Lover Avenged (Black Dagger Brotherhood #7) - J. R. Ward Page 0,60

everything about her. They had been promised to each other before they’d been born, and it had been love at first sight the moment they’d met. Destiny had been so kind to them.

He swept his palm down onto her waist, and then…

He stopped, realizing something was wrong. Something…

“Your belly…your belly is flat.”

“Tohr…”

“Where’s the young?” He pulled back in a panic. “You were with young. Where’s the young? Is he okay? What happened to you…are you all right?”

“Tohr…”

Her eyes opened, and the stare he had looked into for over a hundred years focused on him. Sadness, the kind that made you wish you’d never been born, drained the sexual flush from her beautiful face.

Reaching up to him, she put her hand on his cheek. “Tohr…”

“What happened?”

“Tohr…”

The sheen over her eyes and the quaver of her lovely voice snapped him in half. And then she began to drift away, her body disappearing under his touch, her red hair, her exquisite face, her despairing eyes fading so that only the pillows remained before him. Then in a final blow, the lemony smell of the sheets and her naturally clean scent left his nose, replaced by nothing—

Tohr jacked upright off the mattress, his eyes spilling over with tears, his heart aching as if he’d had nails driven into his chest. Breathing raggedly, he clutched at his breastbone and opened his mouth to scream.

No sound came. He didn’t have the strength.

Falling back against the pillows, he wiped his wet cheeks with hands that shook and tried to calm the hell down. When he finally caught his breath, he frowned. His heart was skipping in his rib cage, not so much beating as fluttering, and no doubt because of the erratic spasms, dizziness spun his head in a tight circle.

Pulling up his T-shirt, he stared down at his deflated pecs and his shrunken torso and willed his body to keep failing. The spells had been coming with increasing regularity and strength, and he wished to hell they’d just get organized and help him wake up dead. Suicide was not an option if you wanted to get into the Fade and be with your deceased loved ones, but he was operating under the assumption that you could effectively neglect yourself to death. Which wasn’t technically suicide, like eating a bullet or throwing a noose around his neck or doing a slit-the-wrist special would be.

The scent of food from out in the hallway had him looking at the clock. Four in the afternoon. Or was it morning? The drapes were drawn, so he didn’t know whether the shutters were up or down.

The knock that sounded was soft.

Which, thank fuck, meant it wasn’t Lassiter, who just came in whenever he wanted. Evidently fallen angels weren’t big on manners. Or personal space. Or boundaries of any kind. Clearly the great, glowing nightmare had been booted out of heaven because God hadn’t liked his company any more than Tohr did.

The quiet knock was repeated. So it must be John.

“Yeah,” Tohr said, letting his shirt fall as he pushed himself up on the pillows. His arms, once strong as cranes, struggled under the weight of his wilted shoulders.

The boy, who was no longer a boy, came in bearing a tray heavily laden with food, and a face full of baseless optimism.

Tohr glanced over as the burden was put on the bedside table. Herbed chicken and saffron rice and green beans and fresh rolls.

The shit might as well have been roadkill wrapped in barbed wire, for all he cared, but he picked up the plate and rolled out the napkin and took the fork and the knife and put them to use.

Chew. Chew. Chew. Swallow. More chewing. Swallow. Drink. Chew. Eating was as mechanical and autonomic as his respiration, something he was only dimly aware of, a necessity, not a pleasure.

Pleasure was a thing of the past…and a torture within his dreams. As he recalled his shellan up against him, naked, in lemony sheets, the fleeting image lit up his body from the inside out, making him alive, and not just living. The strike of his mortal match head faded quick, though, a flame with no wick to sustain it.

Chew. Cut. Chew. Swallow. Drink.

As he ate, the boy sat down in a chair by the closed drapes, elbow on knee, fist on chin, a living, breathing Rodin’s The Thinker. John was always like that lately, always with something on his mind.

Tohrment knew damn well what it was, but the solution that was going