FORTY-THREE
Fresh air was good for the mind and the soul.
As Layla strode out into the garden, she was careful across the ice-covered terrace, splaying her arms out, going slowly: She didn’t want to run the risk of falling.
Funny how her assessment of everything from potentially slick surfaces to stairs to selecting food had intensified.
“Off into the night,” she said to the young within her belly.
It was, of course, crazy to speak to that which had yet to be born. But she had some thought that if she could only keep the dialogue open, mayhap the young would continue to choose to stay around. If she could just eat the right things and not fall and get her rest … somehow, at the end of however many months, she could hold her son or daughter in her arms, and not just in her body.
Walking down onto the snow-covered lawn and away from the glow of the house, she found the boots she had snagged from the back hall to be warm, solid and comfy. The same was true of the parka and the gloves. She’d left the hats and scarves behind; she’d wanted the chill to clear her head.
Farther along the grounds, the swimming pool was sporting its winter cover, but she imagined it full of water lit from underneath, the azure waves inviting and soft upon the skin and joints. She was going to swim as soon as she could—and outdoors. Much as she appreciated the pool that was in the training center, the air there smelled of chlorine, and after having been used to the crystal clear, naturally fresh baths above in the Sanctuary, she didn’t favor …
Abruptly, she stopped walking. Stopped with the distracted thinking. Stopped everything except the draw in her lungs and the beat of her heart.
Closing her eyes, she replayed what had happened in the dining room, seeing the anguish on Wrath’s face as the announcement was made, hearing the indignation and aggression in the Brotherhood’s voices, watching how Rehv kept staring at the King as if he were reading things she could not sense.
Xcor was behind it all.
He had to be. One did not go from orchestrating an assassination attempt to sitting back idly whilst the glymera gained procedurally what one wanted. No, he was lurking behind the scenes. Somewhere.
Stomach churning, she resumed her restless promenade, heading past the pool area and into the geometrically constructed formal gardens. And she kept going on their far side as well, linking up with the twenty-foot-tall retaining wall that ran all the way around the compound.
Continuing ever onward, her ears were numb. So was her nose. She didn’t care.
Images of Beth appearing in the archway of the dining room and Wrath looking down the vast table at her warred with a far more traitorous and just as tragic montage of …
That which she refused to think of.
Or at least tried not to.
Had she really allowed Xcor into that car? Had he really sat next to her, unarmed, his menagerie of weapons left on the hood of the Mercedes … and talked to her? Held her hand?
“Stop it,” she warned herself.
No good would e’er come of remembering that connection, that burning spark.
Layla slowed. Stopped. Recalled with great precision and no small amount of guilt the way Xcor had looked at her.
She knew so little about him—apart from his political aspirations, he was a total stranger, and a deadly one at that. And yet she had the sense, given his awkwardness with her, that he was not one who reveled in females very often.
With his facial disfigurement, it was obvious why.
But with her … he was different.
Aside from the pregnancy, which she had actively brought about, she had never affected much during the course of her life. But she could not stand idly by while there was mayhap even a little she could do to help Wrath in this horrible situation.
She had such guilt. Over so much.
She could, however, attempt to do something about it all.
Taking out her cellular phone, the one Qhuinn had insisted she take with her everywhere, she called up the dialing screen.
Xcor had told her how to call him, the digits engraved upon her mind the moment they had left his lips.
She had never imagined putting them into service.
With each finger tap of the screen, the phone let out a different tone, the sequence completed in seven contacts.
She hovered over the send button. And then she pressed it.
Her whole body was shaking as she put the thin, playing card–size device to her ear. An electronic ringing sounded once … twice …
Layla wrenched around.
From over on the left, on the far side of the wall, she heard a distant sound, one so faint that if it hadn’t mirrored exactly the rhythm of that which was in her own phone, she might have not paid it any mind.
The cellular device slipped from her grip and bounced upon the snow at her feet.
He had found them.
Standing in the shower at Assail’s house, Sola didn’t know how long she stayed under the hot spray, letting the water pound on her shoulders and fall down her back, closing her eyes and leaning into the wall.
For some reason, she was ice-cold—even though there was enough steam in the bathroom to qualify the loo as a sauna, and she was pretty sure she had increased her core temperature to a hundred and five.
Nothing was touching the deep freeze that had taken up res in the center of her chest.
She had told her grandmother they were leaving just before dawn for Miami.
In retrospect, investing in a safe place in the heart of Benloise’s family business had been a dumb-ass thing to do. But with any luck, Eduardo, assuming he was still on the planet and the beneficiary of his brother’s will, would be so busy enjoying the purchase of pale blue Bentleys and animal-print Versace sheets that he wouldn’t come after the likes of her.
Assuming he even knew what his brother had done to her. Or planned for her.
Ricardo had kept so much to himself.
God … what had Assail done to that man?
A quick flash of that face of his, bloodied around the mouth and chin, increased her chill, and she turned around—
“Fuck!” she screamed as she looked out the foggy glass.
The male figure who had appeared in the doorway was still as a statue and powerful as a tiger. And he was watching her as a predator might.
Instantly, she was hot on the inside of her skin—because she knew why he had come, and she wanted it, too.
Assail strode to the glass door that separated them and tore it open. He was breathing hard, and in the inset light above her head, his eyes were bright as match strikes.
He stepped into the shower fully clothed, his Gucci loafers no doubt ruined, his dark brown suede jacket absorbing the falling water and turning the color of blood.
Without a word, he clamped his hands on her face and dragged her by the head to his mouth, his lips crushing hers as he backed her up against the marble with his entire body. Sola gave in with a moan, accepting his tongue as it penetrated her, gripping his shoulders through his fine clothes.
He was fully erect and he ground his hips against her, pushing his hard cock in and rubbing it against her belly, the gold H of his belt scratching at her. More kissing, the desperate, starved kind that you remembered even when you were eighty and far too old to think of such things. And then his hands were on her slippery breasts, his fingers pinching her nipples until the distinction between pain and pleasure disappeared and all she knew was that if she didn’t orgasm in the next moment, she was going to expire—
As if sensing what she needed, Assail dropped to his knees, threw one of her legs over his shoulder, and went down on her, his lips eating at her sex in the same way he’d attacked her mouth.
This was sex as punishment, an indictment of her choice, a physical expression of his anger and his disapproval.
And maybe it made her a sick bitch, but she loved it.
She wanted him to come at her like this, pissed off and nothing but edge, pouring himself into her so she didn’t have to feel as guilty … or as empty.
Gripping his soaked hair, she tilted her hips and forced him even harder into her, using her calf to his back so he found a rhythm that—
Sola bit down on her lip as she came wildly, her torso jerking against the marble with a high-pitched squeak.
Before she knew it, she was on the floor of the shower, stretched out in front of him as he peeled his soaked jacket and silk shirt from his carved chest. As he went for his belt buckle, she reached out for him, her hands impatient to get to that smooth skin and those hard contours of his.
He never said a word to her.
Not as he spread her legs wide and mounted her, not as his cock went in and he started pounding on her, not even as he braced himself above her and stared into her eyes as if he were daring her to leave everything he could give her.