The King

Shower time aside, how could he not see her off …

At that moment, her grandmother took a deep breath and the flat yellow gold cross she always wore around her neck caught the overhead light.

“We go,” Sola heard herself say.

With that, she picked up her suitcase and headed for the back door. Outside, a totally lose-it-in-a-crowd Ford was parked close to the house, the rental agreement in the name of Sola’s emergency identity.

The one nobody in Caldwell knew she had. And in the glove box, there was another set of documents and IDs for her grandmother.

Using the remote, she triggered the locks to disengage, and opened the trunk. Assail’s men, meanwhile, were handling her grandmother with kid gloves, helping her down the stairs, carrying her luggage, and her coat, which she had obviously refused to put on in protest.

As they settled the woman into the passenger seat and her suitcase in the back, Sola searched the rear of the house. Just as before, she expected to see him, maybe running through the main room to get to her before she left. Maybe coming up from the basement and shooting through the mudroom to come out. Maybe skidding around the corner from having been upstairs …

At that moment, something strange happened. Every window in the house had a sudden shimmer to it, the glass panes between the sills and the flat plates of the sliding doors showing a subtle twinkle.

What the—

Shutters, she thought. There were shutters coming across the windows, the subtle movement the kind of thing you’d miss … unless you were looking in at the very second it happened. Afterward? It was as if nothing had changed. All the furniture was still visible, the lights on, normal, normal, normal.

Another of his security tricks, she thought.

Taking her time opening her door, she put one foot in and craned around. The two bodyguards had stood back and crossed their arms.

She wanted to tell them … but no, they didn’t seem like they were interested in carrying a message back to Assail.

They looked downright pissed off now that they’d gotten her grandmother safely into the sedan.

Sola waited for a moment longer, eyes fixed on that open rear door. Through the jambs, she looked at the shoes and the coats in that back hall. So ordinary-looking—well, ordinary for a rich person. But the house wasn’t Middle America anything, and not just because it was probably worth five million. Or ten.

Turning away, she slid behind the wheel, closed herself in, and got a good whiff of lemon air freshener. Under which was the faint stinky haze of cigarette smoke.

“I no know why we have to leave.”

“I know, vovó. I know.”

The tinny-sounding engine jumped to what little life it had and she put the car in reverse. K-turning, she gave that open door one last look.

And then there were no more excuses to linger.

Hitting the gas, she blinked hard as the headlights illuminated the driveway and then the one-lane road that would take them off the peninsula.

He was not going to come after her.

“You make a mistake,” her grandmother said on a huff. “Big mistake.”

But you don’t know the whole story, Sola thought as she came up to a stop sign and hit her directional signal.

What Sola was unaware of, however … was that neither did she.

Assail watched the departure from the ring of trees behind the rear of his home.

Through the windows of the kitchen, he saw her standing by the table, rifling through a suitcase as if searching for something she was leaving behind.

Out here, my love, he thought. What you have lost is out here.

And then her grandmother made an appearance with the cousins, and it was clear that the female did not approve of the leaving.

Just one more thing to adore about her.

It was also obvious that the cousins were against this. Then again, they had never eaten so well, and they had respect for anyone who would stand up to them.

Not a problem with Marisol’s grandmahmen.

As Assail played witness to his female searching about as if she were waiting for him to present himself, there was a small satisfaction in her sadness. But the overriding imperative was to convince his inner beast to let her choose the path she had.

He could not argue with the self-preservation—just as he could not vow to disengage from his business. He had worked too long and hard to fade into a lifestyle of sedentary nights … even if they were spent with her. Besides, he had the worry that things were not done with the Benloise family yet. Only time would tell if there was another brother out there, or mayhap some cousin with a greedy eye and a heart of vengeance for what had been served unto his blood.

She would be safer without him.

As Marisol put her luggage in the boot of the car, her grandmother was accommodated to the front of the vehicle. And there was another pause. Indeed, as she glanced around, he felt she must have seen him—but no. Her eyes passed o’er him in his shadowed hiding spot.

Into the car. Shutting the door. Starting the engine. Turning about.

Then all there was … were brake lights disappearing down his drive.

The cousins loitered only for a moment. Unlike his female, they knew exactly where he was, but they did not approach. They retreated into the house, leaving the door open for him to use when he could stand the rising sun no longer.

His heart was howling in his chest when he finally stepped free of where he had tucked himself.

Walking across the snow, his body was loose-jointed to the point where he wondered if he would collapse. And his head was spinning ’round and ’round—his intestines as well. The only thing that was solid were his male instincts, which were bloody incessant that he needed to go out to the road in front of her, brace himself before that cheap-ass car, and demand that she turn around and come back home.

Assail forced himself into his house instead.

In the kitchen, the cousins were helping themselves to leftovers specifically cooked for them and left in foil-wrapped servings in the freezer. Their affects were as if someone had died.

“Where are the cell phones?” Assail asked.

“In the office.” Ehric frowned as he peeled a Post-it note off the package. “‘Preheat to three seventy-five.’”

His brother went to the wall ovens and began pushing buttons. “Convection?”

“Doesn’t say.”

“Damn it.”

Under any other circumstances, Assail would have found it impossible to believe that Evale was wasting his meager urge to speak on cooking. But Marisol and her grandmother had changed everything … for the short time they had been here.

Leaving his cousins be, he was not at all surprised they didn’t offer to include him in the repast. After centuries of transient existence, he had a feeling they were going to become hoarders of those foodstuffs.

In the office, he sat behind the desk and regarded the two identical phones before him. Naturally, his brain went to how he’d procured them—and he saw Eduardo first upon the ground and then Ricardo strung up against that torture wall.

Ordering his hands to clasp them, he—

His arms refused to obey the command, and in fact, his body fell back into the chair. As he stared straight ahead at absolutely nothing, it was clear that his motivation had deserted him.

Opening the desk’s center drawer, he took out one of his vials and fired up one nostril and then the other with coc**ne.

The tingling rush at least got him sitting up, and a moment later, he did in fact take the phones … and hook them up to his computer.

His focus was artificial, the attention forced, but he knew he was going to have to get used to that.

His heart, black though it was, had left him.

And was on its way to Miami.

FORTY-EIGHT

It was in fact possible, if you ran long enough and hard enough, to make the body feel as if you had been in a fist fight.

As Wrath continued to pound his Nikes into the treadmill, he thought about his last sparring session with Payne.

He had lied to her. Back when he’d finally assumed the throne in a serious way, the brothers and Beth had confronted him with a set of “guidelines” intended to chill him out on the ol’ physical-risk profile. Not exactly a happy convo, and he’d broken the rules at least once that everyone knew about, and a number of times that nobody had caught him at. And after he’d been discovered fighting downtown, he’d agreed anew to put up the daggers but for ceremonial work—and since then, the scent of his shellan’s disappointment had been enough to keep him in line.

Well, that and the fact that he’d lost his remaining eyesight entirely at about that time.

The bunch of them hadn’t been wrong. The King needed to be breathing most of all; taking down slayers in the back of an alley in Caldwell could not be the primary directive anymore.

And no sparring with the brothers, either.

None of them wanted to roll the dice with possibly hurting him.

Except then Payne had presented herself, and though he’d first assumed she was a male, when her true identity had been discovered, he’d been given a pass … precisely because she was a female.

He thought of her sneaking into the males’ locker room and putting that knife to his throat.

He supposed now … he could fight with anyone he liked. And that he owed her an apology.

Reaching down, he increased the treadmill’s speed. This one machine had been retrofitted with hooks on the console and a padded belt that had been made for him. With bungee cords strung between the two, he could go hands off and still keep on the machine, the subtle pulls on his waist telling him where he was in relation to the running surface.

Handy on a night like tonight. Oh, wait … it was daytime, now.

Falling into a faster rhythm, he found that as always, his head had a way of floating above the exertion, as if with his body engaged and working, it was free to drift. Unfortunately, like a helicopter with faulty gauges, it kept ramming into rocky cliffs: his parents, his shellan, the possibility of a future young, all the empty years stretching out before him.

If he only had his eyesight. At least then he could credibly go out and engage with the enemy. But now he was trapped—by his blindness, by his Beth, by the chance that she was with young.

Of course, if she hadn’t been in his life? He would have gone on a killing bender until he died honorably in the field. Although, hell, without her, he probably wouldn’t have bothered doing anything about ascending in the first place.

He knew he should never have tried that f**king crown on his head.

After everything his father had done in such a tragically short time, he should have followed his first instincts and walked the f**k away. The race had been fine going rudderless for a couple of centuries; probably could have kept that shit up indefinitely.

He thought of Ichan. Maybe that SOB was going to discover that modern populations didn’t need kings.

Or more to the point, maybe Xcor and the Bastards were going to learn that lesson.

Whatever.

Wrath went to increase the speed again—and found that he’d tapped the machine out on velocity. Cursing, he resettled into his already breakneck pace, and thought of his father, sitting behind the very desk that he himself could no longer see or use, parchment rolls and ink pots, quill pens and leather-bound volumes covering the carved surface.

He could just picture that male behind it all, sporting a half smile of contentment as he melted wax himself and pressed the royal crested ring into it—

“Wrath!”

“Wha—” Cue the squealing of rubber as he yanked out the safety key and jumped to the side rails. “Beth—?”

“Wrath, oh, my God—”

“Are you okay—”

“Wrath, I’ve got the solution—”

He could not f**king breathe. “About … what?”

“I know what we have to do!”

Wrath frowned as he panted and braced his hands on the rails in the event his jelly legs gave up the ghost and he torpedoed. And yet even through the hypoxia, his female’s scent was strong with purpose and conviction, her natural undertones sharpened so they got through to him clearly.

Grabbing the towel he’d slung over the console, he mopped his face. “Beth, for the love of Christ. Will you please stop—”

“Divorce me.”

In spite of all the exercise-induced suffocation, he stopped breathing. “I’m sorry,” he said roughly. “But I did not hear that.”

“Dissolve our mating. Effective yesterday—when for all intents and purposes you were still King.”

Wrath started shaking his head, all kinds of thoughts jamming up his brain. “I’m not hearing you say that—”

“If you get rid of me, you get rid of the grounds they used. No grounds, no removal. You have the throne and—”

“Are you out of your f**king mind!” he bellowed. “What the f**k are you talking about!”

There was a slight pause. Like she was surprised he wasn’t all into her bright idea.

“Wrath, seriously. This is the way to get the throne back.”

As the bonded male in him started screaming at the top of its lungs, he was an inch from exploding—but he’d already trashed one whole room in the compound. And the brothers would kill him if he smashed up their weight room.

Attempting to keep his voice level, he failed miserably: “No f**king way!”

“It’s just a piece of paper!” she hollered back. “What the hell does it matter?”

“You’re my shellan!”

“It’s all about carrots!”

Annnnnnnnnnd that stopped him dead. Shaking his head to clear it some, he said, “I’m sorry—what?”

Little hard to transition from ending their relationship to root frickin’ vegetables.