Chapter 137 - Inseparable

Louis

Fighting with Nash made me feel more alive than I have felt in… forever. Finding my daughter alive and well had woken me up from the stupor of insanity, but as I clashed with Nashville Turner, wooden staff smashing against wooden staff, sweat dripping down bare chests, mate-scent swirling in the wind…it was like all my senses had finally come online.

I’ve fought and sparred with other werewolves my whole life, men and women alike. It wasn’t the first time that I’d had a body land fully on top of me. But it was the first time I’d had the full weight and force of Nash knock me on my ass and press me into the grass. His body was lean and hard, cooler than mine, but still slick with sweat. For a moment we lay, chest to chest. I couldn’t move if I wanted to, because his weight had knocked the oxygen out of my lungs. And Nash seemed a little stupified. I could feel his heart beat, and wondered at the way it seemed to hitch, like it had been stunned by the power-surge that happened when we connected, and then it fell into perfect rhythm with mine.

And then the moment turned more intimate, as I felt his sex stirring against my thigh. With nothing more than some thin cotton and nylon gym shorts separating us, there was no mistaking the feeling of his desire.

Or my own. My member was also quickening, and a red haze was creeping over my vision. But there was something else playing on the edge of my consciousness, a sense of apprehension and anxiety. It took me a second to comprehend that it wasn’t my feeling, but Nash’s.

He’s not ready for this.

Especially not with twenty-odd werewolves looking on with rapt curiosity.

I acted quickly to flip him on his back, separating our lower bodies and bringing the staff, which was still in hand, and pressing it into his throat to remind him that we were supposed to be fighting not f.ucking.

But I felt as dazed as he looked. I jumped off and offered a hand to pull him to his feet. He accepted it, presumably so that he wouldn’t look like a sore loser, because as soon as he was up, he dropped my hand like a hot potato.

I understood how he was feeling. It wasn’t like this was familiar territory for me either. Until Nash had shown up on the scene, I’d never looked at another man as anything but a friend or a foe.

Daphne hurried off to start her day in the office with Dr. Conway. Leanne was already waiting for me in the hallway with her ever-present clipboard and tablet. The woman was a master at keeping me on schedule, but that ever-present list was a tyrant.

“What do I have this morning, Leanne?”

“Um, trade negotiations with the Northern European packs.”

“Cancel it.”

“Cancel it!?” She squeaked.

“Yes. I have something else I need to do. I will be unavailable until…” I checked my watch. “Ten.”

“Ten! But sir!”

“Make it ten-thirty.”

I left her choking on her own spit and started toward the center and oldest part of the château. It was the only area in the castle where you could access the sub-terranian levels. The first level was accessible only to certain staff members, but there were only four people who could access the second level, and I was one of them. I used my pass card, a password, and a retinal scan to unlock the door. The air seal hissed, and I felt the pressure change in my ears as I descended a set of archaic stairs under strangely harsh fluorescent lights.

The air felt harsh in my lungs, like it was purified to the point of being artificial. My feet echoed in the empty stone-walled corridors. Despite all the work that had been done to modernize the floor, it still had that cold, damp feeling. There were doors lining either side of the hallway, labeled with numbers but no names.

I stopped in front of door 3-11, sucked in a deep breath, and then used the same triple security protocol to unlock the door. As soon as the lock clicked open, the occupant began to scream. My movement in the doorway activated the motion sensor lights, and the cell was flooded in harsh blue light.

There was a hospital bed in the corner, the kind that they use in psychiatric wards, with no moving parts that an unstable patient could use to harm himself or others.

I was grossly familiar with that bed.

It used to be mine.

It was now occupied by a thin, pale stick of a man. His cracked lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl as I approached. His hands gripped the rails, and the veins and tendons popped out of his neck.

But from his chest down, Avery was completely paralyzed. Because I had broken his back and severed his spinal cord. His hair, which had always been dirty-blond, had grown thin and now whisps of it stuck to his pink scalp. His skin had grown almost translucent from more than a year without the sun.

I didn’t allow him to eat, but the nurse filled his stomach with liquid nutrition through a PEG tube, and a constant drip of fluids was connected to a port in his neck. As I drew closer, he tried to thrash on the bed, but within moments he was exhausted and panting.

I pulled up the plastic chair to the side of the bed and sat on it, crossing my legs and resting my hands on my knee. “Hello, brother.”

My greeting was met with a weak snarl.

“I’ve been thinking about you today,” I admitted reluctantly. I wish I could say I’d put my brother down in this hellhole and had forgotten about him for all time. I hated to admit that he got even a sliver of my attention anymore.

He panted and a bit of drool dribbled out of his mouth. He couldn’t speak. I’d removed his lying tongue. And as I stared at him, so weak, so pathetic, I felt absolutely no pity or remorse. “You thought you took everything from me. I lost my mate, my child, almost lost my kingdom. And I lost my brother too. At least my fantasy idea of what a brother should be. I can’t decide if you were always a jealous, greedy prick, or if something happened along the way to make you that way…” I paused, pretending I was giving him time to answer.

“Well, I guess we’ll never know.” I heaved a big sigh. I’d already been over and over my brother’s betrayal, but there was nothing, nothing that could ever excuse what he had done to me, what he had done to my family.

“Jokes on you though,” I said, swinging my leg, “Because I’ve been given a second chance.”

I watched Avery’s face contort with a new kind of hatred.