“No, but we’re going to. Even if it kills us.” He took out another rolling paper, and then barked across the dining room, “Jesus, will you two just look it up on the Internet!”
Butch and Rhage turned and looked at him as if he had suggested putting a “For Sale” sign in front of the mansion. And was prepared to deed Fritz, butler extraordinaire, along with the property.
V jabbed a hand into his ass pocket and took out his Samsung, waving it around. “Not sure if either of you are aware, but you have the world at your fingertips here. Typey-typey.”
Butch tugged at the sleeve of his Tom Ford jacket, prim as the good little Catholic boy he had been, and still was. “That’s not the point.”
“And you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet.” Hollywood motioned with that bathtub-sized spoon. “Also, we don’t really care about what other people think.”
“So this is a private jerk-off,” V muttered.
“Exactly.”
“About a very important horror franchise,” Butch footnoted.
For some reason, the sight of the two of them standing there by one of the long windows, Rhage all big, blond, and beautiful, eating out of a Ben & Jerry’s container, Butch looking like he was waiting for someone fromGQto hand him his Best-Dressed Vampire of the Year award, made V remember the early days of the troika, the three of them single and hanging out in the Pit.
He wouldn’t return to that time, even if someone paid him with a lifetime supply of hand-rolleds that he didn’t have to twist and lick himself. But they were good memories. Just like the pair of airheads were very good males, very good brothers.
Very good fighters.
V checked the time on his phone. The three of them had been early for tonight’s audiences, some kind of buzzy animation making it impossible for them to hang out all the way through First Meal back at the mansion. Wrath would be arriving soon, and not long thereafter, the citizens for their appointments with their King.
V hated this part of his job, cooling his jets while he listened in on private conversations about matings, births, deaths, and property disputes.However, the Black Dagger Brotherhood had always functioned as both the defenders of the species and the King’s private guard.
So Wrath never did this on his own.
And who knew, maybe some night, the brothers might be needed.
In the meantime, he was staring down the barrel at six hours of twitching in his shitkickers. When he could be out looking for that fucking prison camp.
The more they couldn’t find that place, the more he was determined to hunt down the location. It wasn’t that he knew anybody who was currently incarcerated, and he was not a bleeding heart with a rescue complex. He really fucking hated theglymera, though, and even if the camp had been co-opted by some faction and wasn’t being run by that bunch of self-righteous snots anymore, there was satisfaction in taking a toy with their name on it away.
And okay, yeah… maybe he didn’t like the idea that there were people in there who’d done nothing wrong. According to the Jackal, there had been a number of murderers thrown behind bars, but there were others who’d been tossed in there who’d done nothing but break social rules that were total bullshit. Like females who had busted out ofsehclusionor left abusive mates. Males who were competition, politically, socially, romantically.
People who were into their own kind.
FFS, his sex life had never been conventional, so it could have been him. Saxton. Ruhn. Blay and Qhuinn.
So fuck theglymera, he thought as he took another pinch out of the pouch.
“We’ll find it,” he vowed to the King’s solicitor. “And I’m going to enjoy blowing it the fuck up.”
CHAPTER THREE
In the prison camp’s new location, three stories below the abandoned tuberculosis hospital’s decaying floors of patient rooms, treatment areas, and administrative offices, two levels beneath where the drug processing was performed by the imprisoned and the private quarters for the Command had been built, and four flights of cracked concrete steps underneath the terrible sleeping conditions of the prisoners… a lone nurse draped from head to toe in dingy brown robing was changing the bedsheets on a thin, stained mattress with the kind of care usually reserved for the master suite in one of the aristocracy’s finest houses.
As Nadya moved about the rusted metal frame, tucking the rough sheets in between the creaking springs and the forty-year-old padded pallet, the falls of fabric she hid under swung loosely about her scarred face and crippled body. It was a strange contrast, her stiffness, jerks, and hobbles, compared with the flow of the cloth, and she reflected, not for the first time, that she wore what she did partially because it granted her something of what she had lost.
Ease of movement. Grace. Fluidity.
But there were other reasons she covered herself thus.
Flipping a clean blanket out of folds she had rendered it into, she let the woolen weight settle and then smoothed out any wrinkles. Then she bent down with a grimace and picked up the thin, hard pillow from the concrete floor. As she placed the headrest where it belonged, she stared down at the vacant bed.
Until she had to look away.
What she saw around her elevated none of her unsettled mood. Her makeshift facility for the sick, injured, or infirmed among the prisoners was in an abandoned storage room, tucked behind a forest of shelves that still bore the weight of supplies that had been outdated or antiquated twenty years ago. When the camp had been moved here to this old human hospital, it had taken her nights and days to clear the space to set up the row of treatment beds, and as much as she scrubbed the floors and laundered the linens and washed down the walls that she could reach, she did not bother with the dust on the shelves.