Page 8 of Lover Forbidden (The Black Dagger Brotherhood #23)

Some fifteen blocks due east and a little south, Shuli was deep down an abandoned avenue and having a great fucking night.

The cold had eaten under his clothes, his bad hip was acting up—and he was really fucking tired of playing babysitter for a heavily armed, cranky toddler.

Oh, and he also had black lesser blood all over his face—which meant the oily shit was in his mouth.

Nothing like a little spoiled sushi whipped up with some old school Johnson & Johnson baby powder.

He wasn’t turning his head away, though, even to spit. And he certainly wasn’t moving either of his hands to wipe at anything.

The slayer he had pinned against a filthy brick wall was bleeding out.

The lower part of its leg looked like the thing’d been in a mangler, and of course, the fact that L.W.

—a.k.a. Wrath, son of Wrath, the great Blind King—had his fingers shoved into that open wound like he was looking for his car keys was having the opposite effect of plugging the leak.

But that wasn’t even the worst of the undead’s injuries.

Still, the lesser remained dangerous, its shrewd, nasty eyes alert and looking for its best chance for retaliation.

“ Where. ”

As L.W. spat out the word, he was kneeling at the feet of the enemy as if he were about to propose. The position was not the norm for the hulking male, who was no more likely to bow down than settle down, but needs must and all that jazz.

On that note, the heir to the throne leaned in closer, his bicep thickening under his leather jacket, his upper lip peeling all the way off his fangs. In response, the lesser moaned in pain, the dead head lolling on its shoulders, the torso jerking and not getting far.

Thanks to Shuli.

He resecured the hand he had locked on the base of the slayer’s throat, but the other was doing just fine as it was: It was cranked around the hilt of the steel blade he’d impaled that abdominal cavity with—which was how he’d gotten his facial.

Lot of sputtering involved when you disrupted the GI tract like that.

“ Where , you fucker,” L.W. growled as he relented a little.

And then went right back into the meat of that leg.

As the second verse of suffering bubbled out of the lesser ’s mouth, Shuli glanced around.

The alley they were in was on the fringes of downtown.

With abandoned apartment buildings on both sides, no CPD civilian monitoring systems in play, and empty streets all around, this was where the war between the Lessening Society and the vampires had played out for the last century.

Privacy mattered. It was the only thing both sides agreed on.

So they were not likely to get interrupted by anything other than backup for the piece of shit—and this was what Shuli was worried about.

“Not… telling…” The lesser drew in a ragged breath. “… shit.”

The former human still had the dark hair and hazel eyes he’d been born with, which meant his induction was fairly recent, i.e.

, within the last couple years. The longer the inductees were in the Lessening Society, the more they lost their natural pigmentation until they were pasty white and had OxiClean locks growing out of their heads.

The discoloration thing was a good barometer for how advanced their training and technique was going to be, so yes, the bitch had been pretty easy to overtake.

But it also meant the lesser wouldn’t have been let out alone.

Sooner rather than later, whatever it’d been partnered with was going to show up.

“Let’s move on.” Shuli glanced over to the left as his instincts prickled. “This is going nowhere—”

“Where’s your master.” L.W. outed a steel dagger. “You’re gonna fucking tell me—”

“Hold up,” Shuli hissed as he narrowed his eyes on the far corner of the decayed apartment building. “We’ve got fucking company.”

Overhead, cloud cover was choking out the moonlight, and it wasn’t like there were any outside lights to go by—or inside ones, either.

But at least there was enough ambient bleed from the rest of the city that he could see well enough…

to know that there was a shadow lurking at the end of the block.

As the slayer started laughing in a series of gurgles, Shuli moved his grip up and cut off that windpipe completely.

“Stab the fucker or I will,” he whispered to L.W. “We gotta get out of here.”

Unlike this undead, backup for him and his boy was going to be harder to come by tonight.

He wasn’t about to pull a Fredo and speak candidly against the family in front of the enemy, but for some unknown reason, there was just a handful of their fighters in the field this evening, both the Brotherhood and the Band of Bastards being tied up at the same time.

The reasons for whatever it was were totally above Shuli’s pay grade, although he knew without asking that it had to be something to do with the King.

Except who gave a fuck about the why’s, if they got ambushed by a squadron of slayers.

L.W.’s head cranked to the left as the male assessed what kind of bad news had shown up on that street corner. And then the movement was so fast, there was no tracking it. The male jerked his arm—

Pop!

The flash was bright enough to freeze-frame the scene on the backs of Shuli’s eyelids—maybe fucking permanently—and the heat was like opening the top of a grill when you were flipping a dozen burgers at once. That was it for the lesser . Gonzo, and not in a Hunter S. Thompson kind of way.

So Shuli fell face-first into the bricks.

He managed to catch himself right before he turned into a pug, and immediately pinwheeled around. Too late. L.W. was already jogging down toward whatever was waiting for them over there.

Because of course he was. Why hang back for the guy who was not just your assigned partner in the field, but your fucking ahstrux nohtrum ?

Shuli started hauling ass. “Like a… fucking two-year-old… gunning for a light… socket.”

Keeping his eye on that shadow, he got out a gun for his right hand, switching the steel dagger that was dripping black blood to his left palm. He was determined to catch up, but L.W. moved like a Ferrari even though he was built like a tank. So ground was lost over a couple of yards—

Right before the king’s only heir engaged with the enemy—fucking solo— the figure disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. One second there, the other not, and L.W. skidded to a halt in the snow as he reached the curb.

Shuli’s heart stopped even though he was running like his life depended on it: Classic ambush setup. Set the bait, draw the predator, close the trap.

L.W. was about to get riddled with bullets—or at the very least brown-bagged and shoved into a murder van.

He ran even faster through the frozen ice and—

When he arrived beside the male, he had both his weapons up and his head going owl, even though his cervical vertebrae weren’t meant to function on that kind of swivel.

Nothing.

Just more decaying buildings across the street. Steam rising from a manhole. A distant horn and a siren even farther off.

“What the hell was that,” L.W. muttered.

“The worst fucking idea”—Shuli blew out his breath in a cloud—“you’ve had lately.”

He put his weaponed hands up on his head and walked around, panting into the cold air. “Which considering you also tried to ditch me last night is really saying something, you goddamn maniac. We’re supposed to stick together. I’m your ahstrux nohtrum —”

“That was my father’s idea, not mine,” L.W. said as he scanned the deserted streetscape. “Keep up—or don’t. Either way, it’s not my problem.”

With that, the male just turned away and started walking.

“Excuse me, motherfucker,” Shuli called out.

When there was no response, he jumped forward and caught the male’s arm. “FYI, the pink slip that comes with this job I didn’t want is my own coffin. So will you work with me here?”

“No one needs to know,” the heir to the throne tossed back.

For no good reason, the big dumbass came into sharp focus.

L.W. was a chip off the ol’ block for sure, tall, broad, and black-haired, with a center braid keeping his long-and-straight out of his harsh face, and a set of pale green eyes that gossip said were just like his sire’s.

He was also highly impatient, very autocratic, and about as fun to be around as a bag of Tannerite two seconds before the bullet hits.

Shuli poked the guy in the chest. “ You need to stay with me.”

“No, you ”—L.W. returned the favor twice as hard—“need to be better at your job if you’re not keeping up.”

Don’t do this , Shuli told himself. Not here, at least. Later, when they were home—

His body stepped forward on its own, closing the distance so they were chest to chest. Too bad he had to look up to meet that nasty stare.

“What the fuck is your problem,” L.W. gritted.

“I’ll spell it out. Most of the time I’d like to kill you, but if I do, I’m committing suicide. So I’m dealing with a really fucked-up conflict of interest—”

The vibration in Shuli’s pocket was a welcome distraction. At least until L.W. shoved his hand into his own jacket and pulled out his phone, too.

Group texts were never good news—

“Holy… shit,” Shuli breathed as he hit play on the video they’d been texted.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught L.W.

staring down at his screen with the same surprise.

Which was saying something. Usually the guy didn’t give two craps about anything other than hunting and killing.

Then again, when was the last time either of them had seen a billboard go flying off a building and nearly crush somebody they knew?

And… maybe, on Shuli’s side… loved.

A little.

“Oh, fuck, Lyric,” he said. And who the hell was that Good Samaritan? “We got to get over to Bathe—”

L.W. shoved his Samsung away. “There’s no ‘we’ in that. Go if you want, I’m staying in the field.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“She lived, didn’t she.”

Shuli tilted his head. “I’m sorry, what ?”