was with his socks. Sometimes they were black. Sometimes they were white.
Call him a party animal.
There were a couple of boxes of study books that were Bella’s. Quilts that had been brought over from her farmhouse. A sofa and chair from there that were draped with drop cloths.
He thought of that property that Bella still owned, the one that was next to what had been Mary’s condo. It was so strange. But for the random proximity of those two pieces of real estate, so much would never have happened: Mary had met John Matthew through her work at the local suicide prevention hotline. Bella had known what John was, even though Mary, as a human, had not. Then the three of them had been brought in to the training center, where Mary had met Rhage, and Z and Bella had met, and John Matthew, an orphan in the human world, had found a set of loving parents in Wellsie and Tohr.
Now, years later, John Matthew was a brother and had found a mate in Xhex. Rhage and Mary were mated and had adopted Bitty. And Z and Bella were parents. Wellsie was gone, though, and that was a loss that would never go away. But Tohr had another love in Autumn, although not as a replacement for his beautiful first shellan. There were others who had entered the Brotherhood’s world as well, like the Band of Bastards, and the Chosen.
The Scribe Virgin, gone.
The Lassiter era, commenced.
Yet for all the changes, the past was still in the shadows.
Z went to the back of the storage unit, to a Hammermill box that had previously held ten reams of printer/copier paper. The lid was not taped down, the corrugated cardboard forming a sturdy enough seal—and it wasn’t like anybody was liable to poke around with it.
Bella knew what was inside.
As Z knelt down to the hard floor, both of his knees cracked, and so did his spine. His fingers trembled ever so slightly as he reached forward. The resistance to opening the box was slight and overwhelming at the same time.
Putting the lid aside, he peered in, the light from the ceiling flowing over his head and shoulders and creating an outline of him in shadow on the wall.
The sleeping pallet was folded up, its felt corpus thick and mottled due to the cheap collection of fibers that had been woven together to form its weight.
Given its size, it took up the whole of the interior, as if the box had been precisely made for the purpose of storing the thing.
Z took the blanket out. Holding what he had slept on for . . . God, years and years . . . he found himself remembering when he had put it away, first in the closet in his bedroom, and then in this box that he’d gotten from the office, and finally down here. He’d been determined to turn his life around. He’d lost the female he had bonded with—
No, even worse, he’d told Bella to leave.
And yet even after she was gone, he’d decided to try to better himself. To learn how to read and write. To stop being so brutally angry.
Destroying his mistress’s skull, which he had slept beside since he had killed her, had been part of it. So, too, had been starting to sleep in a bed.
Little had he known that he had been preparing for Bella’s return. And it was only after she had returned and, by some miracle, taken him back, that he’d realized what he’d been doing. He’d been afraid he’d fail, however, and that was why he’d had to set her free. After a century of hating himself, he’d had no reason to believe he’d be close to worthy—
Z twisted around with a jerk. “Hello?”
There were a couple of footsteps, and then Mary, Rhage’s shellan, stepped in between the open jambs of the storage unit. The female was not vampire, but neither was she human anymore, really. The Scribe Virgin had taken her out of the continuum of time, the result of a bargain Rhage had struck to save Mary’s life from her terminal cancer. In return, the brother had to live with his beast for the rest of his nights, and you know what? He seemed very satisfied with his choices—and Z could totally get it. Mary was a bastion of calm and reasonable, the perfect foil to Rhage’s out-there.
“Hi.” She smiled as she ran a hand through her short brown hair. “I hope