay in his mind the whole time.

It was Blay who’d he’d pushed back against the sink and kissed hard. Blay’s cock he’d sucked off, and Blay’s body he’d taken from behind and—

“For the love…” he groaned.

From out of nowhere, the image of his old friend sitting on the machine just now, his knees wide, his cock straining against the oh-so-thin material of those shorts entered his mind and shot down his spine, going straight between his legs. With a curse, he sagged and had to put a hand out on the slick tile.

“Oh…fuck…”

Leaning in, he rested his forehead on his arm and tried to concentrate on the feel of the water hitting the nape of his neck.

Not even close.

All he was aware of was the heartbeat in his cock.

Well, that and a ringing fantasy of him dropping to his knees and pressing in between Blay’s open thighs, licking his way into that mouth…while burrowing under the waistband of those shorts and starting to give the guy a hand job he would never fucking forget.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14