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True, provided Bella survived this pregnancy of hers: Until she came out of the delivery healthy, his twin wasn’t out of the woods yet. And by extension, neither was Phury.

“Please let me introduce you—”

“No.” Phury stood up and chewed like a cow. Table manners were very important, but this conversation had to end before his head exploded.

“Phury—”

“I don’t want a female in my life.”

“You would make a wonderful hellren, Phury.”

He wiped his mouth on a dish towel and said in the Old Language, “Thank you for this meal made by thine hands. Blessed evening, Bella, beloved mate of mine twin, Zsadist.”

Feeling cheap that he didn’t help clean up, but figuring it was better than him having an aneurism, he pushed through the butler’s door into the dining room. Halfway down the thirty-foot-long table, he ran out of gas, pulled free a random chair, and dropped into the thing.

Man, his heart was pounding.

When he looked up, Vishous was standing on the other side of the table, staring down at him. “Christ!”

“Little tense there, my brother?” At six-feet-six, and descended of the great warrior known only as the Bloodletter, V was a massive male. With his blue-rimmed ice white irises, his jet-black hair, and his angular, cunning face, he might have been considered beautiful. But the goatee and the warning tattoos at his temple made him look evil.

“Not tense. Not at all.” Phury splayed his hands out on the glossy table, thinking about the blunt he was going to light up the instant he got to his room. “Actually, I was going to come find you.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Wrath didn’t like the vibe at this morning’s meeting.” Which was an understatement. V and the king had ended up chin-to-chin on a couple of things, and that wasn’t the only argument that flew. “He’s taken us all off rotation tonight. Said we need some R and R.”

V arched his brows, looking smarter than a matched set of Einsteins. The genius air wasn’t just an appearance thing. The guy spoke sixteen languages, developed computer games for kicks and giggles, and could recite the twenty volumes of the Chronicles by rote. The brother made Stephen Hawking seem like a candidate for votech.

“All of us?” V said.

“Yeah, I was going to hit ZeroSum. Wanna come?”

“Just scheduled some private biz.”

Ah, yes. V’s unconventional sex life. Man, he and Vishous were on such opposite ends of the sexual spectrum: Him knowing nothing, Vishous having explored everything, and most of it on the extremes…the untrodden path and the Autobahn. And that wasn’t the only difference between them. Come to think of it, the two of them had absolutely nothing in common.

“Phury?”

He shook himself to attention. “Sorry, what?”

“I said, I dreamed of you once. Many years ago.”

Oh, God. Why hadn’t he just gone straight to his room? He could be lighting up right now. “How so?”

V stroked his goatee. “I saw you standing at a crossroads in a field of white. It was a stormy day…yeah, lots of storms. But when you took a cloud from the sky and wrapped it around the well, the rain stopped falling.”

“Sounds poetic.” And what a relief. Most of V’s visions were scary as hell. “But meaningless.”

“None of what I see is meaningless, and you know it.”

“Allegorical then. How can anyone wrap up a well?” Phury frowned. “And why tell me now?”

V’s black brows came down over his mirrorlike eyes. “I…God, I have no idea. I just had to say it.” With a nasty curse, he headed for the kitchen. “Is Bella still in there?”

“How did you know she was—”

“You always look ruined after you see her.”

Chapter Two

Half an hour and a turkey sandwich later, V materialized to the terrace of his private downtown penthouse. The night was a bitch, all March cold and April wet, the bitter wind weaving around like a drunk with a nasty attitude. As he stood before the panorama of Caldwell’s bridge, the postcard view of the twinkling city bored him.

And so did his prospects for the evening’s fun and games.

He supposed he was similar to a long-standing coke addict. The high had once been intense,