Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
Looking down at himself, his clothes registered in a way they never had.
Different jeans, but essentially the same he’d been wearing the night before. That particular pair was getting washed, but he had a feeling he wasn’t going to wear them ever again. Same with the sweatshirt he’d had on as he’d held that dying male.
The fact that he was thinking about a new wardrobe, at a time like this, was the first aristocratic thing he’d done in oh, so long.
Taking out his Samsung, all he wanted to do was call Denne and see if she would, in fact, answer. But then he focused on what he’d promised Rhamp. Shit. The way to make up for the fact that he’d gotten six males killed was not to set up three more. But it was their right to ahvenge those deaths.
That was what you did when someone you loved was hurt.
He knew that firsthand.
And there was no way he could go after the enemy himself. He wasn’t trained to fight. If someone put a gun in his hand, he was liable to shoot himself.
Hell, maybe that would be a public service.
On this note, he reached up to his ear and felt around. The wound was totally healed, and it seemed fucked up to regret that. What, like the damage to the outer rim was a hickey he wanted to keep as a souvenir?
Now was not the time to think about Denne.
And he couldn’t break into the Brotherhood’s servers here in his room. He just… couldn’t.
Getting back to his feet, he left his quarters and walked down to the living area. As he headed for the exit, he glanced around at the duffle bags of gym clothes and weapons. Then focused on the pile of Crocs by the exit. It was wrong of him to be here, sleeping under their roof, fed by them, clothed by them.
Vishous and Jane cared too much about him.
And he had come to care too much about them.
With a heavy heart, he let himself out and headed to the left, passing by so many doors. As he went along, he ticked off the homes of the King and the First Family, and the rest of the Black Dagger Brotherhood.
Well, L.W. didn’t stay here. He lived at Shuli’s.
Where slayers were not coming. Not tonight. Not tomorrow night. Likely not ever.
Finally, he came up to a series of rooms that were for common use, but which were rarely visited as far as he knew: Movie theater. Arts and crafts facility. A library filled with original volumes of the Old Laws.
He picked that last one because surely nobody ever went in there. If someone needed something related to those ancient edicts, they just asked Saxton, the King’s solicitor. Or looked it up in the scanned, searchable database.
No way there was time for a manual search through a billion pages of parchment and ink.
As he entered the room, motion-activated lights came on at the ceiling and down the shelves. The scent was soothing: Antique leather and oil soap. The memories were not: Everything about the rows upon rows of gold-embossed spines reminded him of his father’s rare book room, and he hated thinking of the way he had once lived.
With all that perceived wealth and status came only lies and pain.
There was a pair of deep-red velvet armchairs in the back and he went over and sat in one. Taking out his burner phone, he gritted his teeth and felt his newest deception as a physical pain. Accessing the internet was the work of a moment, and a VPN cloaked him in secrecy. That wasn’t enough, though. He went into the dark web through a Zeus browser, and then back-ended into the BDB scene database like a ghost.
Vishous was the only one in FT Headquarters who could find an infiltration like this, but the Brother wasn’t going to be looking for anybody going where Allhan was. And if he did discover the entry, and somehow managed to trace it back? There was an easy enough explanation.
He had to see the incident report. In order to understand what had happened last night.
That was not a lie.
And as for the burner phone? He’d just have to make up an excuse.
God, he hated himself, he really did.
As the directory of scene reports propagated on his phone’s little screen, he squinted. The form was just a generic template that was supposed to be filled out by one point person per engagement with the enemy, and from time to time, he’d seen printed versions of them on Vishous’s desk.
He’d never gone into this restricted file system before, however.
No titles. Just dates, and the one at the top was last night’s.
His forefinger hesitated. And then instead of opening the thing, he started to scroll through the list.
With sweat breaking out across his brow and over his upper lip, he swiped up. And… swiped up again. And again.