Lover Avenged(165)

“Shit’s good fertilizer.”

“Then lemme lay you out under a rosebush and we’ll see how you do.”

Grady let out a moan and they both glanced at him. The bastard was in the final stages of death, his face the color of the frosted ground around his head, the blood flow from his wounds slowing.

Abruptly, Lash realized what had been shoved in his mouth and looked at Xhex. “Man…I could seriously go for a female like you, sin-eater.”

Xhex drew her blade across the sharp edge of the headstone, Grady’s blood getting transferred from the metal to the stone as if she were marking a payback. “You got balls, lesser, considering what I did to him. Or don’t you want to keep your set?”

“I’m different.”

“Smaller than him? Christ, how disappointing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m out of here.” She lifted up her knife and waved, then disappeared.

Lash stared into the air where she had been, until Grady gurgled weakly like a drain on its last grab against a puddle of bathwater.

“Did you see her?” Lash said to the idiot. “What a female. I’m so getting some of that.”

Grady’s last breath came out the hole in his throat, because it had no other exit, given that his mouth was busy giving himself a blow job.

Lash put his hands on his hips and looked at the cooling body.

Xhex…he was going to have to make sure they crossed paths again. And he hoped she tried to tell the Brothers she’d seen him: An unsettled enemy was better than a collected one. He knew the Brotherhood would all wonder how in the hell the Omega had been able to turn a vampire into a lesser, but that was only a small part of the story.

He’d still get to serve up the punch line.

As Lash sauntered away into the cold night, he rearranged himself in his pants and decided he needed to go get laid. God knew he was in the mood.



While iAm was locking up Sal’s front door, Rehvenge sheathed his red sword and looked at Vishous. The Brother was staring at him in a bad way.

“So what was in there?” Rehv said.

“You.”

“Montrag try to say I was responsible for the plot to kill Wrath?” Not that it mattered if the guy had. Rehv had already proven which side he was on by having the motherfucker sliced.

Vishous shook his head slowly, then glanced over as iAm joined his brother.

Rehv spoke up sharply. “There is nothing they do not know about me.”

“Well, then, here you go, sin-eater.” V tossed the envelope onto the table. “Apparently, Montrag knew what you were. Which is undoubtedly why he went to you to try to kill Wrath. No one would believe it wasn’t your idea and your idea alone, if what you are is revealed.”

Rehv frowned and took out what looked to be an affidavit about how his stepfather had been killed. What. The. Fuck. Montrag’s father had been in the house after the murder; that much Rehv knew. But the guy had gotten his mother’s hellren not only to talk, but to testify? And then promptly done nothing with the intel?

Rehv thought back to a couple of days ago, to that meeting in Montrag’s study…and the guy’s happy little comment that he knew what kind of male Rehv was.

He’d known, all right, and not about the drug dealing.

Rehv put the document back into the envelope. Shit, this got out and the promise he’d made to his mother was going to get blown to pieces.

“So what exactly’s in there?” one of the Brothers asked.

Rehv tucked the envelope inside his sable. “Affidavit signed by my stepfather right before he died calling me out as a symphath. It’s an original, going by the blood-inked siggy at the bottom. But how much you want to bet Montrag didn’t send his only copy.”

“Maybe it’s faked,” Wrath murmured.

Unlikely, Rehv thought. Too many details were correct about what had happened that night.

In a flash, he was back in the past, back to the night he had done the deed. His mother had had to be taken to Havers’s clinic because she’d had one of her many “accidents.” When it became clear she was going to be held for observation for a day, Bella had stayed with her, and Rehv had made up his mind.

He’d gone home, assembled the doggen in the staff quarters, and faced the collective pain of all who served his family. He could remember so clearly staring at the males and females of the house, meeting their eyes one by one. Many had come into the home because of his stepfather, but they stayed because of his mother. And they were looking to him to stop what had been going on for way too long.

He’d told them all to leave the mansion for an hour.

There had been no dissent, and each one had hugged him on the way out. They had all known what he was going to do, and it was their will, too.