Where Winter Finds You (Black Dagger Brotherhood #18)- J.R Ward Page 0,40

consuming the remains of his queen. How many times, during the burn, and then after it was all embers and ashes—hell, even before then, when his female had been on the lip edge of death, lingering, suffering… how many times had he begged for a different destiny? Promised all kinds of things, both within and without of his control, for her to come back, for his life to return to normal, for them to have years, decades, centuries ahead of them.

Instead of what they’d been granted. Which had been too short, and too tragic.

What if this was the fate he had asked for being delivered unto him? What if… this was the only way it could happen, the only manner in which his prayers could be answered?

The reunion with his queen granted.

But only him knowing it.

“I’ll take it,” he said out loud as he clicked his phone off. “I will fucking take this shit a hundred times during the week, and a thousand times on every Sunday.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The following evening, Trez all but skipped down the formal front staircase of the Brotherhood’s mansion. As he descended the red-carpeted, tsar-worthy steps, he was glad no one was hanging around down in the multicolored, marble-columned foyer: Even though he was whistling, very nearly skipping, and liable to high-five anyone in range, he didn’t want anybody to catch him in his good mood.

In fact, his body was bouncy and buoyant, a buoy on gentle seas, and his feet were all Fred Astaire, light and nimble. Then again, the incredible weight that had been sitting on his rib cage like an elephant had disappeared. In its absence, he could breathe for the first time since Selena’s death—and hey, another bonus, his heart wasn’t bleeding out in his chest anymore, either.

And it was funny. Even though he’d been so very aware of how badly off he’d been—because, hello, he’d been in so much pain, he’d had no choice but to recognize the major-organ-failure equivalent of his damage—he nonetheless had a fresh perspective on his mental and emotional states.

Not until the removal of the pain had he understood the depths of it.

Plus, check it, he was actually looking forward to something.

Someone.

Was this what Rehv had been talking about when the guy had come and pressed the drug thing? Because if a person could get this effect by popping a pill every twenty-four hours? Man, sign his shit up. He just didn’t think it was that simple.

No, this optimism, this return to a normalcy he had never really had, was both complicated and simple. Soon, he was going to see his shellan, in the form she had been returned to him as. And what do you know, that solved so many of his problems—and the ones it created? Well, he’d spent all day lying in bed and thinking them over.

Yup, he was more than comfortable managing them.

As he hit the mosaic floor, he stopped and looked toward the cheerful sounds spilling out through the dining room’s archway. There was laughter and chatter, and the soft clinking of sterling silver on porcelain, and the occasional scrape of chair legs as someone got up or sat down. He could picture the people in there. See their faces, their smiles, their bodies in those hand-carved seats. Thirty of them, including the servants.

He had been avoiding mealtimes, not because he didn’t like who was in that grand room, but because he loved the people in there. And it was hard, when you were in a dark place, to be around those who were not. You didn’t want to bring anybody down, but you also couldn’t fake the happiness.

With his change in mood, he was tempted to go into the dining room, hug each and every one of them, and then plant himself at a vacant place setting. As he tucked into the roast beef he could smell, he would apologize for putting them all through what he had—because he knew the Brothers and their shellans, the other fighters, even Fritz and his staff, had worried about him. And then he would join the talking and the laughing.

Except… no. He couldn’t do that. This resurrected mood—natch—he was sporting was like getting rhinoplasty. Everybody was going to notice, and there was no not-explaining, not to the nearest-and-dearest crew.

It was better that he made a gradual reentry.

Yes, that was how this had to go. Especially as he started bringing Selena in her new incarnation around the Brothers. Thank God at least Xhex knew what