Black Dagger Brotherhood 11 - Lover at Last by J.R. Ward

forest were behaving appropriately, standing still, their branches unmoving in the cold air. And when she put the magnifiers up again, she traced the rooftop of the house and the contours of the stone chimneys.
    All were utterly inanimate.
    Back to the glass.
    Inhaling deep, she held the oxygen in her lungs and balanced against the nearest birch trunk to give her body extra stability.
    Something continued to be off. The frames of those sliding glass doors and the lines of the porches and everything about the house? Static and solid. The interiors, however, seemed…pixilated somehow, like a composite image had been created to make things appear as if there were furniture…and that image had been superimposed on something like a curtain…that happened to be subjected to a soft current of air.
    This was going to be a more interesting project than she’d assumed. Reporting on the activities of this business associate of a “friend” of hers had not exactly lit a fire under her ass. She much preferred greater challenges.
    But maybe there was more to this than first appeared.
    After all, camouflage meant you were hiding something—and she’d made a career out of taking things from people that they wanted to keep: Secrets. Items of value. Information. Documents.
    The vocabulary used to define the nouns was irrelevant to her. The act of penetrating a locked house or car or safe or briefcase and extracting what she was after was what mattered.
    She was a hunter.
    And the man in that house, whoever he was, was her prey.

TEN
    B lay had no business getting near a hand weight, much less the kind of iron that was down in the training center’s gym. Hammering back that port on an empty stomach had made him fuzzy and uncoordinated. But he had to have some kind of a direction…a plan, a destination to drag his sorry ass to. Anything other than going up to his room, sitting on that bed again, and starting the day in the same way he’d started the night—smoking and staring off into space.
    Probably with a lot more port added in.
    Stepping out of the underground tunnel, he walked through the office and pushed the glass door open.
    As he went along, still drinking from a half-full glass, his mind was circling itself, wondering when all this bullcrap between him and Qhuinn was going to end. On his deathbed? God, he didn’t think he could last that long, assuming he had a normal life span ahead of him.
    Maybe he needed to move out of the mansion. Before Wellsie had been killed, she and Tohr had been able to live in a house of their own. Hell, if he did that, he wouldn’t have to see Qhuinn except duringmeetings—and with so many people in and around the Brotherhood, it was easy to get out of eyeshot.
    He’d been doing that for a while now, actually.
    In fact, under that construct, the pair of them wouldn’t have to cross paths at all—John was always partnered with the guy because of the whole
ahstrux nohtrum
thing, and between the rotation schedule, and the way territory was divided up, he and Qhuinn never fought together except in an emergency.
    Saxton could go back and forth to work—
    Blay stopped dead at the entrance to the weight room. Through the glass window he saw a set of weights going up and down on the reclining squat machine, and he knew by the Nikes who it was.
    Goddamn it, he couldn’t get a break.
    Leaning in, he hit his head once. Twice. Three—
    “You’re supposed to do reps on the machines—not on the door.”
    Manny Manello’s voice was as welcome as a steel-toed kick in the ass.
    Blay straightened up, and the world went wheeeeee a little—to the point that he had to surreptitiously put his free hand on the jamb just so that the balance issue didn’t show. He also tucked his nearly done drink out of sight
    The doc probably wouldn’t think working out while under the influence was a good thing.
    “How are you?” Blay asked, even though he didn’t really care—and that wasn’t a commentary on