Where Winter Finds You (Black Dagger Brotherhood #18)- J.R Ward Page 0,39

no better than he had handled his grief, his emotions over-spilling. Overcoming. Overtaking. Except now, he didn’t mind it. He took out his phone and called up his brother’s contact. He needed to tell iAm, he needed to tell the Brothers, he needed to—

A flash down on the floor caught his eye.

Frowning, he walked over and bent down. The ring of keys was nothing unusual, exactly the kind of thing that could be found any night of the week after the lights went on. There was something out of the norm, however. The unadorned ring held, in addition to a silver key of unremarkable distinction, a copper one.

The soft metal was old, utterly lacking the mellow, rose gold-like sheen of fresh copper.

So it was from a vampire house.

Bringing the thing to his nose, he breathed in deep—and caught the familiar scent of his female. These were hers. They had fallen out of her purse when her money had been taken.

Rubbing the slip of copper between his thumb and forefinger, he thought of his reincarnated Selena. Of the fact that she didn’t recognize him in person, even though she knew him from her dreams, knew him from the feel of his body on hers, in hers.

This key, which warmed to his touch, was not to the door to her flat in that fucking awful rooming house. It was to another house—a home. Where she had evidently come from.

Except… how had that worked? How had she, as a Chosen, come from anywhere but the Sanctuary?

As much as his soul was singing, and as fervently as he wanted to proclaim to the world his queen had come back unto him, his logical side couldn’t square up the past she had had without him. She was through her transition. Well through it. So how had that happened? How had his Selena died so recently, and yet been returned unto him in the body of a mature female?

There was no reconciling the two timelines. No way to make that equation add, subtract, multiply, or divide. And yet Xhex wouldn’t mislead him. No way. Even though she was a symphath, history had proven that he could trust her, and she had very clearly confirmed what he had known all along, what had captivated him—and given that what he felt now was infinitely better than the suffering? He would take it and run with it. After all, wasn’t that what faith was all about?

You believed what your soul told you even if the fallible mind struggled with the implications.

Peace. All he wanted was peace. And if he had to stop questioning and just believe to stay here in this relief? Then he was on that train, goddamn it.

Staring at his brother’s contact on the screen of his cell phone, it felt all wrong not sharing this with iAm. The other male suffered as he did. Hell, maybe that was why the poor bastard had let that sauce burn on the stove tonight. He was newly mated, to a female he loved with everything in him, but he had a basket case for a nearest blood relation.

The last thing iAm needed was a crazy-ass phone call from said basket case that was full of happy tears, proclamations of reincarnation, and suggestions that they double date. This was especially true given that the guy’s party line on his newest waitress was that the female was not in fact Selena. To iAm, she was Therese. From Michigan. Come to Caldwell to start a new life independent from whatever family she had left behind.

Any news flash to the contrary was not going to go well.

And iAm wasn’t the only one who didn’t need a conversation like that. Trez was not interested in anyone talking him out of this happiness. Trying to prove him wrong. Attempting to “reason” with him.

He was liable to go batshit, and not in an insane way. In a combative manner.

“Fuck.”

As he stared at his phone, he found such irony in the fact that his good news alienated him as much as his bad news had. He had a secret he knew he couldn’t share, and that made him lonely.

Maybe even when it comes to the owner of this key, he thought to himself.

His female had seen him in her dreams… but again, she did not recognize him in real life.

Before he became frustrated with the whole situation, he deliberately remembered the way he had felt as he had stood in front of that funeral pyre, those flames