Black Dagger Brotherhood 11 - Lover at Last

heights and smelling that wonderful cologne, part of him wanted to debate this break up until they both gave in and kept trying.
    But that wasn’t fair.
    Like Saxton, he’d had the vague notion that things were going to end at some point. And like his lover, he was also surprised it was now.
    That didn’t change the outcome, however.
    Saxton stepped back. “I never meant to get emotionally involved.”
    “I’m so sorry, I’m…I’m so sorry….” Shit, that was all that was coming out of his mouth. “I would give anything to be different. I wish I could…be different.”
    “I know.” Saxton reached up and brushed a hand down the side of his face. “I forgive you—and you need to forgive yourself.”
    Whatever, he wasn’t sure he could do that—especially as, at this moment, and as fucking usual, an emotional attachment he didn’t want and couldn’t change was yet again robbing him of something he wanted.
    Qhuinn was a fucking curse to him, the guy really was.

    About fifteen miles south of the Brotherhood’s mountaintop compound, Assail woke up on his circular bed in the grand master suite of his mansion on the Hudson. Above him, in the mirrored panels mounted on the ceiling, his naked body was gleaming in the soft glow of the lights installed around the base of the mattress. The octagonal room beyond was dark, the interior shutters still down, the fallen night hidden.
    As he considered all the glass in the house, he knew so many vampires would have found these accommodations unacceptable. Most would have avoided the manse altogether.
    Too much risk during daylight hours.
    Assail, however, had never been bound by convention, and the dangers inherent in living in a building with so much access to light were something to be managed, not bound by.
    Getting up, he went over to the desk, signed into his computer, and accessed the security system that monitored not just the house, but the grounds. Alerts had sounded several times during the earlier hours of the day, notifications not of an impending attack, but of some kind of activity that had been flagged by the security system’s filtering program.
    In truth, he lacked the energy to be overly concerned, an unwelcome sign that he needed to feed—
    Assail frowned as he reviewed the report.
    Well, wasn’t this instructive.
    And indeed, this was why he’d installed all his checks and balances.
    On the images feed from the rear cameras, he watched as a figure dressed in snowfield camouflage traveled on cross-country skis through the forest, closing in on his house from the north. Whoever it was stayed hidden in and among the pines for the most part, and surveyed the property from various vantage points for approximately nineteen minutes…before traversing the westerly border of trees, crossing into the neighbor’s property, and going down onto the ice. Two hundred yards later the man stopped, got out the binoculars again, and stared at Assail’s home. Then he circled around the peninsula that jutted out into the river, reentered the forest, and disappeared.
    Bending in closer to the screen, Assail replayed the approach, zooming in to identify facial features, if possible—and it was not. The head was covered with a knit mask, with cutouts only for the eyes, nose, and mouth. With the parka and ski pants on as well, the man was covered in his entirety.
    Sitting back, Assail smiled to himself, his fangs tingling in territorial response.
    There were but two parties who might be interested in his business, and going by the daylight that had reigned during this recon, it was clear the curiosity was not generated by the Brotherhood: Wrath would never use humans as anything other than a last-resort food source, and no vampire could withstand that amount of sunshine without turning into a torch.
    Which left someone in the human world—and there was only a single man with the interest and the resources to try to track him and his whereabouts.
    “Enter,” he said, just before a knock sounded on his door.
    As the pair of males came in, he didn’t bother to look away from the computer screen. “How did you sleep?”
    A familiar, deep voice answered, “Like the dead.”
    “How fortunate for you. Jet lag can be a bore, or so I’ve heard. We had a visitor this morning, by the way.”
    Assail leaned to one side so his two associates could review the footage.
    It was odd to have housemates, but he was going to have to get used to their presence. When he had