If she wasn’t venom neutral, her scent would’ve put him off immediately, regardless of their prior relationship. It was pure survival instinct for vampires to be disgusted at the idea of wanting to fuck or feed on each other. Even allowing that perhaps her body hadn’t completely finished its transition, he would’ve felt it.
Still, he’d restrained himself from biting her. He didn’t want to. In fact, he couldn’t remember ever wanting anything morethan that when he had his cock buried in the vice of her wet cunt and she practically begged him for it.
He was absolutely certain she was venom neutral, and yet…
“I need Alvin to take a look at her. I trust my nose, but I’m not risking poisoning her because I can’t wait one night to get a sip. She needs to be tested. Actually, she needs a full work-up. Everything. I want to be sure she’s completely healthy before I touch her. Once that’s done, I want Marietta to get her settled. My girl’s going to need a friend to answer questions and get her things to make her feel at home. Whatever Dahlia needs, she gets.”
He paused before adding, “And I want the bed taken out of the bridal suite. She can do what she wants with the space but she’s not sleeping there.”
Felix drummed his claws on the desk, the list unspooling in his mind in order of most urgent to least. “Milo, I need a full report on what thefuckwent down at The Lush. This worked out in our favor, but the fact that a fuck-up of this scale happened tomy girlis unacceptable.”
She was there. She was there. She was there.
The knowledge that Dahlia had been on that roof with Yvanna and he hadn’t even known was like fine grains of glass under his skin. He knew his girl was stubborn and didn’t trust him, but to not say anything at all about the fact that she’d clearly been injured was?—
He forced himself to take a deep breath.
Felix didn’t do self-loathing or regret. That meant looking back on shit that was done and couldn’t be changed. What hediddo was cause and effect. Actions and consequences.
Action:He’d been careless.
Consequence:His girl was put in harm’s way.
Action:Dahlia hid what had happened to her.
Consequence:He’d make sure she never did that again.
“I want her hospital records sent to Alvin and then I want them wiped,” he continued. “Luis, you’ll pay a visit to the doctor who sold her out first thing tomorrow night. No one should have the information on her that he does.”
The brothers nodded, all business now.
Milo said, “I got all her records while you were gone. You want them?”
“Are they just from today?”
“No. There’s normal check-up stuff, but there’s also a visit to the ER the same night as the hit.”
Any remnant of the pleasant after-sex buzz that had stubbornly clung to him vanished. Hand stilling on the desk, he murmured, “Tell me how bad it was.”
Milo blew out a breath. “Boss, maybe you?—”
“Now.”
Grimacing, he said, “She got lucky. When I compared the Patrol report to her hospital record, I was able to piece together where she must’ve been when the explosive went off. She was standing across from Yvanna, presumably close to Alastair. I don’t know what happened between those two, since he’s not in the report, but she arrived at the hospital with…”
He trailed off. Milo wasn’t one to mince words or hesitate, so the fact that he really didn’t want to tell Felix what had happened to Dahlia made his stomach churn.
Keeping his voice flat, he prompted, “Finish.”
“The intake notes say she was impaled by a piece of a metal table. There was a major puncture wound in her left shoulder and several shrapnel wounds on her face and limbs. She also had a minor concussion.” He rubbed his jaw again, his gaze averted. “Where Alastair fits into that… I don’t know. She told the doctor that she was absolutely certain it was his blood that got in her wound, though.”
Impaled.
Dahlia had been impaled. And she hadn’t told him.
It wasn’t just fury that made his mind go blank. It was betrayal. Another more well-adjusted person might’ve called it hurt, but he wasn’t one of those, so the fact that she hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him she’d been catastrophically injured registered as an insult.
He’d spoken to her the next night and she’d sounded off, but he’d chalked it up to the fact that she’d been rattled. After years of back and forth between them, he justassumedthat she’d be smart enough to tell him if she so much as got a paper cut. It seemed obvious to him that being impaled by a fucking table warranted at least a phone call.
