“You are serious.”
“The past does nae interest me as much as it used to. So go if you want. Take the others if you wish. But our life in the Old Country sufficed for many years, so I fail to see why the King’s identity should be of such concern for you.”
“That is because my blade had not been honed on the stone of the crown—”
“What shall you do the now? That ’tis all I care about.”
“I fear I do not know you anymore.”
“Once that would have been a blessing.”
“No longer.”
Xcor shrugged. “’Tis on you.”
Throe looked up as if searching for inspiration from the heavens. “Fine,” he said tightly.
“Fine, what.”
“Try as I might”—the male’s face became grim—“my fealty is to you.”
Xcor nodded once. “Your pledge is accepted.”
But he wasn’t fooling himself. Throe’s ambition was between them now, and no exchange of words or even parchment was going to change that.
They were not done with this, not in the slightest. And mayhap it would take nights or weeks or years before the split came to the fore … but that which was due would follow them from this moment forward.
And he feared that the currency was female.
SIXTY-NINE
Sitting at his desk at the Iron Mask, Trez had had it with the whole club thing. The noise, the smell, the humans—hell, even the paperwork was getting to him.
Shoving away about a hundred and fifty receipts, he was ready to explode as he rubbed his eyes. And then, as he lowered his hands, his eyes readjusted to the fluorescent light, a pixilation fuzzing out his vision.
Another migraine?
He picked up a random piece of paper and checked to see if he could read the text.
No blind spot—yet.
Giving up on trying to get anything done, he sat back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest, and glared across at the closed door. The distant thumping of the bass made him think he needed to get some earplugs.
What he really wanted to do was get the fuck out of here. And not just this club. Or the one that was going up in that warehouse across town. He wanted out of the whole cocksucking enterprise, from the booze sales to the prostitutes, from the money to the madness.
For shit’s sake, every time he closed his eyes, he saw Selena’s face. Heard her voice as she said she wanted to get dressed. Smelled the scent of her disappointment.
As he thought back over their “relationship,” if you could call it that, he defined things in terms of pullouts. Failed conversations. Half-truths. Hidden secrets.
All his.
And it was weird. His brother had been yakking at him to clean up his act for how long? Telling him he had to get a grip and stop the sexing, warning him that time was getting tighter, hoping and praying that a turnaround would come—even when there had been no hope of that ever occurring. Meanwhile, he’d been balling whores in public places, getting migraines, and riding a huge wave of self-destruction—poppin’ his collar and paying no attention.
In spite of all of iAm’s best efforts, Selena had been the one to make him really see himself.
Seemed disrespectful to his brother to admit that, but there you go.
God … he prayed the queen had a daughter who was chosen. Maybe that way, at least part of this nightmare would be over—
The knock on his door was soft, and he caught a whiff of body spray even before the thing opened.
“Come in,” he muttered.
The working girl who walked in was leggy enough to be a model, but her face wasn’t quite there: nose a little too big, lips a little too small, eyes a little off center. And that was even after all the plastic surgery. Still, from a distance or in the dark, she was a goddamned knockout.
“I heard you want to see me?”
Her voice was up to phone-sex standards, deep and raspy, and her hair, as she pushed it over her shoulder, was naturally thick.
“Yeah.” Good thing she didn’t know him well enough to be aware he was half-dead. “I’ve got a special client who—”
“Is this the guy they’ve been talking about?” Her eyes widened in a rush. “Like, the sex god?”
“Yeah. I want to know if you can go to an apartment tomorrow and meet him.” He and s’Ex had agreed to be on a once-a-week schedule, but when your blackmailer called you up and wanted a date? You went with it. “I’ll introduce you and—”
“Oh, fuck, yeah. The other girls were talking about him—he’s a stallion.”
She started running her hands up and down her body, cupping her breasts and her sex.
“Tomorrow noon.” He gave her his Commodore address. “I’ll meet you there.”
“Thanks, boss.”
As her eyes narrowed, he had a feeling what was coming next. Sure enough, she said, “What can I do to show my gratitude?”
He shook his head. “Nada. Just come on time tomorrow.”
“Are you sure?”
Staring across at her, part of him wanted to give in. It was so much easier that way—like falling backward into a swimming pool in July—splash, and you weren’t hot anymore. The problem was, in that hypothetical, he didn’t know how to swim. And every single time he let himself go just to get cooled down, he ended up underwater, unable to breathe.
The struggle to get to the surface simply wasn’t worth the momentary relief.
“Thank you, baby girl. But I gotta pass.”
The woman smiled. “You got a female there, boss?”
Trez opened his mouth to say no. “Yeah, I do.”
Ha, he thought. Yeah, right.
After their happy little convo, Selena had not come down to the Brotherhood house again, and he sure as hell hadn’t gone up to the great camp.
He could still remember exactly what she’d looked like as she’d stared at him. Eventually he’d gotten up and left her room—after the silence had stretched waaaaay out. Yeah, sure, he could have pressed her for some kind of closure or something. But the bottom line was, whether or not he had to go back to the s’Hisbe, he’d still contaminated himself.
What he had to offer her or anybody else wasn’t worth the breath to apologize with.
“Ohhhh, that’s big gossip,” the whore said. “Can I tell the other girls.”
“Yeah. Sure. Whatever.”
She all but danced out of his office.
As the door reclosed, he went back to staring at it. On its flat plane, all he could see was Selena, sure as if she’d died and her ghost had come to haunt him.
For a moment, he was actually crazy enough to wish there was some unfinished business between them that he could use as an excuse to see her. Then again, the reality was, he could come at her in a thousand different ways … and all he had to offer was himself.
Not good enough yesterday. Today. Or tomorrow—
Deep inside of him, a shift began. At first he just recognized it as an errant thought. But then, as that thought resonated, he realized it went much, much further than that.
As he looked into the future, he saw nothing of substance in his life except his brother. iAm was it, the extent of any value he had in this world. And abruptly, the idea of turning himself over to the queen and her daughter, becoming a sexual slave imprisoned in the walls of the palace, used only for his cock and his ejaculate … didn’t seem like anything very different from the way he had been living his life.