“Everything.”

John Matthew was downwind from Xhex and Murhder as they embraced in the shadows of a stand of pine trees.

The ugly grunt that came out of his throat was low and dangerous to his own ears. And then there was the fact that his palms had somehow managed to find both his daggers and unsheathe them from his chest holster.

The crack of a stick directly behind him was the only thing that stopped him from rushing out into the meadow and attacking the former Brother.

As John wheeled around, Tohr loomed behind them. “Damn it, John. What the hell are you doing here?”

All John could do was breathe. His raging bonded male was so dominant that the instinct to attack, protect, defend took over his higher reasoning. Or at least most of it. There was still enough to remind him that he did not want to hurt his surrogate father.

“Son,” Tohr said, “don’t do this, okay? Don’t do any of this.”

The image of Xhex stepping in against another male, a former lover of hers, a Brother, was like gasoline on the fire of his temper. And Tohr must have known he was about to act because the male locked a hold on John’s right shoulder—

Directly on the bite wound.

If John had had a voice that worked, he would have cursed loud enough to bring snow from the storm clouds overhead.

The unholy pain that lanced through him was so intense it was probably the only thing that could have overridden his bonded male. Pitching forward, temporarily blinded, he fell into Tohr, who caught him before he hit the ground.

“Are you injured? John!”

Tohr rolled him over and laid him out flat on the snow, and as his nervous system struggled with the sensory load plowing through him, his daggers were stripped from his hands and the Brother’s face appeared above his.

“Talk to me, son, what’s going on?”

With sloppy reflexes, he fumbled around the area of his shoulder, trying to push the Brother’s hold away from what was killing him—

Okay, that was a bad choice of words right there.

With a swift yank, Tohr opened his leather jacket.

“You’re not bleeding.” The Brother took out his phone and turned the light on. “Let me pull your shirt—”

As strung out as John was, he knew the second when Tohr saw the bite wound through the straps of the muscle shirt. The Brother’s face froze, composure slamming down on his features. He actually seemed to lose concentration for a split second.

When he came back on line, his voice was falsely even. “When did this injury happen and why haven’t you told anyone?”

John just shook his head, the snow underneath his skull creaking from the cold—which made him wonder dimly why he didn’t feel the wintery temperature. Actually … he wasn’t feeling anything all of a sudden, not the weight of his body, not the buzz of his aggression, not even the pain.

At least that last one was good news.

Other voices, now. Deep and quiet. Tohr had called for someone(s), but John didn’t bother trying to see who it was.

Instead, he stared straight up at the gray sky overhead. Funny, back before his transition, he had thought he had good eyesight—or maybe it had been more like he hadn’t had bad eyesight. Near or far, he’d gotten what he needed in terms of visual information.

After the change? It was as if a cloudy film had been removed, his ability to notice minute details about objects and people from a football field’s distance away in near pitch darkness such a shock, he could remember thinking surely it was a superpower.

Now, as he watched the sky, he could see the different shades of gray in the storm’s underbelly, the currents of wind swirling in slow-motion banks of snow-swollen clouds. The effect was quiet, beautiful … calming, like silk billowing in an open doorway.

Xhex and that male felt miles away. Then again, so did his corporeal form, even as his vantage point suggested he wasn’t having an out-of-body experience.

Am I dying, he asked mutely.

When no one answered, he wasn’t surprised. They couldn’t hear him, and even if they could have, he couldn’t connect with whoever was around him.

Sadness washed through him. He didn’t want to leave things with Xhex like this.

Even if he was the only one who knew they were estranged.

Murhder and Xhex stepped back from the embrace at same time, and as he stared down at her, he figured out what his emotion had been when she’d told him that she was mated to someone. It had been a quiet relief. A door closing not with a slam, but with a click.

Not that he’d come back here thinking they had any future together. It was just a resolution he had not expected to find, and yet valued more than he would have guessed.

“If he ever hurts you,” Murhder said, “I’ll skin him alive.”

“John, you mean?” She shook her head. “He’s a prince of a guy. I think you’d like him, actually.”

God, it had been so long since Murhder had thought in terms of liking or not liking another living being. But that was what happened when you were all about survival. And when your brain was an unreliable mess.

“Let’s do this,” he said as he looked across the snow-blanketed meadow.

Xhex nodded and they started off side by side, her boots and his heavy treaded shoes punching through the icy top level and compressing the softer flakes underneath with muffled crunches. Before leaving Darius’s old house, the Brothers had given him a heavy parka and thick snow pants as well as gloves and the shoes. No weapons. Not that he’d asked for his own back.

Looking around, he saw nothing but trees on the periphery. Talk about sitting ducks. As the pair of them crossed this open area, they were completely without cover, but he wasn’t worried. There were no foreign scents on the cold wind, and the Brothers were no doubt on the fringes and playing nursemaid. If anyone rode up on them?

Shit was going to go down.

The closer they got to the farmhouse, the worse the structure looked. Between its swaybacked roof, distorted windows, and loose clapboards, the place looked like it was on its last legs—and he felt a renewed sense of guilt.

Not that regrets over this female had ever needed help getting over his fence and into his backyard.

If only he’d been faster at that lab. Or if that male hadn’t gotten shot. Or if—

“How did she find you?” Xhex asked.

“Eliahu Rathboone.” His breath left his mouth in puffs as he spoke. “My B&B. She said she saw the portrait of me on TV.”

As a cutting wind came up against them, Murhder put his gloved hands into the borrowed parka’s pockets and thought about Fritz providing the insulated clothes. The butler had not been surprised to see him and had offered the same wrinkled smile he always had. In his eyes, though, the doggen’s sadness had been evident and Murhder got it. Back in his old life, he’d crashed so many times at Darius’s, he’d been a member of the household. Now? Being an outcast meant he was worse than a stranger.

He was family with bad baggage.

And on top of that? Darius, the Brother who had brought that butler and Murhder together, was now dead, the conduit between them gone, one more emptiness to register on the long list of people who were no longer there.

Speaking of which … they were about twenty yards away when the dark windows of the shack made him worry. He’d expect any exterior glass to be shuttered during the daylight hours, but the sun wasn’t a problem now. Why no interior lights? Eyeing the anemic wires that came out of the forest and attached to a corner of the roof, he worried that she’d lost power.