Total pages in book: 163
Estimated words: 154735 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 774(@200wpm)___ 619(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154735 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 774(@200wpm)___ 619(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
Nobody else appeared to be on the property.
Surging with a hunter’s instinct, but not as juiced as he’d been when he’d seen his enemy’s protectors in the flesh, Lash was able to obscure himself and drop down to the neighbor’s grass so he could walk over the property line. Passing through one of the gaps in the black wrought iron fence, he got an unobstructed view of some of the windows of the first floor: The butler was washing something in a sink, his body tilted forward as he appeared to be scrubbing at a pan or perhaps a large platter.
No, it was a pan. And he set it in the rack when he was finished—but did not leave it there. The ancient male went for a dish towel, dried the thing, and put it away under a gas cooktop.
He spoke to no one. No one came in to interact with him. Nobody appeared to be in any of the other rooms.
So did the butler live here? Like… it was his private residence? Impossible. A traditional doggen wouldn’t stand for that. They would have to be with their master, and besides, this was far too grand a place.
This had to be one of the Brotherhood houses, the fighters hiding in plain sight, just like Lash’s “parents” had done… just like the owners of that Tudor who had lost a young to a rogue lesser.
So whose estate was this? Not the King’s. No way. The First Family would be in something far more removed, far better defended than this. Lash, after all, had been in the Brotherhood’s training center. That place had been a state-of-the-art fortress, and Wrath’s crib would be nothing less.
But that didn’t mean this wasn’t a property owned by one of them, and maintained by a trusted doggen… who had the keys to all the other houses.
And who knew where his true master stayed.
Studying the butler through the windows, Lash knew that he had a good hundred pounds on the doggen, and then there were the tricks of his trade as the Omega’s son.
He stepped forward and remained invisible, making a slow circuit of the house’s perimeter. As he stared through into a parlor with a massive oil painting of a French aristocrat, the layout of the rooms was as he expected it—and though he hadn’t noticed it at first, he now saw a subtle distortion in the panes of the old blown glass: Every one of them was covered with a fine steel mesh, and he was willing to bet there were sheets of it inside all the walls, across every ceiling, embedded in the foundation itself.
A surge of triumph and purpose was a heady buzz as he rounded the corner to the front. But then… he peered into what should have been the females’ drawing room. All mansions from this era had one, so that the males could retire after Last Meal to cigars and talk of serious matters, while the fairer sex nattered on elsewhere about gossip and jewelry.
The room on the left as one entered the house was in the correct location for après-meal chatter of the feminine variety, the walls painted a lovely lemon, the pastoral oil paintings intended to soothe and provide a suitably subtle background to the true beauty of the chatelaine and her guests. But instead of dainty silk love seats and maybe a marble-topped console table or two, there were matching chairs all around the periphery against the walls. And that wasn’t the only oddity. A desk—not an antique one, but a modern sort, with a computer and a phone on its blotter—was set just inside the archway.
Like it was a waiting room.
Continuing across the front lawn, he stopped again and peered into a long, narrow room kitted out with sideboards, a chandelier the size of a car, and enough carved wooden molding to qualify the square footage as a sculpture. But where was the dining room table? Things were obviously set up for the serving and consumption of food, especially given the flap door in the back right-hand corner. The weird thing was, the whole space was vacant except for two armchairs in front of the hearth and a desk set with leather-bound books.
He thought of the waiting area.
Was it possible… that this house was used by the great Blind King to meet with his subjects? Why else would it be set up like this?
It wasn’t like there was a dentist chair up by that fireplace.
Could this mansion be the key to what he really wanted: Death of Wrath, son of Wrath. Destruction of the Brotherhood.
And dominion over all vampires.
The last part of his credo shocked him, because that hadn’t been part of his original playbook. Yet now, as he stared into this fine home, he realized that, unlike his true father, he didn’t want to destroy the species for destruction’s sake, in the fulfillment of some private battle over creation.