Daniel
PROLOGUE
Istared at the small dip in the sheet between my baby brother’s head and torso. It didn’t matter that his body was shielded from view. Everyone in the room knew what had been done to his body.
Ezekiel had been tortured. Slowly. Agonizingly. Ripped into pieces like a slab of meat.
My baby brother, who’d driven me crazy since the moment he could crawl, was gone. He’d never again steal my motorcycle and bring it back beaten to hell. He’d never call me over and over again until I agreed to go with him to Egypt or India or Amsterdam on a whim. He’d never steal the edge piece of my mother’s brownies off my plate again, never tackle me from behind on the sparring mats, never grin at me mischievously right before he did something completely unhinged.
I wasn’t sure what death entailed. No one was. It was impossible to know if the end came quickly, like a snap of the fingers, or if it took a while, like drifting to the center of a lake when your raft came unmoored, but whichever it was, I prayed that it had been peaceful. Zeke deserved that much after what he’d gone through.
It felt as if a piece of me had been torn away, and the space left empty gaped wide, the edges ragged.
Rage on a level that I’d never felt before rose in my chest until it felt like I could open my mouth and breathe fire. The room flickered, a red haze clouding my vision for a moment and then disappearing again.
My brother Chance gripped my bicep, giving it a squeeze in warning.
“You have all that you need from him?” my father asked the commandant of Vampire Command.
I’d fought for Arthur Carruthers for years. Bled for him. Killed for him. I’d answered every call and followed every order.
Now, I could barely look at him.
I wasdone.
I ignored Arthur’s response and everything that followed as I put one foot in front of the other, following my father and brothers out of the morgue. It took every piece of focus I had to climb the stairs and walk through the nondescript building, passing the Vampires working their administrative jobs like the world hadn’t just crashed down around us.
They’d known Zeke had been captured. I would’ve bet every dollar in my accounts that they’d been on their little computers, their fingers flying over their keyboards, searching for any kind of information that would help them get my brother back. They’d analyzed the odds, called in favors, searched records for his team’s strengths and weaknesses, and planned and replanned the rescue mission.
But not one of them had called any of his brothers.
I wished every one of them dead.
The flight home was a blur, and the freedom I usually felt with my hands on the controls and nothing but air and space around me was absent. The only thing I felt was relief that I was closed into the cockpit, away from the grief of the others.
I already knew how things would play out. My mother’s devastation would be overwhelming. My father’s rage would rattle the earth. Ambrose would grow more protective and desperate to find answers. Beau’s disillusionment with the world would grow, and he’d become more distant than he already was. Chance would be unable to contain his need to say the most offensive thoughts that popped into his head, an impulse he’d barely contained before.
None of them would recover. None would ever be the same.
I would have to be the calm in the center of the storm.
I was used to that.
I was the easygoing brother. The hard-to-rattle brother. The kind brother, the friendly brother, the never-caused-a-moment’s-worry brother.
Since the day I turned six years old, I’d trained myself to be all of those things.
I used the silence around me to find the peace I needed. By the time we touched down on the private landing strip at home, I had pushed down every bit of emotion, every agonizing vision of what Zeke had gone through, the urge for vengeance, and the pulsating rage into a small box in the back of my mind.
Only a hundred years of conditioning kept that box from breaking open as I stepped through the cockpit door and realized what my brothers were discussing.
“Do we really believe that this wasn’t a targeted blow?” Chance asked, his eyes landing on each of us quickly, like he couldn’t figure out where to look.
“Fuck no,” Beau replied darkly. “They knew what they were doing.”
“They were trying to figure out what would kill him,” I said quietly. It was the only thing that made sense. “Worked their way through?—”
“Enough,” my father barked, his hand slashing through the air. “That’s enough.”
