Page 72 of Lover Forbidden (The Black Dagger Brotherhood #23)

Back in the heart of downtown, on the fourth floor of the apartment building that had been the epicenter of so much, Dev was waiting on his bed, hands in his lap, eyes on the floor where the bloodstain was.

The red one, where Lyric had lain.

Passing a hand down his face, he knew that this was the last time he would be in this space, and he didn’t feel any type of way about it.

The studio hadn’t meant anything to him when he’d first taken it, and in spite of everything, it didn’t mean much to him now.

If there was any hint of nostalgia, it was just because the square footage had been a marker of time passing, an era over.

Marked in blood, as it were—

One by one, they appeared, the three vampires from the night before entering through the crack in the window across the way: Lyric’s brother, fierce and dark-haired on the left. The tall one in the middle with the nasty expression and the braid. The diamond-studded one on the other end.

“She’s okay, isn’t she?” Dev asked.

Twinkle Lobes muttered, “None of your goddamn business—”

The brother elbowed the guy to shut up and then replied smoothly, “She’s totally okay. She’s resting and fine.”

As the pair of vampires glared at the male, he didn’t seem to care. He just kept staring straight ahead at Dev.

Ah, so the guy had seen the little sleight of hand and knew what had happened.

“I really want to kill you,” the one with the braid muttered.

“I wish you would.” Dev smiled coldly at him.

“With the way I’m feeling now, death would be so much more preferable.

But unfortunately, given who my parents are, that’s not an option.

” He sat up straighter and cracked his knuckles.

“We could go a couple of rounds with that dagger in your hand, though. Good exercise for you, and I think I’d like to have a little physical pain to go along with everything else that’s banging around in my head.

Except that would really just be a waste of time when there’s so many other things you want to do, right? ”

“Where are you taking us,” the braided one demanded.

“To his presence.” Dev shrugged. “I’m not Google Maps, asshole. I can’t give you directions. All I can do is transport us into my sire’s vicinity.”

“Hold on,” Twinkles cut in. “How do we know this isn’t a trap.”

“Call the Black Dagger Brotherhood. Call all the vampires on the planet.” Not that he wanted that. Better to keep this limited in scope so there was less chance of people dying. “I don’t give a shit, but I thought you wanted to try to kill him yourselves. Or was I wrong about that.”

When there was no immediate reply, he looked at them one by one. “What’s it going to be, boys.”

Still no answer, so Dev shrugged and went over to that open window. For a moment, all he could see was a memory of Lyric standing in front of the drapes as she’d looked around that first time she’d been here, her blond hair so beautiful as it shimmered when she moved.

The searing pain that went through him made him wonder what she’d felt after she’d been shot. Too bad he couldn’t have taken whatever agony she’d had from her. The shit in the center of his chest was late to that party, though.

Clearing his throat, he said, “Look, I’m leaving Caldwell after this and never, ever coming back. It’s now or not at all.”

Up on the shores of Lake George in Whestmorel’s glass house, Conrahd stood over the bed and watched the male breathe. The respiration had been getting slower. Slower. Slower…

Slower.

Yet the aristocrat just would not expire. Frustrated, Conrahd checked the clock on the wall. It had been like this for hours, the lingering, on the verge.

Glancing down, he tightened the grip on the pillow between his hands.

Do it , he told himself. Just lean over the bed and suffocate the bastard. The others had seen for themselves that their so-called fearless leader had taken very ill, thus there would be no questioning of the passing.

Then he could assume power—

Outside, something moved at the sliding glass doors, and he pivoted toward the expanse of transparency that provided such a panoramic view of the water and the snowy mountains.

Staring out across Whestmorel’s body, he frowned.

There was a shape on the far side of one of the doors, looming like a ghost that had become corporeal—

Every bone in Conrahd’s body, every inch of his skin, all the hairs on his head and each rib in his chest, screamed for him to go .

Now.

It was the kind of calling that he couldn’t ignore.

With a quick shift, he bolted out of the room, and skidded into the hall beyond. As he realized he was running with the pillow, he dropped it and went straight for the study.

The instant he arrived, the four other males looked up at him. They were in various stages of recline on the sofas, the chair, at the hearth by the fireplace, the stasis they were in predicated upon the update that Conrahd had been planning to make.

“Do you trust me,” he said roughly.

They straightened, each of them, the three who were sitting rising slowly to their feet.

“Do you,” he repeated as all kinds of urgency pounded his heart. “Just answer the question, I will not ask it again.”

When the halting yeses came, he pointed to the hidden door that was tucked in the south corner of the room. “We go now, we leave through the tunnel, and we do not look back.”

Now, the questions bubbled up, exploding on waves of anxiety:

“Now here, whatever is going—”

“—quite apparent something is rather out of order—”

“—is going on with Whestmorel. Is he sick—”

Conrahd cut them off with the horrible truth: “We go now, because the Omega’s son has just come unto this house.”

That was when a scream rippled out from down the hall, from where the bedroom was.

“Now!” Conrahd hissed as he bolted for the secret entrance to the escape tunnel. “Stay at your own peril.”

He didn’t even care whether they followed him. All he knew was that he was going to save himself first.

And then deal with the fallout.

Whatever route Whestmorel had intented to take with the head of the Lessening Society, whatever plan that had been conceived between the two, it was clear that no good could come of it.

If they intended to take down Wrath, there was going to have to be another way.

Assuming any one of them lived to hide from the dawn at the end of this night.

When Dev left his now-former apartment, he brought the others along, the three vampires traveling with him in a pocket of energy he created.

He could sense their resolve and aggression even more easily now that their physical bodies were gone and they were in their essence form: Before they’d left, he’d been surprised they hadn’t called for backup—but now he understood why as he read them with clarity.

They would sacrifice themselves to protect the greater good.

And they believed they could call for help at any moment.

He wasn’t sure the latter was true. Guess they would all find out.

What they didn’t know, and he had come to a firm resolution on, was that he was the one who was going to kill his father this night. To save the vampires, and most importantly his love, he was going to stand up to the Omega’s begotten son, and he was going to battle.

And these vampires were going to help him by dealing with the lessers who came to his sire’s defense.

He would handle Lash—

Arriving at their destination, he made them all corporeal once more—and he was intrigued by the rustic location.

It wasn’t a dark alley in the shitty part of town, it wasn’t some hidden induction site, it wasn’t even a place of worship where the fucking converted sucked up to their master.

Nope, it was a plowed lane leading to a glass house perched on the side of a mountain—and his father did not own the property.

His dark mark would have stained the very molecules of everything on the site.

No, for some reason, Lash had come here.

As the vampires shook off the travel spell, Dev walked forward through the snow.

The great concentration of evil was on the far side of the structure, so he cut around the fringes, finding his way by stepping through branches and the accumulation of drifts.

Soon enough, a vast frozen lake was revealed, and then he joined up with a porch that ran the breadth and length of all that glass.

He made sure Lyric was nowhere near his thoughts.

His father would sniff her out immediately—

The open sliding door, way down at the end. Yes, that was where he needed to go.

Except then he paused. Glancing back at the males behind him, he recognized they were ready to fight, but he had a sudden awareness that he couldn’t shake.

And that was when he saw the shadow. Off to the side. An angel with gossamer wings and long black-and-blond hair.

As if a memory block was being lifted, Dev suddenly remembered that the entity had been at the apartment the night before. In the far corner, as unseen as he himself had been.

And there was a message being sent to him now, an urgent warning.

Turning back to the vampires, he looked them over. And then he opened his mouth—yet what happened next had nothing to do with him.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” Dev heard himself say in a voice that was not his own, as if he were a channel for the communication. “You have to go.”

The arguments were swift and sure, aggressive and angry. But then he locked eyes with Lyric’s brother.

“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” Dev said in his own voice now. “This is a family matter between me and my father.”

Because it dawned on him, sure as if the conviction had been placed in his brain by that other entity: He might not survive this. So he couldn’t protect these mortals if things went badly.

In which case, he’d be responsible for the death of Lyric’s own blood.

“No,” he said abruptly. “I was wrong to bring you with me.”

Before they could make even more noise, he extended his hand, bundled them up safely, and sent them off. What had he been thinking anyway—other than respecting their need for vengeance because it was what motivated him.

Dev glanced back at the angel. The shimmering apparition put its hand on its chest, and inclined its upper body in gratitude.

Then that other voice wove its way into Dev’s head. If you give all you have, all that is within you, your destiny and everything you wish for will come true.

And then the angel disappeared.

In the aftermath, he took a couple of deep breaths—and after that, he approached the aperture, his heart starting to pound… especially as he arrived at the open sliding glass door and looked into a bedroom.

His father was as he had always been, tall and strong, with blond hair that was currently tied back.

No clothes of leisure tonight. Lash was wearing a black ceremonial robe as he stood over a male who was straining on a bed as if in a seizure, the mouth open, the face twisted into a mask of horror and pain, the limbs of the body sticking straight out from the torso as it levitated off the satin sheets—

His father looked over with a sharp jerk of the head.

And then he actually did a double take. Which was a rather… human?… response.

Mortal, was more like it.

The vampire was instantly forgotten, cast aside across the space to crumple into an oozing mess of black blood and gore in the corner.

At which point, Dev squared off at the evil.

Lash.

The Omega’s son.

His sire.

In an effort to block any intrusion into his mind, Dev kept the titles circulating over and over again in his thoughts. If he was successful in redirecting his every conscious awareness back at his father, there were no weak points to get inside, no chance of infiltration and manipulation.

“The prodigal son returns,” Lash said in a low voice.

“Hello, Father.”

There was a moment of sizing up, on both sides. And then Dev stepped into the house, making sure that he was hyperaware of his surroundings, ready for anything.

“You know,” his sire said with an autocratic accent. “Of all the places I expected you to turn up, after all these years, some random aristocrat’s house in the mountains is not it.”

Blue pupils with black rims, the reverse of his own coloring, stared across at him. He’d brought no conventional weapons with him, and of course, his father didn’t need any. But that didn’t mean things weren’t going to get very deadly, very quick.

“I cannot read your mind.” The evil smiled. “You are very strong. Tell me, how ever is your mahmen ?”

As the memory of standing in front of the demon and seeing her truly for the first time struck a chord, Dev felt an odd need to protect the female.

“I wouldn’t know,” he lied.

“Do not tell me you’ve come here for some Shakespearean reason.” Lash lowered his chin and looked out from under lowered brows. “That would be so unoriginal of you—”

The evil stopped. And glanced out of the open glass slider.

“I think we have a visitor, son.”