“Oh, I know all that. But with where he’s at now, he’s getting in the way of something that is not only very important to me, but something that is within my right to do. And when you love someone that isn’t cool, even if your motivations are good hearted and loving.”

There was a long stretch of silence.

“Lemme talk to him.”

“I’d appreciate that.” She cursed quietly. “We’ve been having some problems this last little bit. It’s breaking my heart.”

“Relationships are like that. Even the best ones.”

“I guess so.”

“Look, he doesn’t want to be with anyone but you.” The Brother put his palm out. “Yeah, I know you know that, but I gotta say it again. And for better or worse, your grace and elegance and, yes, good-girlness is part of what attracts him to you. I mean, for instance, he had a shot with Xhex, but that was just sex—and all it was ever going to be. You’re his type, not her.”

Marissa jerked upright sure as if a bucket of ice water had just been poured over her head. “He had sex with her?”

Down in the training center’s office, Butch sat behind Tohr’s desk and stared at the shooting patterns of colorful lines that gyrated their way around the computer screen.

What he kept chewing on, what he had been chewing on all through the day, was what the hell was wrong with him. After Marissa had left him in the dust in the billiards room, he’d proceeded to get drunk, like, saturated drunk—but it hadn’t done the job. Yeah, sure, his body had gotten sloppy as fuck, to the point that making it back to the Pit to crash had become an absolute impossibility.

Hell, dragging himself over to one of the sofas by the pool tables so he could pass out on the vertical had been enough of a challenge.

His brain had remained tragically clear, however.

And the worst part? For some reason, the last image he’d had of his sister—of her looking at him through the back window of that car as she’d gone off to her rape and murder—kept popping up, like his mind was a slot machine that spit out mismatched losers over and over again.

Ah, screw the “for some reason.” It was Marissa’s dead girl, of course. And he guessed, if he were to go sit down with Mary and get all shrinked out, that the Brotherhood’s favorite therapist would tell him that the past was being kicked off by the present and he was rocking some PTSD—

The door into the supply closet was thrown wide. And he had enough alcohol in him to not jerk around and squeak like a pussy.

“V?” he said as his bestie stumbled in.

Okay, talk about your PTSD: Vishous was as disheveled as Butch had ever seen the brother, breathing hard, icy eyes wide as saucers, black hair all this way and that—and he was panting like he’d run the tunnel, not walked it.

“What?” Butch demanded. “Is Doc Jane okay? Is the Pit? Christ, what happened?”

V just marched around a little and then threw himself into Tohr’s green, ugly-ass, beloved chair on the far side of the desk. Propping his head on his gloved fist, he muttered, “One of my old dreams just came true.”

As Butch’s panic deflated, he rolled his eyes. “And what was that.”

“I just fucked you in the ass.”

Blink. Blink. And then Butch started laughing. “Yeah, yeah, good joke. Okay, what did Lass do now?”

“No, I’m serious. I just screwed you. Badly. I’m really fucking sorry.”

Leaning onto his forearms, Butch exhaled a curse. “No offense, there is nothing you could do that’s this bad.”

“I told Marissa that you fucked Xhex.”

Butch’s jaw unhinged, and he felt his mouth pop open. “How … why … what…”

V threw his hands up. “I thought she knew, true! I didn’t know you hadn’t told her! What the fuck, didn’t you guys do that whole ‘who’d you sleep with before me’ shit? What the fuck!”

If Butch hadn’t gone straight back into panic mode, he would have had to laugh at the guy again. V was the ultimate in unflappable, the kind of composed bastard who would sit on a gasoline can in the middle of a house fire just to take a load off.

Guess they’d figured out the criteria for his adrenal gland finally waking up. Good to know.

Bad news for Butch, though.

Putting his head in his hands, he rubbed his face. “What did she say?”

“Not much. She went down to your room, got dressed, and left for work, calm as could be. Which was what really made me shit in my pants, true?”

Butch wanted to say that it would be fine, it was going to be okay. But with the way he and his mate kept missing each other lately …

“How did the subject come up?” he asked.

V put both palms forward. “Look, she started talking about you guys.”

“The club thing?”

“Yeah. She feels like you’ve got her typecast in the virgin/whore duality and you’re smothering her. And listen, not that you have any interest in taking advice from me, but you gotta cut that shit out. Just because she sees a couple of humans banging in a public place doesn’t mean she’s going to change in any way. What do you think is going to happen? She’s suddenly going to turn into the likes of me? First of all, she’d need a sex change, and second, she’d have to get a fuck of a lot more uglier—and more stupid, too, evidently.”

In the silence that followed, half of Butch’s brain went on overload with the Xhex thing; the other half came to a sudden realization.