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“Oh, this is good,” Beth said. “Listen, Mary should be coming in a minute. She’s bringing you something.”

Wrath nodded and reached forward, running his fingertips across the desk’s top until he got to the glass of red wine he’d been drinking. By its weight, he knew that he’d almost finished it, and given his mood, he was going to want more. The shit about Rehv had been bothering him. Badly.

After he polished off his Bordeaux, he put the glass down and rubbed his eyes under the wraparounds he still wore. It might be weird to keep the sunglasses on, but whatever—he didn’t like the idea that other people could look at his unfocused pupils and he couldn’t see them staring at him.

“Wrath?” Beth came over to his side, and he could tell by her tense tone that she was trying to keep the fear out of her voice. “Are you all right? Does your head hurt?”

“No.” Wrath tugged his queen back into his lap, the little chair creaking once again, its spindly legs wobbling. “I’m okay.”

Her hands brushed his hair from his face. “You don’t seem that way.”

“I just…” He found one of her hands and took it into his own. “Shit, I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

He frowned hard and tight. “It’s not about me. At least, not really.”

There was a long pause, and then they both spoke at once:

“What is it?”

“How’s Bella?”

Beth cleared her throat as if she were surprised by his question. “Bella’s…doing the best she can. We don’t leave her alone much, and it’s good that Zsadist has taken some time off. It’s just so hard that she lost both of them within days of each other. I mean her mother and her brother…”

“That shit about Rehv was a lie.”

“I don’t understand.”

He reached around for the Caldwell Courier Journal she’d been reading him, and tapped the article she’d just finished. “I find it hard to believe that someone blew his ass up. Rehv was no dummy, and those Moors who guarded him? That head of security? No fucking way they’d let some cocksucker with a bomb anywhere near that club. Plus, Rhage said that he and V went to the Iron Mask the other night to drag John home, and the three of them are working there—iAm, Trez, and Xhex are still together. Usually people scatter after tragedy. Except that bunch is right where they always were, like they’re waiting for him to come back.”

“But there was a skeleton in the ruins, wasn’t there?”

“Could be anyone’s. Sure, it was male, but what else do the police know? Nothing. If I wanted to disappear from the human world—hell, even the vampire one—I’d plant a body and blow up my building.” He shook his head, thinking of Rehv lying in his bed up at the Great Camp, so fucking ill…and yet well enough to have his assassin take care of the guy who’d wanted to kill Wrath. “Man, that SOB was there for me. He had every chance in the world to fuck me when Montrag met with him. I owe him.”

“Wait…why in the world would he fake his own death? He loved Bella and her young so much. Hell, he practically raised his sister, and I can’t believe he would ever hurt her like that. Plus, where would he go?”

The colony, Wrath thought.

Wrath wanted to tell his queen everything that was on his mind, but he hesitated, because he’d been flirting with a decision that was going to complicate the shit out of things. Bottom line was, that e-mail about Rehv? Wrath’s intuition was telling him the guy had lied about it. It was just too coincidental that the thing came in and the next night Rehv “dies.” It had to have been legit. But with Montrag dead, who could have—

There was a sharp crack and a free fall and a hard-ass landing.

As Beth shrieked, Wrath cursed. “What the fuck?”

He patted around, feeling splinters of old, delicate French wood all around them.

“Are you okay, leelan?” he said sharply.

Beth laughed and got up to her feet. “Oh, my God…we broke the chair.”

“Pulverized it might be more accurate—”

The knock on the door had Wrath struggling up to his feet with grunts of pain. Which he was getting used to. Payne always went for the shins, and his left leg was