As if every male in the room had the same instinct, the same feeling of dread he had, out came the guns, all kinds of palms finding all kinds of grips.
V was the only one who didn’t go for his forty. He went for his Samsung, and with a quick sequence, he initialized the defense protocol for both the Audience House and the mansion. Then he went into his monitoring feeds and played firsthand witness to the daytime shutters coming down all around the exterior of the two structures. Finally, he sent out a group text that he had only ever tested before.
It was the all-points-bulletin duck-and-cover, shelter-in-place alert to every single person in the First Family’s community, from doggen to shellan and everybody in between.
And within the dining room, there was an instant repositioning of fighters: Xcor and Tohrment flanked Wrath while Rhage and Qhuinn slipped out the double doors to cover the front entrance. Other brothers and Bastards paired off with fighters, the teams predetermined and practiced as they surrounded the house and sent everybody who didn’t have a gun underground for safety.
V just wished he knew what the hell they’d all picked up on.
But something was off in Caldwell, on a nuclear scale.
“Where the fuck is that angel,” Wrath gritted out.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Lassiter had to wait until everyone left Rahvyn’s hospital room. It was a while. And when Nate finally walked out and took his worried father, who had been loitering outside in the corridor, with him, the angel did a double check before becoming corporeal.
Approaching the closed door, he pulled up the waistband on his leggings. Then he looked at them—and changed their color from pink and black to just black. Then he changed them altogether from spandex to a nice pair of slacks.
With pleats. And a razor sharp press down both legs.
No. Too formal.
He changed his bottom half to a set of Adidas sweatpants in black. Nice, normal, tight-legged on the lower part so that his thighs looked bigger and stronger. There, good. Oh, crap. Shoes. He needed shoes. Flip-flops with Disney princesses on them were probably not going to strike the right note.
And P.S., the fact that he’d had to enlarge them to fit his twelve-and-a-half flappers had offended him. As if real men couldn’t like Tiana and Ariel.
It was a somber night, though. He also wanted Rahvyn to take him seriously.
Especially after what she had wrought this evening. God, he’d had no idea what she was capable of, but he had sensed within her something unique, something… powerful. He’d just thought it was the effect she had on him.
It was so much more than that, though, wasn’t it.
Knocking on the door, he waited. When there was no response, he knocked again.
After pulling another look-both-ways-before-you-cross in the corridor, he pushed things open a little—and just in case she was changing or something, he was careful to keep his eyes on the floor.
“Hello?” he said.
When there was no response, for a split second, he thought she was dead—as if she had traded her own life for Nate’s. But then he leaned around the jamb and looked at the bed.
The female who had delivered a miracle upon a deserving young soul was lying back against two white pillows, the adjustable bedframe tilted up at a forty-five-degree angle. Her white hair, which was like fine, spun silk, was splayed out around her shoulders, and her civilian clothes, which were loose and contemporary, seemed ill-fitting, and not because they were the wrong size.
She should have been in silks and satins… a gown of old-fashioned sensibilities and cut, something handmade specifically for her with reverence.
Spring green. Yes, that color would be the perfect complement to her.
He moved himself over to the base of the bed, but he did so on a float over the flooring so as not to risk waking her up with any footfalls. Her body was so slight under the blanket that had been pulled up over her, and she was utterly still, in a way that made him think she didn’t sleep much and was catching up on all that she’d missed. He didn’t think she had been given a sedative—there was no IV in her arm.
Yeah, going by the dark circles under her eyes, she was just exhausted, and he wondered if maybe she finally felt safe enough to sleep here. They were underground, after all, in a secured location.
Maybe she needed to live somewhere other than Luchas House. Someplace where nobody could make her scared again.
Someplace on a mountaintop where humans didn’t go.
Someplace that didn’t exist on any maps and that, if somebody happened to set foot on the property, had an extra layer of magic security around it that would confuse any interlopers and blur their eyes and ruin their sense of direction.
Someplace with soft beds and good, wholesome food…