As V shut the door behind him, he stalled out by the racks of Canali and Tom Ford. Everything was quiet, Marissa at Safe Place, Butch playing pool back at the big house, and Jane …

With a curse, V headed for the kitchen. The Grey Goose bottles were right where he liked them, under the counter next to the deep drawer where Butch kept the Fritos, the Parmesan Goldfish, and the Milanos.

Those were the only snacks the guy ever ate.

Funny, it hadn’t dawned on V before now, but Butch was a rut kind of guy. He liked what he liked, and wasn’t interested in innovation.

SOB would probably faint if you offered him a bagel chip. And forget about multi-grain crackers or foofy melba toast.

Old school, the cop was, and even though V would never say it, it was part of why he loved his best friend. When you were a couple of centuries old, you learned that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. So yeah, sure, you could waste a lot of time and taste buds trying to re-create a new version of what was already working, but that was grossly inefficient: There was, quite literally, a maximum amount of happiness that could come from a snack cracker or finger food. Wading through a bunch of shit that didn’t quite make it, just so you could go back to what you’d liked in the first place, was a human move.

Shit, you could see it all over their culture, from “fashion,” which was simply a reactive, fifteen-minutes-of-fame carousel of ugliness from season to season, to entertainment where you ended up with great swaths of the same, to technology and all its planned obsolescences and needless innovation.

Which culminated in Apple saying it was “courageous” for doing away with a headphone jack. In its dumb-ass cell phone.

Yeah, real Purple Heart stuff there, boys. Presidential Medal of Freedom. Maybe they were going to put themselves on a stamp, once they bought the American government.

Opening a cabinet, V took out a tumbler, filled it full of ice … and then went to the top rim with vodka.

You want courage? he thought. How about you do away with yourselves, humans. There was a plan.

Not that he was bitter or anything.

Nah.

Over at his desk, he sat down in front of his bank of PCs, eased back in his ass palace, and one by one, signed into all his computers.

It had been a long time since he’d had a night off to himself, and as he checked in with his security cameras, and monitored the Brotherhood’s various properties in and around Caldwell, he was reminded of why.

The last thing in the world he wanted to do was sit here like a fucking loser with his Lenovos and his Goose, all alone while everybody else was doing their thing.

But his brain was still scrambled from all the Xcor shit. He was also bone-tired—but didn’t want to sleep. He needed to feed—and had no interest in taking a vein. He had to eat—and wasn’t hungry. He wanted to get drunk—and that wasn’t happening fast enough.

Pushing back in the chair, he focused on getting the alcohol into his bloodstream, taking big swallows that singed his throat and swirled in his gut.

As he started to make progress on his goal, he thought about Jane just now in her clinic. How when he’d gone to see her, she’d been knee-deep in crisis, Assail screaming in that room of his, Manny asking her questions about something, Ehlena coming to her with a drug order issue.

V had stood on the periphery and admired his mate’s purpose. And commitment. And passion.

God, Assail.

Those screams were something else, a reminder that addiction was nothing to fuck around with. Sure, you started down a chemical highway just so you could keep yourself in your life. But the next thing you knew, you were in a rubber room—literally—in restraints because you had tried to tear your own face off with your fingernails.

By the way, pass the vodka.

Reaching across his desk, he grabbed his bottle and pulled a refill. The ice was getting low in his glass, but after this load, he wasn’t going to care that the shit was room temperature.

At least Assail had his Jane on the job, and she sure as hell was trying to give him the best treatment in his withdrawal she could. The question was whether the psychosis would ever lift. It had been a month since the male had last shoved white powder up his nose, so he might just be a wasteland in the aftermath. Sometimes that happened with vampires and the coke.

’Course, the former dealer probably hadn’t known that when he’d started doing so much of the shit. But there were a lot of times in life when you were dancing with the devil and had no idea evil was your partner. And you didn’t find out until it was too late.

That was how destiny worked. Curses, too.

As V took another slug of numb-in-a-bottle, he found himself thinking about that hot chocolate again, the stuff he’d served Jane way back in the beginning. Or rather … way back in the first of their endings.

He’d always assumed that the last finale they had would come when he died. But as he sat here in an empty house, and tried to recall the last time they’d spent any meaningful group of hours together … he had to wonder.

Payback was a whiner, he supposed. When he and his brothers were out in the field, fighting for the race, they weren’t thinking about all the mates and females who were holding down the fort back at home. They were just trying to do their job and stay alive.

The same was true down in that clinic. Jane wasn’t thinking about him right now. She was working with Manny to salvage what was left of Assail’s brain. She was helping Qhuinn’s brother Luchas regain mobility and mental health after horrible abuse at the hands of the Lessening Society. Every night, she handled all manner of injuries, from the chronic to the acute, from the Band-Aid to the life threatening, with tireless focus and devotion to her patients.

So it wasn’t that he didn’t get it.

And it wasn’t that he didn’t love her. Shit, she was smart. She was tough. She was … probably the only female he had ever met that he would consider his equal—and no, that wasn’t a misogynistic statement. He didn’t think any males were his equal, either.

Which was what happened when you were the son of a deity, he supposed.

He absolutely could not see himself with anyone else but his Jane. The trouble was, he was devoted to the war. She was devoted to her job. And in the beginning, when everything was new and fresh and the impetus to be with each other had been an itch that had to be scratched or they would go mad, they had made the time.

Now?

Not so much.

But it was fine, he thought as he sat forward and refocused on the lineup of monitors. Neither one of them was going anywhere.

It was just … he was beginning to worry the same was true of their relationship.

A sudden image of Layla putting her body in front of Xcor and shielding his dying flesh with everything she had, popped into his head and wouldn’t leave. Jesus, in that moment, she would have taken a bullet for the motherfucker. A dumb move, sure, and one she would have regretted the instant she thought about her young … but in that split second, she had been motivated by love.

And Xcor, in turn, had meant what he’d said when he’d begged for her to be sent away before he was killed. That bastard had been dead fucking serious … and really fucking in love.

V frowned as he realized that that sonofabitch and he had something in common, didn’t they. They’d both been through the Bloodletter’s war camp.

Dollars to nut sacs, they’d lost their virginity in the same way.

So, yeah, maybe they should get a set of bestie tattoos or some shit.

“For fuck’s sake …”

More with the Grey Goose … until he needed a second refill. And he forced himself to get out of his head and focus on the images on the screens in front of him, all those interior and exterior shots of various rooms, whether it was the Audience House, that little ranch Layla and Xcor were love-shacking in, the other three homes they owned in Caldie, Sal’s Restaurant, or the mansion and its grounds.

Only the mansion was showing signs of life. The other places were shut down because of “Snowmageddon,” as the reporters were calling it.

As he watched his brothers play pool and laugh, he noticed that the vast majority of them had their shellans by their sides. The females of the household all had their separate, independent existences, but on a night like tonight, when their males were off the clock of the war, they made spending time with their loves a priority.