Home > Prisoner of Night (Black Dagger Brotherhood #16.5)(12)

Prisoner of Night (Black Dagger Brotherhood #16.5)(12)
Author: J.R. Ward

Like his blood . . . his sex.

That he went to such an inappropriate place, even if it was only in his mind, made him recall when her scent had first registered. There was something about this particular female that kindled him, and he couldn’t explain it. Back when he’d been in the cult, there had been no sex allowed—at least not unless the Dhavos decreed it, and then it involved the great male himself.

Duran had always been too worried about rescuing his mahmen to think much about the ban or to follow through on whatever might have, ever so briefly, turned his eye. And then when he’d been in the dungeon? Taking those veins had been about survival, not attraction.

This female . . . Ahmare . . . had changed all that for him. Not that either one of them were in a position to do anything about it. Or, in her case, so inclined.

“Water?” he asked as he held out a jug.

This had to be what canned corn felt like, Ahmare thought as she chewed and looked around at all the metal.

The bunker had been fabricated from sheets of steel bolted together, the seams overlapping and riveted with vertical lineups of bolts. For some reason, the orderly rows of hexagonal heads made her think of the old Victorian dresses that had been in her mahmen’s closet, the buttons down the backs evenly spaced in their hooks or holes like well-behaved pupils.

Taking another bite of the sandwich she’d made with the Shadow, she found the bread and salami all texture, no taste in her mouth. But it wasn’t like she was eating to enjoy.

“More water?” the prisoner said.

As she took what he held out and drank again, a part of her brain acknowledged that she was placing her lips where his had been.

Her eyes went to his beard. She could see nothing of his mouth with the long growth and she decided that was a good thing. Unless, of course, everything under there was ugly, then maybe it would help—because she shouldn’t be thinking about things like lips . . . and tongues.

His lips. His tongue.

The trouble was, his scent in her nose, replacing as it did the tinny high notes of the metal-laced air, was working telephone lines on her switchboard that hadn’t rung in a very, very long time.

And then there were his shoulders. Under the well-washed flak shirt he’d put on, they shifted as he took his bites, unbaggied a second sandwich, drank more water. Every time his arm rose, his bicep pulled the sleeve so tight she knew its seam was straining, and every time his arm went down, the shirt seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, a test passed.

His hair was drying now that they were out of the humidity, the waves turning into curls at the long ends, and she had a feeling it would be soft to the touch in a way his body would not. The shampoo he’d used in the Shadow’s shower had left it all shiny—or maybe it had just been soap that he’d rubbed all over his head.

Funny, she couldn’t smell whatever it had been. Usually at the gym where she worked, she had to train her nose away from all the bodywashes, Biolages, and colognes, the human need to artificially enhance their scents a reflection of their subpar olfactory range.

She had this male in her nose and down the back of her throat—

Stay focused on Ahlan, she told herself. What she needed to do was—

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

As the prisoner spoke, Ahmare jerked and had to catch up with what the syllables meant.

“You’re staring at me,” he said as he finished the sandwich. “And I can only guess you’re worried about how the day is going to go. So let me just get that out of the way. I’m not going to touch you.”

The fact that her libido felt a sting of rejection made her want to bang her head into one of the walls until she left a dent in the shape of her own face.

He pointed over to the bunk. “You can sleep there.” Then he pointed across the way in the opposite direction, to a bare wall. “I’ll sleep here. And you always have that trigger. You can drop me in a heartbeat, isn’t that what you said?”

Yes, she had been reminding herself of that fact at different points in this shitty adventure they were on. But concern for her personal safety hadn’t been why she’d been staring at him now, not that he was ever going to know the real reason.

“So tell me about your brother,” the prisoner said as he packed up the empty baggies, picking one to hold all the others.

Ahmare took a deep breath and figured talking was better than silence. “He’s about six-five, so a little shorter than you. Dark hair like mine. Eyes my green color. He came along sixty years after me. I was excited.”

Such basic statistics. That told nothing about Ahlan, really.

She stared down at the half-moon that she’d made in the bread when she’d taken her bite. “Live wire, Ahlan was—I mean, Ahlan is—a live wire. And that was a great characteristic before the raids, something that made the house come alive. After my parents were killed, though . . .” She shook her head. “He went off the rails. In that regard, we both played to type. I doubled down on the self-control, he became a firework going in a thousand different directions. I refused to think about my grief, burying myself in learning skills in self-defense and weapons that came too late. He ran from his, following any distraction he could.”

Clearing her throat, she looked up. “I can’t finish this sandwich. Do you want it?”

The prisoner reached out, and it was then that she noticed two out of his five fingers had no nails.

“They pulled them off so many times,” he explained, “that they stopped growing back.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered as he popped what she’d given him into his mouth and put his hand palm up in his lap so the nail beds didn’t show.

“How did Chalen get involved in the story?” he asked.

She opened her mouth to speak. But couldn’t seem to get any words out.

The prisoner’s brows went low, but he didn’t seem offended. It was more like bad memories were coming back to him.

“My father gave me to Chalen,” he told her. When she recoiled, he smiled. At least she thought he did. It was hard to be sure because of the beard. “My father is a very superstitious male, and superstition becomes a hard fact if you believe in it enough.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My father believes that if you kill a direct descendant of yours, you suffer a mortal event yourself. It’s like in his mind, he and I are intrinsically tied together, and if he causes my death, it’s tantamount to committing suicide. He’ll die as well.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“It’s an Old Country thing.”

“I was born in the New World.”

“So was I. The old ways live on, though, don’t they.” He planted his palms flat behind his hips and leaned into them. “He also believed I was going to come after him one night. Tricky situation for a guy who has plans to live a long life. His personal Grim Reaper out in the world, tracking him, waiting for him to slip up, and yet he couldn’t eliminate the threat.”

“You make it sound like you’re his killer.”

“I will be.”

Ahmare blinked at this. “Why?”

“He raped my mahmen. Repeatedly. That’s how I was born. He had her once and couldn’t stop. When her needing came, he took her over and over again. The nature of his addiction to her crippled him, and I believe his plan was to kill her as soon as he had his last hurrah during her fertile time—like a goddamn alcoholic going on a bender. But then when it was over, it dawned on him that he might get in trouble with that whole can’t-kill-my-young thing. He had to wait to see if it took, if she got pregnant, and she did. I have no doubt he hoped she and I would both die on the birthing bed because I heard he had repeated nightmares that what he had sired would exact revenge for the way the conception had happened. No such luck on the maternal/fetal funeral, and then, horror of horrors, I was a son. Like a female wouldn’t be strong enough to take revenge?”

“So he gave you to Chalen so someone else would kill you.”

“Bingo.”

“You were a member of the cult, then?”

“I was born into it, yes.”

“And what happened to your mahmen?”

“My father kept her alive because he was in love with her and he liked to torture her with his presence. The second she died of natural causes, he sent me to Chalen. He might have done that sooner, but I look like him, and every time she met my eyes, it was like he was right with her. He’s a sick fuck.” There was a long pause. “She loved me, though.” As the prisoner’s voice cracked, he cleared his throat. “I don’t know how . . . but she loved me as her son. How the hell could she do that? She should have hated me.”

“None of this was your fault.”

Bleak eyes met her own. “No, I’m just the living, breathing symbol of everything she endured. I wouldn’t have been able to be like her if the roles had been reversed.”

“A mahmen’s love is the greatest force in the universe.” Ahmare thought of her own family. “It is sacred. It’s stronger than hate. Stronger than death, too. Sometimes, I wake up in the middle of the day and I can swear my mahmen’s hand is on my shoulder and her sweet voice is telling me all will be well because she will never leave me. It’s as though, even from the Fade, she watches over me.”

But if that was true, Ahmare thought, how had her brother gone down such a bad path? Surely the female watched over him, too?

“I will never understand it,” the prisoner said.

She refocused. “You don’t have to. You don’t even need to accept it because every breath you take and each beat of your heart does that. Your sire might have been evil, but love won in the end, didn’t it?”

There was another long period of quiet.

“No,” he said eventually. “I don’t think it does.”

13

SO HOW GOOD ARE you with a knife?”

As the prisoner asked the question, Ahmare had a quick image of her stab—har-har—at decapitation.

   
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