Yeah, so where was the post-hurricane renewal?

Her phone ringing held little interest, but she went back over to her purse because she could use a distraction.

When she saw who it was, she answered fast. “Bill? Bill?”

“Hey,” her friend said. There was a pause. “I’m sorry I’ve been kind of out of touch.”

“Oh, no. Listen . . . how is Lydia?” Jo went over to the sofa and sat down. “How are you? Is there anything I can do for you guys?”

“No, I think . . .” Bill cleared his throat. “We are where we are, you know? The doctor says we can try again after waiting a month. And you know, at this early stage of things, it was probably a chromosomal problem that . . . well, was incompatible with life. That’s what they called it.”

Okay, compared to losing a child, the fact that Jo was in a funk over some guy seemed downright offensive.

“I am so sorry,” she said, her voice cracking. “Children are a blessing.”

“They are.” Bill took a deep breath. “They sure are, Jo.”

There was a long period of silence, and Jo closed her eyes as she thought about her birth parents, the mother who had brought her into this world and the father who had been in on the miracle at the ground floor, so to speak. When Jo had been growing up, she had given into the temptation to think the pair of those parental hypotheticals were totally different from the Earlys who had adopted her. She convinced herself that living in her real parents’ home would have been one long birthday party with balloons and cake and presents every day and all night. No more cold, drafty house with too many rooms. No more stiff, formal dinners in the dining room. No more sense that she was a nuisance, unwelcome in spite of the fact that her entering Mr. and Mrs. Early’s lives had been a willful, deliberate act on their part.

But yes, the stolen-princess narrative had been one she’d spun as a youngster, her true, virtuous parents out there somewhere in the world, swindled out of their rightful place in her life, mourning her loss as they fruitlessly searched for her.

She had waited for a rescue for so many years. So many. But now that she was an adult? She knew that there was no castle waiting for her on top of a mountain. No “real” parents still searching for her. No one that truly cared, one way or the other, about her future.

Which was why she had to be the hero in her own life.

“Jo? You still there?”

Shaking herself back into focus, she cleared her throat. “Sorry. I’m just . . . yes, I’m here.”

“I know this is awkward.”

“No, it’s not. What happened to you and Lydia is painful and very sad, and even though we haven’t known each other for very long, you’ve both been great friends to me.” Actually, they were her only friends at the moment, so there was that. “I just wish there was something, anything, I could do for you and her. But I can’t, and I hate this feeling that I’m failing you. And then there’s the suckage that you’re good people and this shouldn’t happen to good people.”

Bill’s voice got hoarse. “Thanks, Jo.”

“I won’t say you’re welcome because I wish I didn’t have to say it at all.”

“Amen.”

They talked for a little bit longer, and then they ended the call. Bill was going to take the rest of the week off as personal time, and that was the right thing to do. And when he came back? Jo told him she was ready to co-author everything she was working on.

Putting her phone down, she stared at the door. And thought about how she had made love to a stranger right where she was currently sitting just a half hour before.

Funny how losses were as much of a currency as happiness in life. Somehow, they were noticed more, though.

Jo got to her feet and went back into the kitchen. In a drawer by the refrigerator, one that might have held cutlery if she had any, she kept a manila folder she hadn’t gone into since she’d moved in.

There had been so much going on. And she hadn’t been feeling well. And—

Well, she just hadn’t had the energy to deal with one more thing.

But she took the folder out now, and unsheathed the glossy photograph of a man with dark hair and dark eyes. Turning the image over, she read the block printing that had been done in Sharpie.

DR. MANUEL MANELLO, CHIEF OF SURGERY. ST. FRANCIS MEDICAL CENTER.

Bill had given her the picture. And had typed up a report on what he’d found when he’d looked into her birth mother, who had died during birth.

It was a mystery solved. Kind of. And the dark-haired man? He was her brother . . . who had strangely disappeared off the radar over eighteen months before.

Never to be seen or heard from again.

“I’m getting really sick and tired of people who disappear into thin air,” she muttered to herself.

Even though Butch was a tried-and-true Red Sox fan, he was mature enough to appreciate that there were certain things that came out of the enemy’s home state that were not all bad. Not that he was in a big hurry to admit this, even to himself—and yet, as the sun came up, he reflected how much difference a good USDA Prime New York strip steak could make in a man’s life. Just the ticket.

On that note, he leaned even further back in the French settee, and repositioned the piece of meat on his black eye. As he let out a groan of relief, someone sat down next to him.

“I’m sorry I had to do that, cop.”

Butch opened the lid that worked and looked at V. “S’okay. I woulda done the same thing.”

“How’s your head?”

“What’s that old expression? Kicking like a mule?”

He closed his eye again, and listened to the sounds of the Brotherhood, the Bastards, and the other fighters, filing into Wrath’s study. When everyone was accounted for and the meeting started, he would sit up, lose his cold pack, and pay attention, but right now, between the hangover and the damage from that right hook of his roommate’s, he had about all he wanted to handle.

“Can I get you some Motrin or some shit?” V asked.

“You really do feel bad, huh.”

“I didn’t enjoy that.”

“Because I wasn’t in a leather thong?”

V laughed in a crack. “If I light up, will it make you feel worse?”

“Short of you punching me in my other eye, I think I’ve hit rock bottom.”

There was a shcht, and then the familiar scent of V’s Turkish tobacco wafted over. When Butch felt up to it—okay, fine, he wasn’t up to shit, but he didn’t want to be antisocial—he pushed himself higher on the cushions and dropped the steak in his lap. Fritz, well familiar with the requirements of people who had swelling in places where it was unwelcome, had been thoughtful enough to slip a ziplock over the meat so there was no facial cleanup to worry about. Not that Butch would have worried about that.

Not that any of the males or females in the room would have worried about it, either.

And as for crowds gathering in common spaces? All in all, you could not get a more mismatched pairing than the decor of the French blue, French antique’d study, with its morning glory-colored walls and its Aubusson rug and its foal-legged furniture and frilly drapes . . . and the legion of hard-ass’d, hardheaded, heavy-bodied boneheads who somehow managed to repeatedly wedge themselves into the four-walls-and-a-ceiling without breaking anything.

Then again, they had been doing these little think tanks here about all things Lessening Society-related for over three years now, ever since the Black Dagger Brotherhood and the First Family had taken up res in this gray stone ark of a mansion. So at this point, it would have seemed strange not to be sitting delicately on all of these spindly love seats and socialite-worthy armchairs talking about life and/or death.

Proof positive that whatever you were used to was normal no matter how weird it might have been without the habit part.

“Where’s the big man?” Butch asked as he glanced over at Wrath’s vacant desk.

“He’s coming.” V took another drag and talked through the exhale, the smoke briefly obscuring his goateed face. “I think he’s stealing candy from a couple of babies to warm up for what he’s going to do to us, true?”

“Least he’s not kicking puppies.”

“They’re the only ones who get a pass.”

As Butch tested out his eyesight by focusing on Wrath’s desk, he thought that at least there was one set of furniture in the room that made sense. That old-school throne that the last purebred vampire on the planet took a load off in was exactly the kind of thing you’d expect the great Blind King, the leader of the species, to set his leather-covered ass on. Word had it that the carved oak heavy weight had been brought across the ocean from the Old Country by the Brotherhood, back in the days—nights, natch—when Wrath had refused to lead his kind.

There had always been the expectation, the hope, that the male would finally assume the mantle of his birthright—

The double doors, which had been shut after each entry—because there were children in the house now, and none of them needed to hear the cursing carnival that was small talk among the fighters—broke open, and not by a set of hands. They were willed apart.

As a hush fell over the room, Butch thought, Well, the race had gotten itself a leader and a half, hadn’t it.

“Be careful what you wish for,” he muttered dryly.

“Like anyone would order that out of a catalogue?” V shot back.

Standing between the broad jambs, Wrath, son of Wrath, sire of Wrath, was a seven-foot-tall scourge of non-human humanity in his stack-heeled shitkickers. With black hair that fell from a widow’s peak to his hips, and a face that looked like it belonged on a serial killer who happened to have a blue-blooded pedigree, he was the kind of thing who even fully armed brothers would cross the road to get out of the path of. Especially when he was in one of his moods.

Which was pretty much anytime he was conscious.

And especially after a night like tonight had been.