The King (Black Dagger Brotherhood #12) - J.R. Ward Page 0,86

the archway. Fritz was standing there with a Louis Vuitton duffel in one hand and the expression of someone witnessing a car accident on his face.

John closed his eyes.

He hoped like hell Beth had gone into that house, locked the door like she promised, and laid low during the daytime.

One of the pair of them was down hard. No one needed a second.

TWENTY-ONE

After Fritz and John left, Beth finally stepped into her father’s house—and as she entered, time’s relentless forward movement reversed itself. In the work of a moment, minutes, hours, days … then weeks and months … disappeared.

Abruptly, she was who she had been before meeting Wrath—a twenty-something human woman living with her cat in a cramped studio apartment, trying to make a go in the world with nothing and no one behind her. Sure, she had loved parts of her job, but her boss, Dick the Prick, had been a leering, misogynistic nightmare. And yeah, she’d been paid okay, except there hadn’t been much left over after her rent—or chance of advancement at the Caldwell Courier Journal. Oh, and romance of any kind had been as fictional and far-off on the horizon as the Lone Ranger.

Not that she’d been interested in men, really. Or women, at all.

But then this one time, at band camp …

Shutting the door, she was careful to lock herself in. Fritz had a key, so whenever he arrived with her stuff he’d be able to get in—but no one else would.

As the silence in the house surrounded her, it felt like bars on a cage. How in the hell had she ended up here? Spending an entire day without Wrath? As early as the night before, at their place in NYC, a separation like this would have been unthinkable.

Walking into the parlor on the left, she wandered around, remembering how, when she’d initially come here, she’d been convinced Wrath was a drug dealer, a criminal, a killer. At least she’d been wrong about the first two—and he’d proved that last one by nearly murdering Butch O’Neal in front of her in an alley.

Following that little horror, they’d come here—where they’d found Rhage in the downstairs bath, stitching himself up. It was after that that Wrath had taken her though the painting, down the lantern-lit stairwell underground … and into a hidden lair.

Where he’d told her who she really was.

What she really was.

Talk about falling through your rabbit holes. Except it had made sense of so much that had confused her—the disconnect to the people around her, her sense that she didn’t belong, her restlessness that had been ever-increasing as she approached her transition.

To think she’d assumed that all she needed was to get out of Caldwell.

Nope. Her change had been coming, and without Wrath, she would have died. No doubt.

He had saved her in so many ways. Loved her with his body and soul. Given her a future she hadn’t even dreamed of.

Right now? All she wanted to do was go back to their beginning. Things had been so easy then …

Going over to the floor-to-ceiling depiction of a French king, she hit the hidden switch that released the oil painting in its two-ton gold-leaf frame. As the thing swung open, she half expected the way down to be pitch-black—after all, no one had lived here for how long? But as with the way everything was still vacuumed and dusted and polished, the gas lanterns flickered in their wrought-iron cages, the rough stone steps and walls curving down into the cellar.

Jesus, it still smelled the same. A little musty and damp, but not dirty.

Trailing her hand over the uneven stone, she descended into the underground. The two bedroom suites at the bottom gave her a left and a right choice, and she picked the one on the left.

The one that had been her father’s old hideaway from the sun.

The pictures of her were still where he had placed them, all kinds of photos in so many different frames covering the writing desk, the side tables by the bed, the mantel over the fireplace.

The particular image she was looking for was by the alarm clock.

It was the only one of her mother, and yup … just a quick glance at the woman and she was reminded of where she’d gotten her thick black hair and the shape of her face and the set of her shoulders.

Her mother.

What kind of life had the woman lived? How had Darius come to her? From what Wrath had said