Lover Avenged(74)

“Yeah. It is.” As the time for parting came, he was anxious about where they stood, and fear made his vision fairly clear. God, how he hated the lonely look on her face. “You can’t know how sorry I am.”

Beth reached up and touched his jaw. “I hear it in your voice.”

He took her hand and placed it over his heart. “I’m nothing without you.”

“Not true.” She stepped out of his hold. “You are the king. No matter who your shellan is, you are everything.”

Beth dematerialized into the thin air, her vital, warm presence replaced with nothing but frigid December wind.

Wrath waited for about two minutes; then he dematerialized to Safe Place. She had so much of his blood in her after all their time of feeding from each other that he sensed her presence inside the stout walls of the security-laden facility, and he knew she was protected.

With a heavy heart, Wrath dematerialized again and headed back to the mansion: He had stitches to get removed and a whole night to pass alone in his study.





TWENTY-ONE




An hour after Trez took the tray back down to the kitchen, Rehv’s stomach was in full revolt. Man, if oatmeal was no longer a viable food afterward, what was he left with? Bananas? White rice?

Fucking Gerber baby gruel?

And it wasn’t just his digestive tract that was screwed up. If he’d been able to feel anything, he was pretty sure he had a headache along with the tossing nausea. Anytime there was a light source, like when Trez came in to check on him, Rehv’s eyes went on autoblink, flickering up and down in an uncoordinated, ocular version of the Safety Dance; then he’d start to salivate and swallow compulsively. So he had to be nauseated.

As his phone went off, he put his hand on it and brought it to his ear without turning his head. There was a lot going on at ZeroSum tonight, and he needed to keep tabs. “Yeah.”

“Hi…you called me?”

Rehv’s eyes shot to the bathroom door, which had a soft light glowing around the jambs.

Oh, God, he hadn’t had a shower yet.

He was still covered with the sex he’d had.

Even though Ehlena was about a three-hour drive away and he wasn’t on a Web cam, he felt absolutely nasty just talking to her.

“Hey,” he said in a rough voice.

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah.” Which was a total fucking lie, and the gravel in his voice made that obvious.

“Well, I, ah…I saw that you’d called me-” As a strangled sound came out of his mouth, Ehlena stopped. “You’re sick.”

“No-”

“For God’s sake, please come to the clinic-”

“I can’t. I’m…” God, he couldn’t bear to speak to her. “I’m not in town. I’m upstate.”

There was a long pause. “I’ll bring the antibiotics to you.”

“No.” She couldn’t see him like this. Shit, she couldn’t see him ever again. He was filthy. A filthy, dirty whore who let someone he hated touch him and suck on him and use him, and force him to do the same to her.

The princess was right. He was a fucking dildo.

“Rehv? Let me come to you-”

“No.”

“Goddamn it, don’t you do this to yourself!”

“You can’t save me!” he shouted.

In the aftermath of his explosion, he thought, Jesus…where had that come from? “I’m sorry…it’s been a bad night for me.”

When Ehlena finally spoke, her voice was a thin whisper. “Don’t do this to me. Don’t make me see you in the morgue. Don’t do that to me.”

Rehv squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m not doing anything to you.”

“The hell you aren’t.” Her voice cracked on a sob.

“Ehlena…”

Her moan of despair came through the phone all too clearly. “Oh…Christ. Whatever. Kill yourself, fine.”

She hung up on him.

“Fuck.” He rubbed his face. “Fuck!”

Rehv sat up and fired the cell phone at the bedroom door. And just as it ricocheted off the panels and went flying, he realized he’d busted the only thing he had with her number in it.

With a roar and a messy scramble, he launched his body off the bed, quilts landing everywhere. Not a great move on his part. As his numb feet hit the throw rug, he went Frisbee, finding air briefly before landing on his face. On impact, a sound like a bomb had gone off rumbled through the floorboards, and he crawled for the phone, tracking the light that still glowed from its screen.

Please, oh, fucking please, if there is a God…

He was almost in range when the door swung open, narrowly missing his head and clipping the phone-which shot like a hockey puck in the opposite direction. As Rehv wheeled around and lunged for thing, he shouted at Trez.