Not that he went there with anybody.
Boone, on the other hand, was the anti-Pey-pey. Quiet, huge, and unusually physically adept, he was the crouching tiger of the group, the prowler who kept to himself and the shadows, the one who was most likely to pounce on your back and slit your throat with a knife you weren’t even aware of him having in his hand. Axe was pretty sure the guy had been seriously fucked up by somebody or something earlier in his life. For all his outward calm, Boone was never, ever truly relaxed or at ease. Whether he was reading on his iPhone, listening to his music on the bus, or waiting for commands from the Brothers, you always had the sense he knew where everybody in a given space was.
As if he were waiting for an attack—and goddamned if he was going to let anyone get the best of him.
Watch the sleeper, Axe always thought. Before the cocksucker went Grim Reaper all over your ass.
Craeg and Paradise arrived next, the pair of them dressed in black and covered in weapons. The couple was as committed as a mated twosome, but they were not lovey-dovey in class or outside of it. And thank God for that.
After all, Axe hated vomiting—and if there was one thing guaranteed to make his stomach go evac? It was the sight of two people going baby-talk and gooey-eye’d all over each other. Back three years ago, when he’d been doing heroin all the time, his nightmare had been when he’d been too nodded out to change the channel on a Sandra-fucking-Bullock marathon.
Although he’d liked The Blind Side.
Axe acknowledged them and stepped back as the rest of the greetings rolled out. And then there was a lull, during which he amused himself by watching Peyton try not to stare at Paradise. It was the same thing every night, that weak pining after a female the guy couldn’t get, and it was good to see the pretty boy who undoubtedly had everything he ever wanted get shanked by fate.
So fucking pathetic.
Man, that was one lesson Axe’s moms had taught him. Never give a female power over you. That shit will castrate you faster than a pair of surgical scissors.
Hell, look at what had happened to his old man after Axe’s mom had left them. Decades and decades of mourning. A life wasted at the altar of “love.” An otherwise good male brought to his knees and kept there by an abandonment that was based on what someone else could fucking buy her.
As an old, familiar pain lit off behind his sternum, Axe bolted away from the sensation even as his body didn’t move. Refocusing on the Paradise-Peyton-Craeg triangle, which wasn’t a triangle at all for Craeg-adise, he found himself smiling. Yeah, the fact that the poor kid had won the girl made him happy. Craeg was the alpha of all alphas, the de facto leader of the trainees, but he came from nothing, just like Axe. Paradise, on the other hand, was the daughter of the King’s First Advisor. You didn’t get more pedigreed than that.
But she had picked the scrub over the Great Gatsby.
Attagirl. One more reason to like her. Aside from her hunting skills.
The last trainee to arrive was the kind of female that would have gotten Axe’s attention under any circumstances. And yup, with nothing but black leather covering her from head to foot, he took the opportunity to admire the view—at a respectful distance. She was the cobra in the group, a sinewy, powerfully dangerous thing of beauty, with teal eyes, reflexes quicker than C4 exploding, and a subversive nature that Axe totally got.
But he’d never hit that.
Even though she was hot as fuck, he had a couple of reasons for his uncharacteristic restraint, the main one being that you didn’t shit where you ate. Although Craeg and Paradise had somehow won the destiny lottery by hooking up without losing their edge or hating each other in the end, that was not a set of dice Axe was interested in rolling. Oh, and P.S., he was about as into relationships as he was aristocrats.
As Novo eased back against the brick tenement next to him, he nodded to her.
“Cold tonight,” Peyton said to no one in particular.
“It’s December,” Novo muttered. “You want it to be eighty?”
“Yup, I do.”
Novo had some choice words under her breath for the guy, including “arrogant” and “fucker,” but nobody paid any attention to it. The pair of them had turned into conversational snipers, but only at each other, and hey, popcorn-and-Coke’ing the show passed the time.
A blast of wind shot down the alley like it was being pursued by an enemy, and Axe flared his nostrils, testing the rush for scents of Brothers or humans … or their enemy, the Lessening Society.
Nada. And that frustrated him.
After seven weeks of intensive training, that had covered everything from hand-to-hand combat skills and firearms to poisons, bombs, and stalking techniques, Axe wasn’t alone in thinking they were ready for something other than fighting in the gym with themselves and studying hypotheticals. Each of them had their own reasons for wanting to get in the war, but the common denominator was they were all chomping at the bit to light some shit up.
And come on. They had been going in to the Black Dagger Brotherhood’s hidden training center six nights a week, for six to eight, sometimes ten, hours at a time. And it hadn’t been a case of a couple of seminars in classrooms and a paper typed up on your laptop. It had been hard, grueling work, and none of them had failed—which proved the brutal tryouts, that had weeded the applicant pool from like sixty to the six of them, had picked the right half dozen to go through the program.
Axe tested the air again. Still nothing. He’d been stoked when, for the first time, they’d been instructed to meet not at wherever the bus was going to pick them up to drive them in, but rather here in the field.
Maybe they were finally getting a chance to fight for real.
Ten minutes later, the checking of the watches started, the wrists popping up at first on the down-low, and later with increasing annoyance.
Axe didn’t bother checking his. They were in the right place. They’d gotten here at the right time. The Brothers would show when they were good and goddamn ready.
Fucking hell, this shit was making him twitchy, though.
He looked down the alley. Snow was starting to fall on the serious from all that cloud cover, but the currents of wind that topped these tightly packed four-and five-story deserted cages for humans meant that nothing penetrated the maze of alleys between the abandoned buildings. Off in the distance, sirens continued to echo back and forth across the city like the ambulance drivers and the cops were playing hide-and-seek blindfolded. No humans were walking anywhere in this area, as there was nothing to come here for, not even a crack house.
Those were a little to the west. About three blocks.
He knew because he’d used them—
The gunshots came from all directions.