cracked. “But I had to … leave the pregnant female behind because everything went wrong.”
A barrage of images blinded him … all things he couldn’t bear thinking about: After that emaciated male got shot, Murhder himself was drilled in the side by a bullet. More humans came. Complete chaos with all the gunfire. Then the male died in his arms.
Murhder had been left with no choice but to dematerialize out of there before he himself lost too much blood.
By the time he’d returned the next night, after having fed from a Chosen and gotten his strength back, the pregnant female had been moved.
That was when he’d lost it and gone on the hunt for those scientists. The first white-coated lab worker he’d come to? He’d searched the man’s memories and discovered he had been in on the top secret project—and Murhder had intended to delve further to find out where the female had been taken. His hands, however, had taken over, his brute strength fueled by vengeance and unchecked after what the symphaths had done to him. He’d choked the human unconscious and dragged him to the next human he’d found. And the next. And a fourth.
All of them had worked in the lab where the vampires had been held.
Seven of them.
Murhder had lived up to his name that night. Had stacked the men like logs and then carried them out via a receiving dock. Which was where he’d found the iron stakes. And the mallet.
He’d used his black dagger only after he’d immobilized them.
The men had regained consciousness screaming. And as other humans had come running, he took control of their minds and frozen them where they stood. By the time dawn had come, he had an audience of a hundred stupor’d sentries, all staring in zombie-like trances at the work he did. Wrath called it field dressing. But that was just the end result.
He had experimented on those seven. Taken his time and staggered his attention, working on one for a while, before leaving him alive and moving to the next. And the next and the next. Until the final … after which he’d returned to the first. His victims had heard the suffering and begging of their ilk—all the while knowing their turn was coming again soon.
It was what Xhex and that male and that pregnant female had been through.
Payback. Yet it had cost him. Unhinged as he was, he had not gotten the information he needed, did not know where the female had been taken, had no other way of finding her location. And he had realized this only as he had returned to Caldwell.
Coming back to the present, he cleared his throat. “I’ve had to live for the last twenty years with the knowledge that I left one of ours behind. Who was pregnant. Do you have any idea what that’s been like? I had to see her through the bars of a fucking cage, screaming for me to help her, to not leave her, to not let them continue to torture her—and she was in labor. Do you have any concept of what that has done to me …” He rubbed his stinging eyes. “I know you think I’m insane for what I did to those doctors. I know that was why I got kicked out of the Brotherhood. You couldn’t trust me anymore. I get that. But it was the right thing to do and I will not apologize for my vengeance.”
“Of course not,” Wrath muttered. “Why would you.”
Murhder shook his head. “Balance is what the Scribe Virgin demands, right? It’s a universal law. And I made sure I took the suffering of our kind out of the hides of those who had been responsible. You used to be an eye-for-an-eye kind of male. I saw what you did to slayers. You think the way you treated our enemy was just because you wanted to save our race? Bullshit. You watched your parents get slaughtered in front of you by lessers. So you know exactly what I was doing when I took my damn time with those humans.”
Wrath lowered his head, as he would have if he were looking at his dog. And his hand shifted to the retriever’s silken ear.
“I got these letters.” Murhder put the folder of photographs on the floor and took the correspondence out of his pocket even though the King couldn’t see the envelopes. “The first one came about six months ago. Then a second. Finally, last week,