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Qhuinn’s move on Lash had been like that.

And the horrible thing that had happened to John on the stairwell . . . yeah, that, too.

It was fate’s version of a lead foot.

Clearly Lash’s throat had been destined to be cut at that moment by Qhuinn, and time had sped up so that there could be no interference by anyone or anything else.

Giving up on the paperwork, John left the desk and headed through the back of the closet. As he stepped into the underground tunnel that would take him back to the mansion, he hated himself for hoping that Lash didn’t survive. He didn’t like thinking he was that cruel, and besides, if Lash died, things would be harder on Qhuinn.

He didn’t want his secret to get loose, though.

As he stepped out into the foyer, his phone went off with a beep. It was Qhuinn: Hav left home. Dont kno hw long fone will work. Will turn self in2 Wrath wheneva he wants.

Shit. John quickly hit his friend back: Blay’s ready 2 cum & pick u up.

No reply.

He tried again: Q? W8 4 Blay, don’t leave w/o him. U can stay thur.

John stopped at the base of the stairs and waited for an answer. What he got a minute later was from Blay: Dont worry, im on Q. Will let u kno wen i hear bck frm him. Worst case? I pick him up.

Thank fuck.

Ordinarily, John would have gone over and met his boys at Blay’s, but he couldn’t face them just yet. How could they not be thinking about him differently? Plus, what had happened to him was going to be tight on their minds, just as it had been for him in the beginning.

After the attack had first occurred, he’d thought nonstop about what had been done to him. Then it had been most of the time during the day and all the time during the night. And then it was sometimes during the day, then every other day; then a whole week might pass without him giving it a thought. The nights had taken much, much longer, but eventually even the dreams had dried up, too.

Yeah, he had zero interest in looking into his friends’ eyes right now and knowing what they were thinking. Picturing. Wondering about.

Nah, he couldn’t be with them yet.

And besides, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the whole thing with Lash was his fault. If he wasn’t carrying that baggage around with him, the guy wouldn’t have trotted it out in front of his friends and the fight wouldn’t have happened and Qhuinn wouldn’t have Rambo’d his first cousin.

Once again, that fucked-up shit from that stairwell was causing problems. It was like the aftershocks from what had happened to him were never, ever going to end.

As John passed by the library to go upstairs, he went in on a whim and scanned the stacks until he got to the legal section . . .which was about twenty feet in length. God, there must have been about seventy volumes on law in the Old Language. Evidently vampires were as litigious as humans.

He flipped through some of the tomes and got a picture from the penal code of what might happen. If Lash died, Qhuinn would go up in front of Wrath for murder, and things didn’t look good, as Qhuinn hadn’t been the one being attacked, so he couldn’t argue self-defense. His best shot was to raise justifiable honor homicide, but even that carried jail time, in addition to a high fine that had to be paid to Lash’s parents. On the other hand, if Lash lived, it was an issue of assault and battery with a deadly weapon, which would still lead to time behind bars and a fine.

Both outcomes raised the same problem: According to what John knew, the race had no jails, as the penile system for vampires had degraded over the four hundred years prior to Wrath’s ascension. Qhuinn would therefore be held on house arrest somewhere until a prison was built.

It was hard to imagine Blay’s parents being okay with keeping a felon under their roof indefinitely. So where would the guy go?

With a curse, John shoved the leather-bound volumes back into the stacks. As he turned away, he caught a vision in the moonlight and forgot about what he had just been reading.

On the other side of the library’s French doors, Cormia was getting out of the