Total pages in book: 145
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138274 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
“You okay?” Tohr asked quietly.
All at once, the conviction that things were falling into place after a long period of painful discord made him take a deep, easy breath.
“It’s good to be back,” Wrath said.
There was a short silence. And then a rumbling vibration that moved the air.
The Black Dagger Brotherhood’s war cry exploded in the corridor, the voices of the males around him swearing, once again, their loyalty to the King they loved and the species they served.
United, as one.
Fearless, as always.
Behind the Wrath who stood before them… forevermore.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Evan used the tunnel a little before midnight.
And his strides had purpose in them as they’d taken him away from the office building.
He was in the same clothes he’d been wearing during the melee—and then afterward, when the trainer had taken the last part of who he had once been from him. The shirt showed the damage that had been done, but his skin had reknitted. And as for any bullet wounds? They were all healed, the punctures closed as if they had never been.
He guessed that the lead slugs were still in him. He didn’t know where and didn’t think about it anymore as he walked forward through the steel-encased chute.
After Lash had left him in that other basement, he’d dragged himself out and found the car, then gone back to Mickey’s apartment to take care of the dead woman on the chair. After releasing her from her binds, he’d wrapped her in his cousin’s comforter and cradled her in his arms like she was just really sick and needed a doctor.
Except there had been no explanation to nosy humans required. The back stairs had been empty and he’d sat the body up in the front seat of Mickey’s beater, belting her in. With grim resolve, he’d driven out to the sticks and dumped her in the old quarry.
As the splash resounded and her bloated body floated to the surface, she had stared up at him as he’d stood on the lip of the thirty-foot drop.
She’d called him stupid for not weighing her down.
“I want you to be found,” he’d shouted at her. “Your husband’s gotta know.”
It had been as he’d turned around and walked back into the forest—once again heading out to the car he’d parked on the side of a country road—that the pieces had started to fall together. And the fight last night was the key to everything coming together.
Uncle’s favorite enforcer was a vampire.
Nathaniel was the enemy.
The signs had been there all along, Evan just hadn’t noticed them, because who screened members of Uncle’s inner circle for being another fucking species? Especially when you didn’t even know there was one threaded throughout the shadows of the human world.
But the clues were so obvious now: The enforcer had never been seen during the daytime—not unusual, given his line of work, but he’d even failed to show at a couple of the family’s funerals. Stupid move, if he wanted to advance. He’d also rarely left Caldwell—and if he did, it was only to NYC or Boston—something that suggested he had other business in the zip code… or couldn’t be exposed to daylight during travel. He was capable of things no one else had ever gotten away with. A one hundred percent success rate over a decade? Never a police investigation, never in the news, not one complication with a human?
No girlfriends or wives. No associates. Never hung out with the others.
No ambition, either. He just wanted to kill.
On balance, what were the chances a human acted like that? None. There were a hundred people in the organization and nobody was like that bastard.
But now that he knew for sure vampires existed, and he’d seen them in action… what were the chances one had infiltrated Uncle’s ranks and was just looking for targets like he was practicing at a range—
Evan stopped, and looked around.
What was that buzzing sound…?
“Just a fly,” he muttered as he kept going.
When he got to the end of the tunnel, he entered the code that he still didn’t consciously know on the pad, and emerged into the shitty apartment.
He was greeted by a gun in his face.
Man, that woman was looking rough. The head wound he’d given her was still festering, but there were other holes in her now, including one at the side of her neck that seemed like it should be fatal. If she were alive in the first place.
“Where the fuck you go,” she snapped.
There was black oil all over the floor, hers—and from the bedroom behind, two other females appeared. Both were sporting injuries, too, just not as dire, and he recognized the one on the left from the night before. He’d seen her in the middle of all the fighting.
“I’m here to deliver on my promise,” he said.
Those strangely colored eyes narrowed on him and before the woman he’d stolen from could speak, he glanced at the pair in the doorway.