Chapter 10 Tohrment, son of Hharm
Tohrment, son of Hharm
One of the coolest things about the mansion’s layout is the hidden steps under the grand staircase.
You head to the right, bypassing that glorious ascending red runner and its gold-leafed balustrades, and go down the ornate, paneled sides of the rise.
As I continue along, I can’t help but notice the incredible craftsmanship, all the joints precisely meeting, the expanse extending up twenty-five or thirty feet to the second-floor landing.
The seam for the entry I’m looking for is nearly invisible, and given how perfectly everything else fits, I’m thinking whoever made it deliberately created the subtle gap so people could find the way.
I fumble around for the release. It’s just a small latch under the lip of one of the panels, and as I trigger it, a big section swings wide open.
After I enter a code, I’m allowed access past the solid steel fuck-off that’s behind all the pretty exterior stuff.
Stepping through, I think of the steps to the basement back at Darius’s old in-town house.
On my own descent, I remember Beth’s first look down that stone stairwell with its flickering torches and sharp curve.
When I was staring at it through her eyes, I thought to myself…
uh-oh. She’s going to put this thing to use—and the reader is going to be all, too-stupid-to-live, WTF-is-she-doing? à la low budget horror movies.
Except it was clean and tidy. (Come on, Fritz was in charge.)
In the book, I decided to focus on the fact that there was nothing nasty on the walls, no moist (*gag*), slimy stuff oozing out of the mortar joints. I also think it smelled of lemon, although I don’t think I put that in.
This stairwell is the same on the neat-and-tidy front, but there’s no dark romance going on. It’s only some gray painted walls and steps, with everything well-lit and heading for a bottom that’s just like the top: a steel landing with a steel door.
After I enter another code, I’m able to get through.
And the tunnel awaits me on the other side.
As I get to walking, my high heels clip-clip-clip again, and I go slowly because I don’t want to slip as the floor is polished nearly to a liquid.
It’s funny how all the places in this universe have associations for me.
Just like in real life. You walk through a room, drive down a street, catch a glimpse of a picture, a person, a dog, smell something, hear something, and you’re instantly somewhere in the past.
Qhuinn’s coming back to me now.
This underground pedestrian highway connects the Pit to the mansion, and both of them to the training center. It also goes farther out from that facility, and the far end is what I’m thinking of.
Well, actually before I go there, I’m picturing an oil drum in a hunting cabin.
And the subtle glimmer of a gold signet ring through a black, viscous liquid.
Luchas, Qhuinn’s brother.
The acceptable son. The one whose eyes matched, whose future was assured, who was proudly claimed by an aristocratic family.
Not Qhuinn, the gay, ocularly-challenged, disregarded and disgraced one.
It was the ultimate reversal of fate in so many ways, the unwanted offspring becoming a member of the Black Dagger Brotherhood, the golden child, future of the bloodline, captured by the Lessening Society, tortured by the Omega, and kept in stasis by the enemy surrounded by the toxic swill that filled the veins of the evil.
Qhuinn rescued him, but Luchas’s body had been too abused, and after what must have felt like an eon of being treated, he took matters into his own hands.
So yes, I’m thinking of when he disappeared from his hospital bed, and Qhuinn went to the terminal point of this thoroughfare and found the hatch open.
Into a brutal snowstorm.
This of course makes me go back to Lover Awakened, and Phury’s broken vs. ruined commentary on his twin.
I know that whenever Qhuinn comes down here, he remembers that night, too, the lashing cold, the fierce gusts of wind, the horizontal snow.
He imagines, once again, his fragile, mutilated brother walking into the blizzard, the sub-zero temperature stealing what body warmth there was, the collapse surely happening not far from the secret exit.
As I arrive at the door that leads into the training center, I look to the left. The ceiling lights extend into what seems like eternity.
I don’t know why mostly negative stuff is what is coming to me tonight. Maybe it’s because I feel like if I could just reframe some of these tragedies in this world, I’d be free to feel happy here.
Instead, this is just a catalog of sadness. Then again, I am sad.
The last twenty years have been incredible, and the idea that they’re over, and I can’t go through it all again and do it right this time bothers me.
I was always so afraid of failing that I never really enjoyed all the wonderful gifts that these books brought me.
At least that’s over now. For this second half of my career?
I’m not wasting a single moment of the good shit.
This is the thought that’s going through my head as I push into the supply closet.
I take a moment to breathe in deep. Another no-surprise is that I’ve always had a thing for paper supplies: Pens.
Reams of loose-leaf. Paper clips, document clips, staplers and folders.
I am so grateful I grew up in the seventies and eighties and got to take my notes and write my papers the old-fashioned way.
By my last year in law school, laptops were starting to make an appearance in lecture halls and shoot me now.
If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s the clicking of keyboards.
Given what I do for a living, thank God for noise-canceling headphones.
Pushing my way out into the office, I expect to find Tohr at the desk, going through the logs of new trainees, or class schedules, or the curriculum.
He’s not there.
Frowning, I go over and push the glass door open. The first thing I hear freezes me where I stand.
Someone is dribbling a basketball down in the gym. The sound is muffled so it’s almost like a heartbeat, and I know instantly who it is.
“Oh, there you are. I was just finishing up.”
I wheel around. Tohr is coming out of the weight room. He’s got Under Armour all over him, and a pair of black Brooks on his feet. A white towel is around his neck, and he looks vital, powerful, strong. He smells good, too. Cologne? Laundry detergent? His natural scent?
Most likely the latter.
“Good workout?” I ask.
“Always. It was leg day. I never skip leg day.”
Given the width of his shoulders and the heft of his arms, he never skips any day. And it’s funny, Tohr is not the one I think of when it comes to sexiness. He’s the widower, the sensible, levelheaded second-in-command, the calm and reasonable.
And all I have to do is look at the white stripe in the front of his dark fade and I’m viscerally reminded of all that he lost.
But I have to say, post-workout? He looks…um, very nice. Very good. Yuuuuup.
“I need to take a shower.” He nods over his shoulder to the males’ locker room. “Z’s down there. You want to go talk to him while I wash up?”
“Ah…” I glance in that direction. “Yeah. Sure. That’s a fine idea.”
Tohr’s smile is open and accepting. But he’s not uncomplicated for me.
The specter of Wellsie will always be between us, even if he’s not thinking about it as I am right now.
What a heartbreaker. When Wrath showed up in my head, he showed me the Brothers—and I knew, instantly, that Tohr’s mate wasn’t going to make it.
He was the only one among them that didn’t have an obvious weakness. No, he had a mate he loved very much…who was pregnant.
Oh, shit, I recall thinking.
And I also knew that he was going to get a book that was his own. After his shattering loss, there was something else, another life, with a different sun to warm his days.
It was important to show that. God knew he’d earned an HEA after his hardship.
As he nods and walks off, I think about the nature of survivors.
It isn’t so much that they get over their pain.
They just find a way to connect with things around their suffering.
After all, some scars are permanent, and broken bones don’t always heal correctly, and your faculties can be irrevocably diminished by injury.
In fact, I’ve often thought that hearts and souls are the same as the body in that regard.
Depending on the wound, our emotions and our minds may never fully recover or may be forever different.
But the people in these books keep going, and as I’ve said, so many folks in the real world have honored me with their stories of how they’ve done similarly.
And speaking of pain…
I look down to the sound of the basketball.
Instead of heading in that direction, I go the opposite way and walk past the locker and weight rooms. When I get to the clinical section of the facility, I have to smile. It was V’s engagement/mating present to Jane, and over the years, it’s just gotten more specialized, more advanced…more used.
One of the patient rooms is open, and I stop in between the jambs.
The hospital bed is off against the right wall, and the wooden headboard behind it splits to expose all manner of monitoring equipment.
There’s also a couple of comfortable chairs.
A TV that can be pulled down from overhead.
A beautiful oil painting of a field of wildflowers.
It’s just like a human clinic. Except it’s an actual Monet over there.
There are a lot of medical scenes in the books, and aside from the fact that fighters in a war often get hurt in big ways, I suppose I’m a wannabe doctor myself.
I would have gone to med school instead of taking the law route if I could have, but back when I was getting out of college, I fainted at the sight of blood.
Kind of a rate limiter if you want to wear one of those white coats.