Lover Avenged(197)

“Whatever, your candles are holding up just fine.”

“And my time is not so valuable as wasted wax?”

“Didn’t say that.”

“But your actions, they speak loudly.”

Lash mounted the stairs with his gun in his hand and felt like he wanted to double-check that his fly was up as the king watched his body move. And yet, when he was standing head-to-head with the guy, the current sparked between them again, licking in the cold air.

Fuckin’ A. He didn’t drive that kind of stick. Really, he didn’t.

“So, we going to take care of business?” Lash murmured, staring into those bloodred eyes and trying not to be captivated.

The king smiled and raised his three-knuckled fingers to the diamonds at his throat. “Yes, I do believe we shall. Come this way and I shall take you to your target. He is abed-”

“I thought you only wore red, Princess. And what the fuck are you doing here, Lash?”

As the king stiffened, Lash shifted around, leading with his gun. Coming up the lawn was…a massive male with glowing amethyst eyes and an unmistakable signature mohawk: Rehvenge, son of Rempoon.

Bastard wasn’t at all surprised to find himself on symphath ground. On the contrary, he looked quite at home. As well as pissed off.

Princess?

A quick look over Lash’s shoulder showed him…nothing that he hadn’t seen before. Thin guy, white robes, hair twisted up like a…girl’s, actually.

In this circumstance, it would be nice to have been snowed. Much better to want to fuck a female liar than have to confront the fact that he was a…Yeah, no reason to go there, even in his own mind.

Whipping his head back around, Lash knew the timing of this little weird-ass interruption was perfect. Getting Rehv out of the drug game would free up all kinds of commerce space in Caldwell.

Just as his finger squeezed the trigger, the king shot forward and grabbed the muzzle. “Not him! Not him!”



As the gunshot rang out in the night and the bullet walleyed into a tree trunk, Rehvenge watched Lash and the princess fight for control of the weapon. On one level, he didn’t give a shit which of the two of them won, or whether he or anybody else got popped in the process, or exactly why a kid who’d been killed was still very much alive. His life was ending where it had been conceived, here in this colony. Whether he died tonight or in the morning or after a hundred years, whether he was killed by the princess or Lash, the outcome had been decided, so the particulars didn’t matter.

Although maybe that laissez-fuck-off attitude was a mood thing? After all, he was a bonded male without his mate, so in traveling terms, he’d pretty much packed up his luggage, checked out of his mortal motel room, and was in the elevator going down to hell’s lobby.

At least, that was the way the vampire side of him was thinking. The other half of his bloodline was doing the wakey-wakey: mortal drama was always inducement to his bad side, and he wasn’t surprised as the symphath in him beat back the last of the dopamine he’d pumped into his veins. In a quick flash, his vision lost the full-color spectrum and flattened out, the princess’s robes turning to red, the diamonds at her throat bleeding into rubies. Evidently, she dressed in white, but as he’d never seen her without his sin-eater eyes, he’d just assumed she clothed herself in the color of the vein.

But like he gave a crap about her wardrobe?

With his bad side out, Rehv couldn’t help but get involved. As feeling flooded his body, pulling his arms and legs out of their numb sleeves, he jumped up onto the porch. Hatred warmed him from deep inside, and although he had no interest in aligning with Lash, he wanted the princess to get fucked, and not in a good way.

Going up behind her, he grabbed her around the waist and jacked her up off the ground. Which gave Lash an opening to yank the gun free and spin out away.

The little shit had transitioned into a big male. But that wasn’t all the changing he’d been doing. He reeked of sweet evil, the kind that animated lessers. Evidently, he’d been brought back from the dead by the Omega, but why? How?

The questions were ones Rehv didn’t care much about. He was, however, jazzed up about squeezing the princess’s rib cage so hard she was struggling to breathe. With her nails biting into his forearms through his silk shirt, he was damn sure she’d have been sinking her teeth into him if she could, but he wasn’t giving her a chance. He had a death grip on the back of her chignon, keeping her head under his control.

“You make a great body shield, bitch,” he said into her ear.

While she tried to speak, Lash straightened his admittedly spank clothes while leveling the SIG in his hand at the Rehv’s head. “Nice to see you, Reverend. I was coming after you, and you just saved me the trip. Gotta say, though, seeing you hide behind that female, male, whatever it is doesn’t quite do justice to your ass-kicker reputation.”