Black Dagger Brotherhood 11 - Lover at Last (169 page)

hadn’t come up—and males certainly weren’t on the menu. Back before the raids, Luchas had been

hetero like their father—which was to say strictly the female you were mated to in the missionary

position on your birthday and maybe once a year after a festival.

Males, females, men, women, in various combinations, sometimes in public, rarely in a bed at

home? Not something Luchas had any frame of reference for.

When Herraduras three and four were slid in front of him, he nodded a thank-you.

Reaching down deep, even though he hated that expression as well as what it meant, he tried to

see if there was anything else in and among his reticence to talk to the remaining member of his family about his life. Any shame. Embarrassment. Hell, maybe a little rebellious gotcha that he didn’t want to inflict on his crippled brother…

Qhuinn squirmed in his own clothes.

Well. What do you know.

If he was brutally honest? Yeah, he was a bit tetchy. But it was on the level of not wanting to be

looked at funny for yet another reason…as his conservative, probably-virgin of a brother would no

doubt do if he was told about the males and the men.

That was it.

Yup. That was all.

I don’t know how to explain it. I just see myself with a female long-term.

He’d said that to Blay a while ago, and had meant every word—

Some kind of emotion curled up inside his gut, twisting things down there, rearranging his bowel

and his liver.

He told himself it was the hooch.

The sudden fear he felt suggested otherwise.

Qhuinn swallowed his third shot in hopes of getting rid of the sensation. And the fourth. And

meanwhile, the faces and breasts and sexes of the many females and women he’d fucked flashed

through his mind—

“No,” he said out loud. “Nope. No.”

Oh, God…

“
No.
”

As the guy next to him gave him a weird look, he shut up.

Wiping his face, he was tempted to order more to drink, but held off. Something seismic was

trying desperately to break through; he could feel it trembling around the foundation of his psyche.

You don’t know who you are, and that’s always been your problem.

Fuck. If he got more tequila, if he kept swallowing, if he stayed his avoidance course, what Blay

had said about him was always going to be true. The trouble was, he didn’t want to know. He just

really fucking didn’t want…to…know….

Jesus, not here. Not now. Not…ever.

Cursing under his breath, he felt the geyser of realization start to really bubble, a loud-and-clear from the middle of his chest threatening to break out—and he knew that once it was free, he was

never going to get it back underground again.

Damn it. The only person he wanted to talk to about this wasn’t speaking to him.

He guessed he was going to have to man up and deal with it on his own.

On some level, the idea that he was…well, you know, as his mother would have said…shouldn’t

have affected him. He was stronger than the
glymera’s
condescension, and, shit, he lived in an environment where whether you were gay or straight, it didn’t matter: Long as you could handle

yourself in the field and you weren’t a total asshole, the Brotherhood was down with you. Look at V’s sexual history, for fuck’s sake. Black candles used as something other than a light source in the dark?

Hell, just being into males was a cakewalk compared to that stuff.

Plus, he did not live in his parents’ house anymore. That was not his life.

That was
not
his life.

That was
not
his life
.

And yet even as he told himself that over and over again, the past that no longer existed was right behind him, staring over his shoulder…judging and finding him not just wanting, not simply inferior, but utterly and completely unworthy.

It was like phantom limb pain: The gangrene was gone, the infection cut out, the amputation

complete…but the horrible sensations remained. Still hurt like a bitch. Still crippled him sure as a limp.

All those women…all those females…what was the true nature of sexuality, he wondered

suddenly. What counted as attraction? Because he’d wanted to fuck them, and he had. He’d picked

them up in clubs and bars, hell, even that store in the mall where they’d gone to get John Matthew

some real clothes after his transition.

He’d chosen the women, singled them from the crowd, applied some kind of data screen that had

weeded out some and highlighted others. He’d had them blow him. He’d sucked them off. He’d

ridden them from behind, from the side, from in front. He’d grabbed their breasts.

He’d done all of that by choice.

Had it been different with the guys? And even if it had been, did he have to label himself at all?

And if he didn’t slap a definition on himself, did that mean he wasn’t something that his parents,

who were goddamn
dead
and who had hated him anyway, hadn’t approved of?

As the questions fired through his brain, pelting him with precisely the kind of self-analysis he

had always stabbed out of his thought processes, he came to an even more shocking realization.

As important as all that shit was, as Christopher Columbus as he was getting, none of it came

close to the most critical issue.

Not in the fucking slightest.

The real problem that he discovered made all that crap look like a walk in the park.

SEVENTY-NINE

Assail did not condone swearing. In his mind, it was common and unnecessary. That being

said, he’d had a shitty fucking week.

Down in the cellar of his house, in the vault, he and the twins had just finished organizing

the haul for the last few days: Bills were stacked in bundles that had been through the

counter, banded, and then sorted according to denomination—and the total was impressive, even by

his standards.

All told, they had about two hundred thousand dollars.

The
Fore-lesser
and his merry band of slayers had been doing excellent work.

You’d think he’d be happy.

Not so.

In fact, he’d been a miserable fucking son of a bitch—and the reason for the bad humor just made

him crankier.

“Go to Benloise,” he told the twins. “Get the next batch of cocaine and come back here to

separate it.”

The twins were masters at cutting the stuff with additives and parceling it out into Baggies, and

that was a good thing. The slayers were moving three times what had been sold before.

“Then make the delivery.” Assail checked his watch. “It’s set for three a.m., so you should have

enough time.”

Getting up from the table, he stretched his arms over his head and arched his back. His body had

been stiff lately, and he knew why: Being in a constant state of low-level arousal had tightened up the muscles in his thighs and his shoulders, among other physical aspects…which had been utterly

resistant to self-regulation.

After years of not particularly caring for tending to his own erections, he’d fallen into a rut of

pleasuring himself.

And all it seemed to do was underscore what he was not getting.

For the last week, he’d waited for Marisol to get in touch with him, expecting the phone to ring,

and not because some unknown had shown up at her door again. The woman had wanted him as much

as he had her, and surely that would lead to a reunion. It had not, however. And the fact that she had exhibited the kind of restraint he was struggling with, made him question not only his self-control, but his very sanity.

Indeed, he feared he was going to crack before she did.

Taking his leave, he went up the stairs and into the kitchen. The first thing he did was go over to his phone, in case she had called or in the event that Audi of hers had finally moved after seven nights of going nowhere fast: The damn thing had been parked in front of that house since he’d paid his visit, as if she mayhap knew he’d put a tracer on it.

Checking the screen, he saw that someone had called him, but it was a number that was not in his

contact list.

And there was a voice mail.

He was not interested in fielding some human’s mis-dials, but as there was a chance it was a

lesser
breaking protocol, he knew he had to listen to the message.

As he accessed it, he walked in the direction of his humidor. He’d been smoking a lot lately, and

probably doing too much coke. Which was painfully counter-intuitive—if one was already twitchy

and frustrated, adding stimulants to that internal chemistry was gasoline to a fire—

“
Hola
. This is Sola’s grandmother. I am trying to reach…an Assail…please?” Assail stopped

dead in the middle of his living room. “Please call me back now? Thank you—”

With a feeling of dread, he cut the message off and hit
Call Back.

One ring. Two rings—

“¿Hola?”

Indeed, he didn’t know her name. “This is Assail, madam. Are you all right?”

“No, no—I am not. I found your number on her bedside table so I call. There is something

wrong.”

He gripped his iPhone hard. “Tell me.”

“She is gone. She came home, but then she leave out the door right after she arrived—I hear her

go? Except all of her things, her backpack, her car, it is all here. I was sleeping and I hear downstairs, someone is moving. I call out her name and no one answered—then I hear this hard noise—loud

sound—and so I come down. The front door is open, and I fear she has been taken—I do no know

what to do. She always told me, we do not call the police. I do not know—”

“Shh, it is all right. You did the correct thing. I’m coming directly.”

Assail ran to the front door without bothering to communicate with the twins; nothing was on his

mind except getting over to that little house as fast as he could.

A second was all it took to dematerialize, and as he resumed form in the front yard, he thought that of all the scenarios he’d run through in his mind for coming back, this was not it.

As the grandmother reported, the Audi was parked on the street at the end of the walkway. Just

where it had been. But what was of note? There was a scramble of messy footfalls disturbing the

snow, the trail crossing the lawn to the street in a diagonal pattern.

She’s been kidnapped, Assail thought.

Goddamn it.

Jogging up the squat steps, he hit the doorbell and stamped his feet. The idea that someone had

taken his female—

The door opened and the woman on the other side was visibly shaken. And then she seemed

further taken aback as she took him in with her eyes. “You are…Assail?”

“Yes. Please let me in, madam, and I shall be of aid to you.”

“You are not the man who came before.”

“Not that you saw, madam. Now, please, let me in.”

As Marisol’s grandmother stepped aside, she lamented, “Oh, I do not know where she is.
Mãe de

Deus
, she is gone, gone….”

He glanced around the tidy little living room, and then stalked out into the kitchen to look at the back door. Intact. Opening it wide, he leaned out. No footprints other than those he’d left a week ago.

Closing things back up and locking the dead bolt, he returned to her grandmother.

“You were upstairs?”

“
Sí
. In the bed. As I said, I was asleep. I hear her come in, but I was half-awake. Then I hear…

that sound, of someone falling. I say I come down, then the front door opens.”

“Did you see a car drive off?”

“
Sí
. But it was very far away, and the license plate—nothing.”

“How long ago?”

“I called you fifteen, maybe twenty minutes after. I went to her room and looked around—that is

where I found the napkin with your number on it.”

“Has anyone called?”

“No one.”

He checked his watch, and then grew concerned about how pale the elderly woman was. “Here,

madam, sit down.”

As he settled her onto the floral couch in the living room, she took out a dainty handkerchief and

pressed it to her eyes. “She is my life.”

Assail tried to remember how humans addressed their superiors. “Mrs.—ah, Mrs….”

“Carvalho. My husband was Brazilian. I am Yesenia Carvalho.”

“Mrs. Carvalho, I need to ask you some questions.”

“Can you help me? My granddaughter is—”

“Look into my eyes.” When the woman did, he said in a low voice, “There is nothing I will not do

to bring her back. Do you understand what I’m saying.”

As he sent his intention out into the air between him, Mrs. Carvalho’s eyes narrowed. Then, after

a moment, she calmed and nodded once—as if she approved of his means, though there was a good

chance they were going to be violent. “What do you need to know?”

“Is there anyone you can think of who would want to hurt her?”

“She is a good girl. She works at an office nights. She keeps to herself.”

So Marisol hadn’t told her grandmother anything about what she really did. This was good. “Does

she have any assets?”

“Money, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“We are simple people.” She eyed his handmade, tailored clothes. “We have nothing but this

house.”

Somehow he doubted that, even though he knew little of his woman’s life: He found it hard to

believe she hadn’t made some cash doing what she did—and she certainly didn’t have to pay taxes on

the kind of income she’d been bringing in from the likes of Benloise.

But he feared that a ransom call was not going to be forthcoming.

“I do not know what to do.”

“Mrs. Carvalho, I do not want you to worry.” He got to his feet. “I shall handle this promptly.”