In which case he felt like an extra-huge douche bag.
He hit the door to the men’s locker room so hard it flew open, striking the wall and forcing him to catch the thing before it smacked him in the face on the rebound.
“Not it, this is not it.”
Pacing around with his hands on his hips, he realized he should never have taken her vein. That blood exchange had created some kind of connection between them such that he was aware of every move she made anywhere at any moment—and the way that shit registered?
Mr. Happy got all excited about the possibility of shaking hands with her.
Which was never. Fucking. Going. To. Happen.
More pacing. More cursing.
Still hard.
“Fuck me!” he belted out.
Yes, please, his cock replied with a kick.
For a moment, all sorts of fantasies played through his head: Slamming the thing in a heavy book. Dropping a cement block on it. Car doors, hammers, logs.
This couldn’t be happening to him. The hardest part of training to become a soldier under the Brotherhood so he could avenge his family … could not possibly be some blond female. He just refused to believe this.
Not possible—
With another kick under his uniform, his erection seemed to be laughing at him.
Glaring down at his hips, he barked, “Shut up, idiot.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Butch watched every move the kid made. From the series of fine muscle contractions under Axe’s left eye to the chin itch he was rocking to the crack-of-the-neck finale.
“Tell me, and I’ll let you go,” he repeated.
Man, this was so much easier to do than when he’d been working for the CPD. Miranda rights? Yeah, whatever. Involuntary restraint? Blah, blah, blah. Coercion?
Well, actually he’d done some coercion even back then.
In fact, he thought back to that kid Billy Riddle who had attacked Beth before she had fallen into the vampire world and taken Butch with her. Man, he’d really enjoyed grinding that little bitch’s nose into the linoleum in the emergency room. Hmm … that hadn’t been coercion, technically—because he hadn’t been after information. It had been flat-out payback for the bastard having jumped a perfectly innocent woman in an alley so he could try to rape her with his friend.
Yeah, because you could really get through to an animal like that with arm’s-length handling.
Fucker.
Refocusing on Axe, Butch murmured, “I’m waiting.”
Axe shrugged. “Kick me out if you want, do other shit to me if you want … but I don’t owe you that. You don’t get a piece of my soul—you haven’t earned it.”
Sound logic, Butch thought—and exactly what he himself would have said if he’d been sitting in that chair.
Butch leaned in. “Sooner or later, before your final acceptance, you’re going to have to tell me.”
“Why the fuck do you care?”
“I don’t.”
Well, didn’t that get him a pair of bug eyes. “Then what the fuck are you asking me for?”
Butch planted his elbows on the desk and fanned out his hands, all Duh. “I need to know how you’re going to handle it when you see it again. That’s why. And one assessment of future behavior is past behavior. What you guys experience here in training is nothing compared to what the outside world is like. You gotta be prepared for situations when there is no time to think, when all you’ve got to go on to save your life or the lives of the people who are fighting with you are your instincts and your will to survive—and I guarantee you that when you get to those moments, the last thing you want is to have a lockup. The more you’re exposed to trauma, the more hardened you become to it and the safer you are. And that is a really suck-ass fucking equation, but it is the goddamn truth.”
Axe’s eyes drifted down to his own hands.
“Go back to the gym,” Butch ordered. “Think about shit. Just know you don’t have forever. We’re not wasting—”
“I lied.”
“Excuse me.”
The hard-ass, Gothed-out, degenerate-looking male inhaled slowly. “I haven’t seen any. I don’t know … what it looks like. I don’t know what it feels like.”
The change in affect, from hostile mask to profound sadness, was startling, but that was the way it always happened. When someone broke, when they decided to give up the goods, they became a different version of themselves, proving that self-protection and revelation were two mutually exclusive propositions.
“So why are you here?” Butch whispered. “Tell me … why did you come to us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yeah, you do.”
Butch surreptitiously reached over and made sure his phone was on silent and that the ringer on the office line was off. And when Tohr reappeared on the far side of the glass door, Butch put his palm out—and the Brother backed off.
“Why are you here, Axe?”
The minutes slowed to a crawl and the quiet noises of the office seemed to dim even further out of respect for the space they were in.
“My dad was a nobody,” came the hoarse voice. “He didn’t do anything with his life. He was a carpenter for the species, you know … worked with his hands. Ma didn’t want anything to do with him or me—she left before my transition. She didn’t give a fuck about us. My dad, though, he stayed, and without him, I woulda been out on the streets as a pretrans, and we both know how long I would have lasted.” That dark-haired, half-and-half head shook slowly from left to right. “I wasn’t … good, you know? I never have been. He didn’t leave because there was no one else, I guess.”