the hall. Her father was speaking to someone downstairs, and the door to Hannah's room was open.
On tiptoe, Jane went down the Oriental runner, thinking that her sister wasn't usually up this early on a Saturday. She must really be sick.
She stopped in the doorway. Hannah was lying still on her bed, her eyes open at the ceiling, her skin white as the pristine snowy sheets she was on.
She wasn't blinking.
In the opposite corner of the room, as far away from Hannah as possible, their mother was sitting in the window seat, her ivory silk dressing robe pooling on the floor. "Go back to bed. Now."
Jane raced for her room. Just as she shut her door, she saw her father coming up the stairs with two men in navy blue uniforms. He was talking with authority and she heard the words congenital heart something.
Jane jumped into her bed and pulled the sheets up over her head. As she trembled in the darkness, she felt very small and very scared.
The board had been right. Hannah got no Christmas presents and married no one.
But Jane's little sister kept her promise. She did come back.
Chapter One
"I am so not feeling this cowhide."
Vishous looked up from his bank of computers. Butch O'Neal was standing in the Pit's living room with a pair of leathers on his thighs and a whole lot of you've-got-to-be-kidding-me on his puss.
"They don't fit you?" V asked his roommate.
"Not the point. No offense, but these are wicked Village People." Butch held his heavy arms out and turned in a circle, his bare chest catching the light. "I mean, come on."
"They're for fighting, not fashion."
"So are kilts, but you don't see me rocking the tartan."
"And thank God for that. You're too bowlegged to pull that shit off."
Butch assumed a bored expression. "You can bite me."
I wish, V thought.
With a wince, he went for his pouch of Turkish tobacco. As he took out some rolling paper, laid down a line, and twisted himself a cig, he did what he spent a lot of time doing: He reminded himself that Butch was happily mated to the love of his life, and that even if he weren't, the guy didn't play like that.
As V lit up and inhaled, he tried not to look at the cop and failed. Fucking peripheral vision. Always did him in.
Man, he was a perverted freak. Especially given how tight they were.
In the last nine months he'd grown closer to Butch than anyone he'd ever met in his over three hundred years of living and breathing. He'd roomed with the male, gotten drunk with him, worked out with him. Been through death and life and prophesies and doom with him. Helped bend the laws of nature to turn the guy from human to vampire, then healed him when he did his special business with the race's enemies. He'd also proposed him for membership in the Brotherhood... and stood by him when he'd been mated to his shellan.
While Butch paced around like he was trying to get comf with the leathers, V stared at the seven letters that were carved in Old English across his back: MARISSA. V had done both the As, and they'd come out well, in spite of the fact that his hand had been shaking the whole time.
"Yeah," Butch said. "I'm not sure I'm feeling these."
After their mating ceremony, V had vacated the Pit for the day so the happy couple could have their privacy. He'd gone across the compound's courtyard and shut himself up in a guest room at the big house with three bottles of Grey Goose. He'd gotten saturated drunk, real rice-paddy flooded, but hadn't been able to meet the goal of making himself pass out. The truth had kept him mercilessly awake: V was attached to his roommate in ways that complicated things and yet changed nothing at all.
Butch knew what was doing. Hell, they were best friends, and the guy could read V better than anyone could. And Marissa knew it because she wasn't stupid. And the Brotherhood knew it because those old-maid fool idiots never let you keep secrets.
They were all cool with it.
He wasn't. He couldn't stand the emotions. Or himself.
"You going to try the rest of your gear on?" he asked on an exhale. "Or you want to whine about your pants a little more?"
"Don't make me flip you off."
"Why would I deprive you of a favorite hobby?"
"Because my finger's getting sore." Butch walked over to one of the