Page 85 of Lover Forbidden
“Well, I am.” Lyric stood up. “And there’s nothing you or anybody else can do to stop me from—”
“You know what I did tonight?” He tilted forward on his hips, his distorted upper lip lifting off his fangs. “You want to know why I’m home early? I got to carry the bruised, dead body of a torture victim to the incinerator at the training center and burn the remains. He was found in a hidden room at a traitor’s mansion and we have no idea who he is or if he had any family. He’d been left for dead, tied to a chair in the abandoned house. He died in spite of everything Doc Jane did to try to save him, but we might well have had to kill him anyway depending on his involvement in the plot against our King.”
Lyric lowered her gaze to all the pretty beads on the table, and the bracelet that was in process.
“You want to deal withthat? You want to look at that—smell it? And that’s before you add in getting shot at, killed, or worse, taken in for questioning by the Lessening Society. Oh, and Lash is inducting women now. Do you want to be the first female vampire to—”
“Enough!”
As Layla slammed her palms into the table, all of the boxes of beads bounced, the colors mixing as shimmers of light fell back down.
There was a moment of tense silence asshellanandhellrenstared across at each other. Then Xcor cursed and headed for the sink. From the drying rack, he took a glass and filled it with water. Tilting his head back, he drank the whole thing slowly, before rinsing it out and putting it back where it had been.
Pivoting around, he said in a more even tone, “I apologize. It’s been a long night, and frankly, this is probably why I need to take some time off. But I don’t want you involved in the war. One son is more than enough, I can’t take a daughter, too—”
The door that led in from the Wheel’s outer ring opened and Rhamp walked in. He was covered in red and black blood, stank oflesser, gunpowder, and gasoline, and had a foot drag that suggested he’d been injured.
“What happened to you?” Xcor demanded.
As Layla jumped up, Rhamp glared at Lyric. “Ask her. Or the human she’s sleeping with—if she’ll tell you who the hell he is. And no, I’m not interested in talking about tonight.”
With that, he went down the hall to his room, and shut the door with a resounding clap.
Out in the countryside, Qhuinn re-formed on the front stoop of his in-laws’ house. As he reached for the door, he hesitated—and thought about all the times when he hadn’t done that. For so many years, he’d just walked right in, happy to be there, looking forward to seeing the people inside… beyond ready for the food, whatever it was.
He took a deep breath. Then another—
Pushing things open, he pinned a smile on his face. The shit didn’t last as he walked in. You could smell the medical-grade cleaner, the astringent not even a little covered up by the fake lemon scent that floated along with it.
Ehlena or the other home nurse must have just left.
He closed things quietly. Rocke’s study was immediately to the left, and as he glanced in, his nape sounded a warning. The office chair wasswiveled away from the desk, and a pen without its cap on had been dropped in the middle of a page.
“Oh, fuck…”
As he strode forward, the formal living room to the right was also vacant, but it was always that way, the fancier furniture arranged with throw pillows that had tassels, the dark green and gold drapes made not of linen or cotton but a nice, weighty velvet. Even though it was an outlier in the midst of all the comfy-cozy, the color scheme still went with the rest of the house, though, and he’d seen the elder Lyric standing on the thick carpeting and slowly turning ’round and ’round. Like she couldn’t believe she had such a beautiful room in her house.
The renovation and furnishing had been an anniversary gift from Blay and Qhuinn about ten years back, a tack-on when Lyric and Rocke had been redoing their kitchen and family room. He and his mate spent too much money on it, something that both his in-laws had always reminded him of, but they would have dumped four times the cost into the decorations just to give Lyric that shy happiness.
As Qhuinn followed a rising sense of alarm to the back of the house, he braced himself for whatever was waiting for him. Although surely he would have gotten a phone call if—
The hall gave way to the open area that faced the pond and the gazebo, and Blay was over at the sink, an anemic stream of water piddling into a coffee mug, the male’s eyes focused on the middle ground in front of him like he wasn’t seeing anything. There was another mug upside down on the rack, dripping, and an open bag of Pepperidge Farm mint Milanos at his elbow.
Blay looked utterly exhausted, and that red hair was clean, but uncharacteristically messy—it was also longer than usual because he hadn’t been able to get to the barberdoggenback at the Wheel. How long had he been sleeping out here for… the last week? Ten days? The calendar had been a blur lately.
“How you doing?” Qhuinn asked as he approached.
Blay jumped in surprise. Then cleared his throat. Twice. And seemed to take extra, extra care with the sponge on the rim of that mug.
The silence that followed was a reminder that, however hard a night Qhuinn had been thinking he’d had… it was nothing compared to what was going on under this roof.
He went over and they kissed briefly. Then he stepped back to give the guy some space.
“Ah, so, Simone just left.” Blay shut off the water by putting the heel of his hand on the faucet arm. “She’s really good withMahmen. So patient. So unhurried, even though she must have been coming to the end of a long shift.”
Pulling out one of the stools at the counter, Qhuinn moved slowly. Blay seemed like he was going to startle at the slightest unexpected anything.
“She’s really good, yeah.”
