V exhaled and snagged an ashtray off the mantel. “No, not Nate. It was Balz, by some human woman, after he had a neck wound—”
“No, it was Nate, who was shot in the stomach outside Dandelion—”
“Yeah, I was there when we took him to Havers’s. But he died—”
“Actually, they do so much more than chili. But their dogs are first-rate.”
Both V and Butch focused on Hollywood:
“What?”
“Huh?”
As they played echo chamber with the inquiries, Rhage stepped up and turned their little group into a circle. “They own Dinty Moore beef stew also. But yes, I like both Hormel’s chili and their hot dogs.”
Vishous closed his eyes and rubbed his temple with his gloved hand. “Do you ever lose the food filter?”
“You were the one who brought up pigs-in-a-blanket—”
“Do we have an angel in this room or are we just fangs?” Wrath’s voice cut through the talking. “Lassiter? Where the fuck are you.”
The King was over by the fireplace, sitting in the armchair to the left, all black leather against the red brocade. With an expression of barely restrained hate-the-world, he was sweeping the room with his blind eyes, those wraparound sunglasses scanning left to right. Meanwhile, there was no angel, and nobody was volunteering to make that report. Then again, Wrath already knew that there was a copious absence of a Lassiter in the crowd, and this growling interruption was more along the lines of voicing his dissatisfaction at being made to wait.
Tohr, ever the peacemaker, cleared his throat and took the heat. “Ah, no. He’s not here. I’ll text him again.”
“Well, where the fuck is he,” Wrath demanded. “I want to know how two females, one of whom is supposedly a civilian and the other of which is a goddamn human, managed to magically drag two males back from the Fade tonight.”
V glanced at his roommate, and as he met those hazel eyes, Butch’s brows gave him a see-I-told-you-so.
Guess Nate had been saved somehow. V had had to go back to that bookshop to clear the scene as soon as they’d dropped him off at—
All at once, everyone in the room froze.
No more shifting of weight back and forth. No movements of hands or heads. No talking, no blinking, no breathing—and he wouldn’t have been surprised if all the hearts stopped, too.
His had certainly turned solid in his chest.
Something was wrong. Something… terrible was wrong.
As if every male in the room had the same instinct, the same feeling of dread he had, out came the guns, all kinds of palms finding all kinds of grips.
V was the only one who didn’t go for his forty. He went for his Samsung, and with a quick sequence, he initialized the defense protocol for both the Audience House and the mansion. Then he went into his monitoring feeds and played firsthand witness to the daytime shutters coming down all around the exterior of the two structures. Finally, he sent out a group text that he had only ever tested before.
It was the all-points-bulletin duck-and-cover, shelter-in-place alert to every single person in the First Family’s community, from doggen to shellan and everybody in between.
And within the dining room, there was an instant repositioning of fighters: Xcor and Tohrment flanked Wrath while Rhage and Qhuinn slipped out the double doors to cover the front entrance. Other brothers and Bastards paired off with fighters, the teams predetermined and practiced as they surrounded the house and sent everybody who didn’t have a gun underground for safety.
V just wished he knew what the hell they’d all picked up on.
But something was off in Caldwell, on a nuclear scale.
“Where the fuck is that angel,” Wrath gritted out.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Lassiter had to wait until everyone left Rahvyn’s hospital room. It was a while. And when Nate finally walked out and took his worried father, who had been loitering outside in the corridor, with him, the angel did a double check before becoming corporeal.
Approaching the closed door, he pulled up the waistband on his leggings. Then he looked at them—and changed their color from pink and black to just black. Then he changed them altogether from spandex to a nice pair of slacks.
With pleats. And a razor sharp press down both legs.
No. Too formal.
He changed his bottom half to a set of Adidas sweatpants in black. Nice, normal, tight-legged on the lower part so that his thighs looked bigger and stronger. There, good. Oh, crap. Shoes. He needed shoes. Flip-flops with Disney princesses on them were probably not going to strike the right note.