Duffels. On the bed. So many of them he couldn’t see more than an inch and a half of the king-size duvet—and he knew whose they were. Matching Guccis, in white with the navy blue logo and the navy blue and red cloth strapping—because according to Saxton, the traditional brown-on-brown with the red and green was “too obvious.”
Blay shut the door quietly. His first thought was, Holy shit, Saxton knew. Somehow, the guy knew what had happened in the training center.
The male in question came out of the bathroom with an armful of shampoo, conditioner, and product. He stopped dead.
“Hi,” Blay said. “Taking a vacation?”
After a tense moment, Saxton calmly came over, put his load down in a travel bag, and turned back around. As always, his beautiful blond hair was swept off his forehead in thick waves. And he was dressed perfectly, in another tweed suit with matching waistcoat, a red cravat and red pocket square adding just the right accent of color.
“I think you know what I’m going to say.” Saxton smiled sadly. “Because you’re far from stupid—just as I am.”
Blay went to sit down on the bed, but had to recalibrate because there was nowhere to put himself. He ended up on the chaise lounge, and, with a discreet lean to one side, he tucked the wadded shirt under the skirting. Out of sight. It was the least he could do.
God, was this really happening?
“I don’t want you to go,” Blay heard himself say roughly.
“I believe that.”
Blay looked across all those duffels. “Why now?”
He thought of the pair of them just the day before, under the sheets, having hard sex. They had been so close—although if he were brutally honest, maybe that had just been physically.
Take out the maybe.
“I’ve been fooling myself.” Saxton shook his head. “I thought I could keep going with you like this—but I can’t. It’s killing me.”
Blay closed his eyes. “I know I’ve been out a lot in the field—”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
As Qhuinn took up all the space between them, Blay wanted to scream. But what good would that do: it appeared that he and Saxton had gotten to the same difficult corner at the same sorrowful moment.
His lover looked over the luggage. “I’ve just finished that assignment for Wrath. It’s a good time to make a break, move out and find another job—”
“Wait, so you’re leaving the king as well?” Blay frowned. “However things stand between us, you need to keep working for him. That is bigger than our relationship.”
Saxton’s eyes dipped down. “I suspect that is far easier for you to say.”
“Not true,” Blay countered grimly. “God, I’m so…sorry.”
“You’ve done nothing wrong—you need to know that I’m not angry at you, or bitter. You’ve always been honest, and I’ve always known that things were going to end like this. I just didn’t know the timeline—I didn’t know…until I reached the end. Which is now.”
Oh, fuck.
Even though he knew Saxton was right, Blay felt a compulsive need to fight for them. “Listen, I’ve been really distracted for the last week, and I’m sorry. But things have a way of regulating, and you and I will get back to normal—”
“I’m in love with you.”
Blay shut his mouth with a clap.
“So you see,” Saxton continued hoarsely, “it’s not that you have changed. It’s that I have—and I’m afraid my silly emotions have put us at quite a distance from each other.”
Blay surged to his feet and strode across the fine-napped carpet to the other male.
When he got to his destination, he was relieved to the point of tearing up that Saxton accepted his embrace. And as he held his first true lover against him, feeling that familiar difference in their heights and smelling that wonderful cologne, part of him wanted to debate this break up until they both gave in and kept trying.
But that wasn’t fair.
Like Saxton, he’d had the vague notion that things were going to end at some point. And like his lover, he was also surprised it was now.
That didn’t change the outcome, however.
Saxton stepped back. “I never meant to get emotionally involved.”
“I’m so sorry, I’m…I’m so sorry….” Shit, that was all that was coming out of his mouth. “I would give anything to be different. I wish I could…be different.”
“I know.” Saxton reached up and brushed a hand down the side of his face. “I forgive you—and you need to forgive yourself.”
Whatever, he wasn’t sure he could do that—especially as, at this moment, and as fucking usual, an emotional attachment he didn’t want and couldn’t change was yet again robbing him of something he wanted.
Qhuinn was a fucking curse to him, the guy really was.
About fifteen miles south of the Brotherhood’s mountaintop compound, Assail woke up on his circular bed in the grand master suite of his mansion on the Hudson. Above him, in the mirrored panels mounted on the ceiling, his naked body was gleaming in the soft glow of the lights installed around the base of the mattress. The octagonal room beyond was dark, the interior shutters still down, the fallen night hidden.
As he considered all the glass in the house, he knew so many vampires would have found these accommodations unacceptable. Most would have avoided the manse altogether.
Too much risk during daylight hours.
Assail, however, had never been bound by convention, and the dangers inherent in living in a building with so much access to light were something to be managed, not bound by.
Getting up, he went over to the desk, signed into his computer, and accessed the security system that monitored not just the house, but the grounds. Alerts had sounded several times during the earlier hours of the day, notifications not of an impending attack, but of some kind of activity that had been flagged by the security system’s filtering program.
In truth, he lacked the energy to be overly concerned, an unwelcome sign that he needed to feed—
Assail frowned as he reviewed the report.
Well, wasn’t this instructive.
And indeed, this was why he’d installed all his checks and balances.
On the images feed from the rear cameras, he watched as a figure dressed in snowfield camouflage traveled on cross-country skis through the forest, closing in on his house from the north. Whoever it was stayed hidden in and among the pines for the most part, and surveyed the property from various vantage points for approximately nineteen minutes…before traversing the westerly border of trees, crossing into the neighbor’s property, and going down onto the ice. Two hundred yards later the man stopped, got out the binoculars again, and stared at Assail’s home. Then he circled around the peninsula that jutted out into the river, reentered the forest, and disappeared.
Bending in closer to the screen, Assail replayed the approach, zooming in to identify facial features, if possible—and it was not. The head was covered with a knit mask, with cutouts only for the eyes, nose, and mouth. With the parka and ski pants on as well, the man was covered in his entirety.
Sitting back, Assail smiled to himself, his fangs tingling in territorial response.
There were but two parties who might be interested in his business, and going by the daylight that had reigned during this recon, it was clear the curiosity was not generated by the Brotherhood: Wrath would never use humans as anything other than a last-resort food source, and no vampire could withstand that amount of sunshine without turning into a torch.
Which left someone in the human world—and there was only a single man with the interest and the resources to try to track him and his whereabouts.
“Enter,” he said, just before a knock sounded on his door.