the blaze, had he recalled it had been the same van from the night she’d been taken from the symphath colony.
That was how he’d suspected there were others being held.
And he’d been right.
“I didn’t know there were others at the lab.” Xhex cleared her throat. “I mean, while I was there, they kept me alone, probably because I attacked them every time they came at me.”
Murhder closed his eyes and shook his head. “That should never have happened. To you, or anybody.”
“I don’t blame you at all for keeping your distance from me. But what I can’t understand is, why did you tell the Brotherhood you were the one who burned down the lab?”
“Does it matter now?”
“Yes. I mean, it wasn’t until tonight that I figured it all out. That they blamed you for all of it. First that fire and then the slaughter at the second site.”
He shrugged. “By the time the Brothers linked what you’d done to all my wrongs? It was a drop in a bucket. I decided you didn’t need any more trouble than you’d already found and God knew I was in deep enough as it was.”
“They know about me. About what I am.”
“I figured that out. Good on them for accepting you—”
“I’m mated now.”
“Congratulations,” he heard himself say.
“He’s a good male.”
He better be, Murhder thought. Or I’ll kill him with my bare hands.
When she didn’t say anything further, he waited for feelings of jealousy and possession to bubble up in his chest. Something did kindle, deep inside, but it was too quiet an emotion for him to process. He was very sure it was not a bonded male reaction, however.
“I didn’t come back here to make problems for you,” Murhder said. “It’s really all about the female.”
“Any way I can help, I’m there.” Xhex looked away to the cabin. “I owe her, even though I don’t know her.”
Murhder didn’t mean to reach out, but his arms extended before he could think about it one way or another … and the next thing he knew, Xhex was in his arms, the pair of them holding on to each other, the invisible winds of their pain and suffering turning them into the eye of a hurricane.
It was what he had wanted to do the night of that fire, but he had lacked the nerve.
“I’m sorry, too,” he said over her head.
“What are you apologizing for?” she asked.
“Everything.”
John Matthew was downwind from Xhex and Murhder as they embraced in the shadows of a stand of pine trees.
The ugly grunt that came out of his throat was low and dangerous to his own ears. And then there was the fact that his palms had somehow managed to find both his daggers and unsheathe them from his chest holster.
The crack of a stick directly behind him was the only thing that stopped him from rushing out into the meadow and attacking the former Brother.
As John wheeled around, Tohr loomed behind them. “Damn it, John. What the hell are you doing here?”
All John could do was breathe. His raging bonded male was so dominant that the instinct to attack, protect, defend took over his higher reasoning. Or at least most of it. There was still enough to remind him that he did not want to hurt his surrogate father.
“Son,” Tohr said, “don’t do this, okay? Don’t do any of this.”
The image of Xhex stepping in against another male, a former lover of hers, a Brother, was like gasoline on the fire of his temper. And Tohr must have known he was about to act because the male locked a hold on John’s right shoulder—
Directly on the bite wound.
If John had had a voice that worked, he would have cursed loud enough to bring snow from the storm clouds overhead.
The unholy pain that lanced through him was so intense it was probably the only thing that could have overridden his bonded male. Pitching forward, temporarily blinded, he fell into Tohr, who caught him before he hit the ground.
“Are you injured? John!”
Tohr rolled him over and laid him out flat on the snow, and as his nervous system struggled with the sensory load plowing through him, his daggers were stripped from his hands and the Brother’s face appeared above his.
“Talk to me, son, what’s going on?”
With sloppy reflexes, he fumbled around the area of his shoulder, trying to push the Brother’s hold away from what was killing him—