Page 21 of Lover Forbidden (The Black Dagger Brotherhood #23)

Out in the wealthy suburbs, where the houses were monolithic and the properties were so picked and pruned their gardens had hairstyles even in winter, the daytime shutters started to rise from the windows all around Shuli’s bedroom.

The subtle whirring was not loud enough to wake him up.

His phone going apeshit with a call coming through did the fucking job just fine.

Jacking upright in his satin sheets, he slapped his hand to his bedside table and snapped the goddamn cell up to his ear.

“Did you find him? Tell me you found—”

The Brother Vishous’s voice was deep as the low note on a Steinway and dry as a desert. “Yeah, L.W.’s been located.”

“And he’s alive.” He kept that a statement, as if any hint of inquiry on his part would make the answer more likely to be in the negative. “He is alive—”

“Yeah, he is.”

Shuli took a deep breath. “Thank Lassiter.”

“Wrath found him.”

“Where? What happened? When—”

“That’s not why I’m calling you—for the third time.” There was a shht and then an exhale, and Shuli could just picture the Brother lighting up one of his hand-rolleds. “You need to answer your fucking phone.”

Next to him, the sheets started moving, and he nearly jabbed his hand under his pillow for the knife he kept there—until he recognized the dark hair, the breast, the naked hip.

Shit, lucky for her there was a glow from the bathroom or she woulda woken up dead. And fucking hell, the tail end of the night was coming back to him now. He’d gotten shitfaced, done a couple of lines of coke at Marhalle’s, and ended up bringing home—

The woman looked at him with unfocused dark eyes. “Well, helllllo.”

Closing his eyes, he said into his phone, “Sorry. I think I passed out for a while there.”

Which explained why he didn’t get any of the texts that had no doubt been sent about L.W.

“We want you at the Audience House in an hour.”

“Okay, I’ll see you—”

The call ended, and he stared at the screen. Ah, right. There had actually been seven missed reach-out-and-touches, as well as those group texts. It was a wonder the Brotherhood hadn’t shown up here with their black daggers out and a coffin as a chaser the second the sun went bye-bye.

“Where are you going?” the woman asked as she reached through the sheets.

As her hand found his dick with the same accuracy his had grabbed his phone, he swung his legs out and put his feet on the carpeted floor.

“I gotta go.” He cleared his throat. “My butler will take you home.”

“Do you always wake up in a bad mood?”

Well, considering he was about to be killed for not doing a job he didn’t want because a selfish royal fuck had fucked him off in the middle of the war—yeah, he was a little cranky.

“You know, I have ways of cheering a man up.”

The sinuous way she rolled over and swept that glossy hair back over her shoulder had no doubt been a successful play many a time.

“My butler will pay you.” And then, because he wasn’t a total shit, he eased back down and kissed her pouty lips. “Thanks for all the fun.”

“Keep me in mind.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that.”

As he stood up, he swallowed a curse while he hit the summoning button under the lip of the bedside table.

Then he limped over toward the loo with the full confidence that his bedroom would be empty when he came out: Willhis, his head doggen , would make sure she used one of the guest rooms to straighten herself before he escorted her down to the car and took her wherever she wanted to go.

And no, she would never know she’d been with a vampire.

Shutting himself in his black agate bathroom, he didn’t make it over to the shower to start the water. His battered feet required an immediate interview, so he sat down on the padded stool in front of the double sinks and cocked one leg up.

The bloody blisters were concentrated on the back of the heel and the side of the big toe. He could feel that the same was true for the other foot, and as a twin set of heartbeats started to thump, he closed his eyes.

So many alleys. So many streets.

After Qhuinn had gone full confrontation with him in that alley outside of Bathe, Shuli had been taken off rotation and told to go home.

But like that was going to happen. He’d walked the field for hours looking for his cocksucking roommate, to the point where he’d been a fucking zombie by the time his best friend, Nate, had found him and forced him into a car.

Even now, he wasn’t sure whether he’d been looking for L.W. to save his own life—or just so he could punch the heir to the throne in the nads.

Then again, the two were not mutually exclusive.

And that was how he’d ended up at Marhalle’s. If he’d stayed home and waited around? And L.W. had been walked through his door, all nonchalant-dick-in-his-hand?

Talk about waking up dead.

Marhalle, on the other hand, had given him exactly what he needed, right down to the escort: A brunette who had looked as different from Lyric as possible.

He didn’t trust himself to fuck a blonde at this point. Why spin the wheel of shame and risk landing on such more-than-likelies as Impotence, Premature Ejaculation, or—worst of all—Crying Jag.

Putting his foot down on the heated floor, he checked the other one—which turned out to be in worse shape—and then forced himself up to the vertical.

As he initiated forward momentum, the distance to the shower seemed to get longer and longer, but hey, at least he had plenty of time to enjoy the view of all his gold faucets and the gold-and-black monogrammed rug.

Oh, and also the black agate tub that had illumination running through it, the veins of white and gold crisscrossing like some kind of magical map to be deciphered.

He used the thing as his nightlight.

Over at the spacious shower alcove, which was the size of a garage and lit up thanks to a motion detector, he hit the water, and when things were warm enough, he stepped into the eight-headed spray—

“ Fuck. ”

All that raw skin on his tootsies screamed as the H 2 O ran over his feet, and he gritted his teeth as he let his head fall back.

Like the tub, the black agate walls and ceiling of the shower room glowed through that subtle veining, and he felt like he was up in the sky and there were ribbons of clouds all around him.

Was he still stoned, too? He couldn’t remember whether he’d smoked a bowl before he’d crashed with the Absolutely Not Lyric escort.

Sweeping his hands back through his dripping hair, the shed water hit his ass with a slap that felt a lot like a cosmic spank. Was it about the sex worker? Or about all his unrequited?

The universe was going to have to be a little more specific if it was trying to teach him something.

God, he’d been watching Lyric from afar for so long now, he couldn’t remember a time when he’d not snuck glances at her, or pretended to be cool when she’d hugged him as a greeting or a goodbye—or hidden behind his cool, rich fuckboy cloak of don’t-care.

When he’d seen that video last night, he’d been reminded that life didn’t last forever, and what the fuck was he waiting for? Maybe he should finally say something.

Yeah, well, the punchline to that stupid idea was that his lifestyle—the drinking, the drugs, the prostitutes—might well be why she wrote him off. And his Sisyphean boomerang on that was that he was self- medicating everything he felt the instant she walked into any room.

Plus, God, Rhamp would kill him.

Then again, that male was going to have to get the fuck in line. The Black Dagger Brotherhood was already first on that list—

Shit, they might actually bury him tonight…

As his reality sunk into his parboiled brain, Shuli realized he’d hit a brick wall and there was a kind of peace that came with the impact—maybe because of an existential head injury, but at this point, he wasn’t going to bother teasing out if this clarity was courtesy of destiny giving him CTE.

Bottom line, he had one hour to find that female and talk to her.

Before Lassiter only knew what was going to be done to him.

When the sky was finally dark enough, L.W.

left the mansion, making sure to lock up behind himself.

He was stiff as fuck after sleeping on the floor in front of the hearth, and he’d been a block of ice when he’d finally woken up, the embers of the fire having long drifted into their ashy deaths, the warmth gone, gone, gone.

Outside, he looked up over his shoulder. Atop the gargoyle’d roof’s slate peaks, the moon was peeking at him, like it was afraid of his mood and hiding in the forest of old iron lightning rods.

He told his brain to remember this sight, the silvery illumination broken up by those spiked diverters of bad weather strikes, the shapes of the purposely hideous creatures guarding the stone manse like something out of a fantasy novel.

Every time he left this place, he felt like it was a goodbye.

And some night, that was going to be true.

Closing his lids, he dematerialized and traveled in a scatter of molecules to the south, his destination one that he’d visited many times in his mind, and sometimes with his body.

When he re-formed, it was in more knee-deep snow and in the shadows of a row of bare-branched trees.

As he glanced across the drift-blanketed lawn to the well-lit, well-cared-for Colonial house, he shook his head.

There were footprints marring the snowpack. A lot of them. All his.

Fucking creeper , he thought as he followed his own trail.

Especially given that Safe Place was where females and their young were supposed to take shelter from dangerous males.

Not that he would ever hurt Bitty. Or anybody else in there.

Closing in from the side, he ignored the first level and all the people milling around there, and instead focused on the window that was smack-dab in the lineup on the second floor.

The four small panes were all dark, but he fixed that by shutting his eyes again and imagining the profile that he’d come to see.

He’d never been any kind of artist, but his memory drew a picture of Bitty’s bent head as she focused on her computer, her concentration so complete, it was as if she were responsible for the well-being of the whole world through that monitor.

Her chestnut brown hair, recently highlighted with red sections, fell forward so her beautiful face was partially obscured, and her slender neck was a temptation even from a distance.

He’d never been inside the house, and he couldn’t go in there now to find her in another room—or even just verify she was at work. Males weren’t allowed to go in.

But she’d come out to him before.

Lifting his lids, he was stupidly disappointed that the female hadn’t magically appeared, and he strained his eyes like he could force the image in his mind to become a reality in the flesh. Shit didn’t work like that, though, and the panic that some night he wouldn’t be able to see her choked him—

Movement drew his attention to the first floor, to one of the windows of the parlor… a female entering into view.

“There you are,” he whispered.

An exhale of relief left his lips on a cloud that drifted toward the house, as if his very breath were called by her as well.

Tonight, Bitty was wearing a pale blue sweater, and her newly tinted hair looked great against the color. She was carrying a tray of cookies, and as she bent down to offer some to a female holding a swaddled young, her lips were moving as she chatted—and then there was that smile. Gentle and kind.

Your anger is your downfall… Unless you can forgive fate, you are going to destroy all of us.

The warning she’d spoken to him—as if it were a message from some kind of divine source—had been something he’d outright rejected.

But no longer, not after last night. A hard truth had dawned on him as he’d woken up, and the shit was impossible to ignore: When he’d broken loose from Shuli in the field, it had supposedly been in the noble quest to win the war against the species and take out Lash by any means necessary.

Except that had only been his surface motivation.

Rage had been his real driver. The undeniable, furious energy that burned in his veins and his gut, that made him take risks—that made him utterly indifferent to the fact that a worthy male might well be killed because L.W. was flaking off his ahstrux nohtrum —was actually why he’d bolted.

The truth he’d woken up to tonight? He would have left anyway. Even if he’d thought Shuli would be put in a grave… he would still have deserted the guy.

So yeah, Bitty was right. That kind of shit was dangerous to people.

That kind of shit was dangerous to her .

Opposites attracted? Fuck that. He was a curse waiting to happen—

Abruptly, Bitty looked to the window, and her brows tightened as if she had sensed his presence somehow.

L.W. swore under his breath and backed away.

Even as he hit reverse, however, his eyes clung to her, noting everything about the freeze frame of her standing there, in the glow of that room, everybody else who came and went around her disappearing, as if she were a brilliant light that blinded him.

She certainly hurt his eyes.

L.W. watched her for as long as he could, forcing himself to focus through the pain that had nothing to do with his sight… and everything to do with his soul.

Bitty was his female.

And after last night, when he’d proved those words of hers were not a caution, but statement of fact, he could never claim her.