At the sound of another fist pop, V took a deep drag and shifted his diamond eyes over. "You okay there, Phury?"

No, he wasn't. Z's savage nature had always been the stuff of a morality tale, but lately he'd become so violent he was hard to watch in action. The bottomless, soulless pit of him had been on a rampage ever since Bella had been abducted by the lessers.

And still they hadn't found her. The Brothers had no leads, no info, no nothing. Even with Z's hard-core questioning.

Phury was a mess about the abduction. He hadn't known Bella for long, but she'd been so lovely, a female of worth from the highest level of aristocracy within the race. Though to him she'd been more than her lineage. So much more. She'd reached beyond his vow of celibacy to the male beneath the discipline, stirring up something deep. He was as desperate as Zsadist to find her, but after six weeks, he'd lost faith that she'd survived. The lessers were torturing vampires for information on the Brotherhood, and like all civilians, she'd known little about the Brothers. Surely she would have been killed by now.

His only hope was that she hadn't endured days and days of hell before she went unto the Fade.

"What did you do with the female?" Zsadist growled to the next slayer. When all that came back at him was a "Fuck you," Z pulled a Tyson and bit the bastard.

Why Zsadist cared about a missing civilian female, no one in the Brotherhood could understand. He was known for his misogyny… hell, he was feared for it. Why Bella mattered to him was anyone's guess. Then again, no one, not even Phury, as his twin, could predict the male's reactions.

While echoes of Z's brutal work cut through the isolation of the forest, Phury felt himself cracking under the interrogation even as the lessers stayed strong and gave up no information.

"I don't know how much more of this I can take," he said under his breath.