V pointed at the screen. And then glanced back at Blay.

Blay straightened, his eyes not leaving whatever image they were talking about. And that was when it became apparent there were other people in the room, too.

Right beside the pair of them was a lineup of males. Rhage, Butch, Tohr, Phury, Rehv.

Qhuinn appreciated them showing up for . . . whatever this was. But their presence was also a huge source of anxiety. Generally speaking, the more brothers and fighters who lingered, the more serious things were.

“He’s probably down in the training center,” Qhuinn mumbled to himself. To anybody who might be listening.

To fate, if fate was looking for suggestions about how to resolve Luchas’s disappearance—

In the end, no one really needed to tell him anything.

It was the way Blay looked over at him. And how V stayed focused on the monitors, but then turned his head as well.

Blay was the one who came across to the sofa, and he knelt down.

“You found him,” Qhuinn said quietly. “You found my brother?”

The sound of his mate clearing his throat was one of the saddest things Qhuinn had ever heard. And yet he refused to let the sorrow sink in.

“We think he went out,” Blay said.

“Like in a car? Can he drive?”

“No, as in . . . he left.”

“Who took him out?”

“Qhuinn . . . we think he left through the tunnel.”

As his brain translated the syllables, he came back online. “Wait, what? Why the hell would he do that? And when did he go?”

“According to the time stamp on the security feed, it was last night. During the storm.”

A buzzing noise lit off inside Qhuinn’s skull, and it knocked out his hearing for a moment. And then everything became sharp, too sharp. Cutting blade, crystal shard sharp.

“I don’t understand.” He got up. “This is wrong. I don’t know what you saw—”

V didn’t argue; he just pivoted one of the screens and pointed at it. The feed was pixelated, but after a pause and recalibration, the contours of the training center’s tunnel came into view. The angle of the camera lens was wide, encompassing a long stretch of the concrete wall and then the terminus of the subterranean passageway. The lineup of outerwear and weapons was to one side, the door out into the escape cave on the right.

Nothing was happening. The picture was just static—

The stooped figure entered from the left and moved along slowly. Its gait was uneven and a cane was cocked at an angle, a black robe draping whoever it was from head to toe.

But like the identity wasn’t obvious?

“Luchas,” Qhuinn mumbled.

His brother stopped in front of the heavy steel hatch. Then that head turned toward the parkas and the snow pants.

“What are you doing?” Qhuinn wiped his brow and fiddled with the sleeve of his sweater. Then he looked at V. “Does he know the code?”

That question was answered as Luchas put his ruined hand out and punched a series of buttons on the keypad. There was a pause, and after that he opened the heavy steel panel with a struggle, fumbling with his cane, catching his bad balance on the jamb.

“Put a coat on. What are you doing? Put a fucking coat on!” Qhuinn shouted at the monitor.

All at once, he remembered that wind. That terrible, howling wind. More than the snow or the cold, those gusts were going to make it impossible for Luchas to stay on his feet.

“What the fuck is he doing?” Qhuinn looked at Blay with panic. “I don’t get this.”

When his mate just stared back at him, those blue eyes held an answer that didn’t bear translating.

“No.” Qhuinn shook his head. “That’s not what happened.”

It was a parade.

Or . . . more like a funeral march.

As Blay followed Qhuinn down the training center’s tunnel, they were not alone. Everyone who had been in the Pit had joined them, but the Brotherhood was hanging back by a good forty or fifty feet. They seemed to sense what Blay knew for sure. Later, when whatever was happening had actually happened, Qhuinn would be grateful for his Brothers’ support—but at the moment, you couldn’t crowd him.

Blay himself was waiting to be asked to leave. And yet . . . not yet.

With every step he took, he thought of what he’d seen on V’s computer screen, Luchas walking where they were now, God only knew what on the male’s mind. But he must have known what he was doing. He hadn’t hesitated to open the portal, hadn’t looked back as he’d stepped through, had closed things up in his wake as if he never intended to return.

And in fact, he had not come back.

Twenty-four hours in the freezing cold? Much less that storm?

As they came to the end of the tunnel, Qhuinn stopped in front of the escape hatch. Putting his hands on his hips, he looked down at his feet.

“Let’s put these on.” Blay took two parkas off the hooks. “Come on.”

He expected an argument. He didn’t get one—which was a bad sign. Instead, he was allowed to dress Qhuinn like he would one of the young, helping arms into sleeves, pulling the body of the jacket into place. He even zipped it up the front.

He did not make the move to put the passcode into the reader. He just drew his own jacket on and waited.

Qhuinn opening the portal and following in his blooded brother’s footsteps was inevitable. But there was no avoiding the outcome as soon as they did so. Frankly, there was no avoiding it now.

Yet there was comfort in the in between. A sliver of illogical hope.

When Qhuinn finally reached forward, the keypad let out a series of tones as the proper sequence of numbers was entered, the little tune culminating in a hollow clank, the dead bolt on the hatch retracting. Or maybe there were more than one. Who knew how V had fortified this exit—but Luchas had clearly known the code.

Then again, he hadn’t been a prisoner.

As Qhuinn pulled the heavy steel free of its jambs, there was a breath of subzero, outside air. When the male looked back, Blay put his palms up.

“Whatever you want,” he said. “I don’t have to join you if you’d rather—”

“I need you. But only you.”

“Then we go together.”

Qhuinn walked through first, and Blay took a second to put his palms out to the Brotherhood, to make sure they didn’t follow. The lineup of males nodded and stayed frozen where they were. Except for V. He took out his cell phone and no doubt called up the exterior camera feed so he could monitor the search.

It was the same feed that had shown, in footage recorded twenty-four hours before, a lone black-robed figure weaving out into the storm and disappearing into the blizzard.

Blay took a deep breath . . . and went out as well.

On the far side of the hatch, there was a shallow parking area that had a high-riding Chevy Tahoe and a couple of snowmobiles. A camouflage drape covered up the forest entrance to the cave, and pulling it aside, he entered the night.

In the security footage, Luchas had drifted in a westerly direction, but he’d only stayed visible for ten or fifteen yards. After that?

Well, two things had to be true.

One, he couldn’t have gone far. He’d struggled to walk distances on level flooring with his cane. In the storm? Out in the snow?

And the second piece of reality had to be—

“Which way?” Qhuinn said as he looked around at the pines and the birches, the snow-covered landscape, the undulations of the ground.

“Do you want to call the others? To help search?” Blay asked

“No, he is mine to find.”

Qhuinn started off, and it was all random, the lefts, the rights. There was no logic to it, no grid system that was the gold standard for recovery missions. Maybe they should have brought George? But even as the thought occurred to Blay, he knew that would have been a waste of a good nose.

There was going to be nothing left. The sun had been out all day long. He’d seen it on the evening news, all that sunshine in the storm’s wake.

That was the second tragic truth to all of this. Vampires went up in smoke when exposed to sunlight.

So there were going to be no remains, really. Well . . . except for the prosthesis and the cane. The flesh would burn away, but the metal and plastic would not.

Helluva thing to bury, the remnants of all that suffering.

As Qhuinn continued along through the snow, Blay stayed on his mate’s heels. There was the temptation to branch out so they could cover more area, but when they found Luchas’s ashes, he wanted to be there to catch his mate.

Why did you have to do it, Blay wondered to himself. Oh, Luchas . . . why—

From out of nowhere, an image came to Blay’s mind and persisted, even as he looked from left to right, searching the powdery, white ground for a scorch mark the size of a fragile body: It was the memory of Luchas in the corridor outside of the OR—when Blay had told him that his brother had been elevated to the King’s personal guard, the highest honor within the Brotherhood.

As a cold sweat bloomed across Blay’s chest and rode his throat up into his face, he had to unzip the parka and let a little cold air in.

The intention had been to provide Luchas with an example of how things got better, to give some hope and optimism to him in favor of positive change, personal growth, new horizons. But the expression on Luchas’s face had suggested the announcement had been taken in a very different way.

Like maybe it had been one more burden on top of all the others, one more accolade that illuminated the male’s spiraling fall from grace, position, and health.

What if . . . what if Blay’s throwaway comment had been the reason for this?

What if this was all his fault?

On some level, Qhuinn realized that this “search” of his was just an aimless wander. As he trudged through the snow, he was rational enough to recognize that he should form a proper team of people, and draw on the expertise of the folks in the household for procedures and best practices. But he was locked into this directionless walking, his footfalls crunching through the drifts, his body going in whatever direction it wanted, his eyes ceaselessly roaming the ground.