A strange sound filtered in through his fog.
Shhhscht.
He lifted his head, and orientation came to him in a rush: The red glow of his alarm clock told him he was on his stomach and running diagonally down the bed.
That sound came again.
What was it? Metal on metal?
He could sense iAm moving around down the hall, his brother’s presence as known to him as his own. So if it was anyone else in the apartment or a threat of any kind? iAm would handle that shit.
Pushing himself up, he got out of bed and—yeah, whoa, the room spun around. Then again, there was absolutely, positively nothing in his stomach. Matter of fact, it was possible he’d thrown up his liver, kidneys, and lungs during that migraine. The good news was that the pain was gone, and the spacey aftermath wasn’t bad. Kind of like being drunk, with the hangover front-loaded.
When he walked into the loo, he knew better than to turn on the lights. Little early for that still.
The shower felt so good he nearly teared the fuck up. And he didn’t bother shaving—there’d be time for that later, after he’d thrown some fuel into his gut. Robe was nice—toasty, especially as he curled the lapels in and covered his throat up.
Bare feet kind of sucked, especially as he stepped out of his bedroom and into the marble-floored hallway, but he needed to find out what the hell that—
Trez stopped as he came to the doorway of his brother’s suite of rooms. iAm was in his closet, taking out shirts that were on hangers. As he pulled another armful together on the brass rod, that shhhscht sounded again.
Naturally, his brother didn’t seem surprised that Trez had made an appearance. He just threw the load on his bed.
Fuck.
“Going somewhere?” Trez muttered, his voice too loud in his head.
“Yes.”
Crap. “Listen, iAm, I didn’t mean—”
“I’m packing you up, too.”
Trez blinked a couple of times.
“Oh?” At least the guy wasn’t pulling out solo. Unless he wanted the satisfaction of pitching Trez’s gear off the balcony?
“I’ve found us somewhere more secure.”
“Is it in Caldwell?”
“Yes.”
Cue the Jeopardy! theme. “You wanna give me a zip code?”
“I would if I could.”
Trez groaned and leaned against the jamb, rubbing his eyes. “You’ve got us somewhere to go—and you don’t know where it is?”
“No, I do not.”
Okay, maybe it hadn’t been a migraine, but a stroke. “I’m sorry. I’m not following—”
“We have”—iAm looked at his watch—“three hours to get packed up. Clothes and personals only.”
“So it’s furnished,” Trez said dryly.
“Yes. It is.”
Trez wasted some time watching his brother be extra efficient with the packing. Shirts were stripped off the hangers, folded precisely, put in black LV Epi luggage. Pants, same. Guns and knives went into matching steel briefcases.
At this rate, the guy was going to be done with his shit in a half hour.
“You gotta tell me where we’re going.”
iAm looked over. “We’re moving in with the Brotherhood.”
Trez’s brain got flushed, the fog clearing in an instant. “I’m sorry. What.”
“We’re moving in with them.”
Trez’s eyes bulged. “I’m…wait, I didn’t hear that right.”
“You did.”
“By whose authority.”
“Wrath, son of Wrath.”
“Shiiiiiiiiit. How in the hell did you pull that off?”
iAm shrugged, like he’d done nothing more than make a reservation at a Motel 6. “I talked to Rehvenge.”
“Didn’t know the male had that kind of pull.”
“He doesn’t. But he went to Wrath—who appreciated our backing him up at that Council meeting. The king feels as though we’d be additive on the home front.”
“He’s worried about a raid,” Trez said softly.
“Maybe he is. Maybe he isn’t. But what I do know is that no one’s going to find us there.”
Trez exhaled. So that was the “why” of it alclass="underline" His brother didn’t want him to be dragged back to the s’Hisbe any more than he did.
“You are amazing,” he said.
iAm just shrugged again, as was his way. “Can you start packing your stuff, or should I do the first shift on that?”
“Nah, I’m good.” He knocked on the jamb and started to turn away. “I owe you, my brother.”
“Trez.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “Yeah?”
His brother’s eyes were grim. “This is not a get-out-of-jail-free thing. You can’t run from the queen. I’m just buying us some time, here.”
Trez looked down at his bare feet—and wondered how far, in fact, he could go if they were covered by Nike.
Pretty fucking far.
His brother was the one tie he hadn’t cut, the only thing he felt like he didn’t want to leave behind in order to save himself from a gilded life of sexual enslavement.
And in a moment like this, with the guy once again having stepped up to the plate in a big way…he wondered if it was possible that he couldn’t walk away from iAm.
Maybe he was going to have to cave in to his destiny, after all.
Fucking queen. And her goddamn daughter.
The traditions made no sense. He’d never met the young princess. No one had. That was the way it worked—the next in line to the throne was as sacred as her mother, because she was the one who was going to lead them in the future. And like a rare rose, nobody was allowed to see her until she was properly mated.
Purity and all that.
Blah, blah, blah.
Once she was hitched, however, she was free to come out to society, free to live her life—within the s’Hisbe. The sad-sack motherfucker who married the bitch? He took her place inside the palace walls, doing whatever the hell she wanted, when she wanted—assuming he wasn’t worshipping at her mother’s feet at the moment.
Yeah, that was a party.
And they thought he should feel honored to strap that yoke on?
Really.
He’d turned his body into a garbage dump in the last decade, fucking all those humans—and what was truly whacked? He wished that all those pesky Homo Sapiens diseases were the kind of thing he could pick up. No-go on that one. He’d had as much unsafe sex as he could with the other species and he was still healthy as a horse.
Pity.
“Trez?” iAm straightened. “Trez? Talk to me. Where you at?”
Trez stared at his brother, memorizing that proud, intelligent face and those bottomless, penetrating eyes.
“I’m right here,” he murmured. “See?”
He held out his hands and did a little circle in his bare feet, in his robe, in his spacey, fuzzy, post-migraine haze.
“What’s going on in that mind of yours?” iAm demanded.
“Nothing. I think it’s great what you did. I’ma go pack up and get ready. They sending a car or something?”
iAm narrowed his stare, but he did answer. “Yeah. A butler named Fred? Or was it Foster?”
“I’ll be ready.”
Trez walked off, the dregs of that headache draining from him as he looked into the future…and really worried about this one last tie of his.
But this move was a good thing. iAm was right: He had been fooling himself these last few years, aware that the princess was aging, and time was passing, and his day of reckoning was fast approaching.
There were things you could put off. This was not one of them.
Fucking hell, maybe he was going to have to disappear. Even if it killed him.
Besides, if his brother was with Rehv in the king’s household? iAm was going to have the kind of support he was going to need if Trez up and got ghost.