We start out in Wesley’s POV because they’re going to be fucking later and we can’t see a sex scene from Azrael’s POV as she is a decent female who only has sexual feelings when it’s required by her man. He’s “burning with irritation,” so I’d say he’s furious as usual while he fills Ann in on what went on while she was locked in the office for her own protection because women can’t protect themselves even if they’re cops. Azrael’s cold but tries to hide it, so she’s having a Millamantian “dwindling into marriage.” Pretty soon she’ll be stripped of all her powers, which I’m predicting will happen before the end of this book so she can become a proper demure female with a family.
Wesley tries to grab her arm, sees her flinch, gets madder than he was to begin with, and locks in the grab.
Wesley Arm Grab Counter: 24
I couldn’t believe he hadn’t grabbed her arm since chapter 10 of Acceptance, when she finally called him out on it. Maybe I just stopped catching it, but I’m not going back to check. Wesley seems to have transferred his arm-grabbing to Ann temporarily.
She’s furious (they are Rage Twins again) and he hauls her over to his car after she tells him not to “manhandle” her and he doesn’t give the faintest shit. OMG guys, he’s such a swoon-worthy hero, soooo hot, amirite? And he forbids her from getting a tattoo because she has no right to make her own decisions since she’s WESLEY’S PROPERTY.
Since he won’t let go of her when she asks, she trips him and he loses his grip on her. He almost drops his stolen drugs, almost hits the ground, and “his rage clamor[ed] for release.” And how would that rage be released if the writer were honest about what kind of man she’d created in the book? He would beat Azrael for disobedience and causing him to lose face in front of Ann because Wesley is a domestic abuser who confines himself to psychological manipulation and threats in the usual course of things out of a desire to avoid punishment. But the writer can’t be honest because she might have to recognize that a lot of the traits she sees as alpha male also are traits of an abuser.
Ann tries to defuse the situation as she’s proved in the past that she’s aware of what a rageaholic Wesley is and he takes a cheap shot at Azrael by implying she isn’t human, which hurts her feelings. And he almost “regretted” what he said, but close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, so in the end he’s fine with hurting her feelings out of pique. So mature—I can almost believe Azrael isn’t the only one with arrested emotional development. Here’s his justification for his current and future shitty actions.
But damn her, she had treated him like a child, like an unskilled buffoon incapable of handling the very fiber of his job. And on top of that, she planned to get a tattoo just to facilitate a closer inspection of Fabian’s tattoo parlor.
Okay, so Azrael treated Wesley the same way he normally treats her and that is worth a bout of fury on his part. I’ll bet this never leads to any self-awareness about his own actions because the author thinks Wesley shits 24K gold.
Next—oh, I am not even two pages into this chapter and Wesley’s proving what an unbelievable piece of shit he is. Wesley puts his arm around Ann to keep her warm. The author tries to justify this as because she was closer than Azrael and “out of habit.” So it’s his habit to behave unprofessionally to his partner because she’s a woman? I can see that.
Azrael now manifests her twentieth asspull superpower: she can see things that are happening behind her. This flies in the face of her being completely unable to avoid running into Wesley if he’s standing behind her, which my headcanon explains by him having a weirdly specific cloaking device that only works on women. She starts giving Ann death looks, Wesley won’t let go, and Ann’s smart enough to “inch out of his reach” so he can’t escalate the situation to the point that she and Azrael get into a physical fight for his entertainment and explicitly tells him not to provoke Azrael. Man, she treats him like he’s a ticking time bomb, and she’s the person in the series who knows him best.
Azrael and Wesley have a staredown and he has the following thoughts.
…he met her fury with his own measure. He would not back down from her; not in this, and not with anything else.
And he never has before, because compromising means a man loses an inch of length on his dick, or so Wesley seems to believe. Compromise is part of any healthy relationship; the fact that he is constitutionally unable to bend in any way does not bode well for their romance, or their relationship in general.
So Azrael gets in the back seat of the car with Ann and Wesley gets pissed off some more because he has to “play chauffeur.” But I’ll bet he’d never offer to let Azrael drive because alpha male. He gets himself into such predicaments with his inflexibility.
Ann doesn’t like sitting in the back with Azrael either and “she nestled up to her car door, as far away from Gaby as she could get.” And who could blame her? This dog-killing bitch presumably assaulted her to get her to the office and lock her in for her own protection as she is helpless despite being a trained cop, has just given every indication of beating the shit out of Ann because of actions Wesley took, and Ann has said before that she thinks Azrael is capable of murder.
Wesley tells us Azrael looks “[p]issed off and bored.” These two things are not compatible. So he gives his stolen drugs to Ann for the purpose of having her sign them into the evidence room—I’ll give the writer credit for one thing: she is absolutely consistent in depicting Wesley as wanting nothing to do with the work he is paid to do–and explains what they are and where he got them. When Azrael tripped him to break his grip on her arm, I guess this bundle was in his other hand? This isn’t the first time the writer has lost track of the objects her characters are holding when she makes them do something.
I couldn’t blow my cover, but there was no reason to leave it there for others to use.
Wesley, you’d already blown your cover a dozen different ways. If Fabian wasn’t being controlled by the writer, he would never allow you within a country mile of him ever again. I’m not sure whether Wesley’s just trying to save face in front of Ann or if the writer truly doesn’t understand that, if Fabian weren’t a character that she controls, he would be one hundred percent sure that Fake Linc is a cop. Plus, it’s interesting that he has all this solicitude about the people he was calling depraved and feeling morally superior to less than an hour ago.
Thanks to Gaby, we just came off as a dysfunctional couple.
Oh, you mean you came off as what you are. Congratulations. Azrael shoots a subpar comeback at him and he takes heart from the fact that she calls them a couple, because nothing is more important than their romance, certainly not human life.
Ann doesn’t want to deal with their personal shit and tells Wesley to take her to Morty’s so she can get her car. And Wesley has problems with this because:
He didn’t relish the idea of leaving Gaby home alone, knowing she might take off again. But neither did he want to drag her along to the station. He could only imagine the questions that would crop up if everyone witnessed her prickly temper.
Yeah, they might start thinking she was lying about Wesley killing Oren, Dory, and Myer in Acceptance and Murdered Mutilated Grandpa in Awakening, along with everyone at the abandoned hospital except Dr. Chiles, the main villain. We can’t have that.
Wesley pushed Azrael for her input on Fabian and she obeys while acting like a sulky thirteen-year-old and taking offense at the fact that Ann’s trying to stay far from her on the basis that:
“I don’t fucking hurt women.” She rethought that and added, “Well, unless it’s for their own good.”
Yeah, I guess it was for KY Lady’s own good that you murdered her by jamming a knife between her legs and basically raping her to death with it in chapter 10 of Awakening. Fuck your dog-killing garbage soul.
Wesley explains that Azrael “slapped around the little skirt who was hanging on me…just to scare some sense into her.” And now you’re lying to Ann directly, Wesley, because this wasn’t some slapfest catfight. This was the Class 3 felony of assault with a deadly weapon which you witnessed and did nothing to prevent or handle. That might be the only reason Fabian doesn’t think you’re a cop. Foster uses Wesley as a mouthpiece here to reinforce Azrael’s implausible motivation for the unprovoked attack, which he has no way of knowing. He’d be on much more solid ground if he thought Azrael attacked her because she was trying to steal him. And calling Desiree a “skirt?” Did this suddenly turn into a Raymond Chandler detective noir from the 1940s? That’s dated slang, even for this series. You might as well be calling the people at the rave “hepcats.”
Ann then calls Azrael out for trying to “bully” her. That’s not a word I would have chosen, as it doesn’t convey the seriousness of the threat level and Azrael completely denies threatening her.
Then we get two and a half pages of unbearable dialogue about their relationship and how jealous she is of Ann because she’s so perfect and blah blah yada yada yada until Azrael finally diverts the conversational train back onto the tracks by bringing up her tattoo plan.
They spend a few paragraphs talking about how weird Fabian is because he’s throwing off her powers—and Ann’s still in the car and hasn’t had said powers explained to her at any point, but she somehow accepts all this bushwa for no reason at all. I think the writer just forgot she was there. Then Azrael has the following blinding intuitive revelation.
“He knows me.” Voice faint with bewilderment, Gaby said, “Somehow, I think the bastard recognized me.”
Gee, you think? Here’s one of the first things he says to you in the previous chapter. “I sense that I know you, but I can’t place where we might have met.” And then he spends five paragraphs pressing you about it in the face of your denials. This should not be news to you. You just don’t know where he recognizes you from.
There’s some clarification that she means he sees what a psychopathic sadistic thrill-killer she is (my words, not hers) and that they’re connected. We haven’t had the unbelievable surprise twist yet that Fabian Ludlow is, in fact–DUM DUM DUM!—her father! Wesley latches onto this as an excuse for her not to get the tattoo, which Azrael shuts down.
Then Ann and Azrael get into a conversation about her bullet scar and Azrael tells Ann she has a “bright aura,” which Wesley tries to shut down as he’s still trying to keep Ann from thinking his girlfriend has mental problems. Ann questions her a little about the aura and Azrael really wants to think that Ann’s scared of her. Ann has the hilarious reply:
“I trust in your ethical nature.”
Funny, in the last book Ann said Azrael was more capable of murder than anyone she’d ever met. And why is she flinching and keeping her distance if she trusts Azrael? I guess everybody in this series has the memory of a goldfish. There’s some uninteresting conversation about Ann’s past romantic history as she tries to assure Azrael that she wouldn’t have Wesley on a silver platter with an apple in his mouth, garnished with parsley, and then, thankfully, they get to Morty’s.
Morty’s on fire with anxiety and Azrael tells him Ann’s all right. It’s kind of funny that, after the page and a half of Ann talking about how much she loves Morty and how wonderful he is, he doesn’t give enough of a shit about her to react to that information and instantly demands to know how Azrael is. It doesn’t bode well for Morty and Ann’s fated romance. Azrael blows off any possibility of getting hurt and Wesley thinks her attitude worries him. He doesn’t know that God won’t let her die.
Then Ann mentions someone followed them from the rave. Just to cut Ann down, the writer makes sure to tell us that both Wesley and Azrael saw this too, so she ain’t special, bitch. She’s Just Like Other Girls.
So they leave, with Azrael getting into the front passenger seat, and argue about Azrael keeping her nose out of Wesley’s policework. Maybe if you actually did some she wouldn’t need to. And he has a problem with the fact that he and Ann “broke protocol by not taking the drugs directly to the station.” Since when have you given the faintest shit about your job? All you care about is committing crimes and covering up the crimes your girlfriend commits. I don’t think you know what protocol is. But yes, the chain of custody has been compromised since you gave the drugs to Ann and she didn’t witness where you got them and was forced to take your word for it. And he does some mental bitching about Azrael “taking over.” He’s such a desperately insecure man; I have no idea how the writer thought we’d think he’s an alpha male, other than his abuse of Azrael.
And let’s think about what happened tonight, from Fabian’s point of view. Two people who obviously aren’t ravers show up at his rave, and they won’t dance or drink or do drugs or do the sex. The guy steals his drugs and his psychopathic girlfriend assaults a woman for coming onto her boyfriend. After they leave (they were at the rave for half an hour maximum), a metric fuckton of cops show up and arrest everybody. Correlation isn’t causation, but he has more evidence than not that Wesley is an undercover cop. If he had any sense, he’d just not be there when they showed up for the appointment and would stay away from the shop for a few weeks, since he apparently has at least one other tattoo artist working there. But that would interfere with our plot, such as it is, so that won’t happen.
Her main point of contention is that he lied to her. He excuses his lying because “I knew you’d take over. And you did.” (Emphasis in the original text) So it’s a control and dominance issue on his part. It’s definitely in character for him. Then she lets him in on the fact that she’s down to fuck, then alludes to beating up the Clean Handsome Duo earlier and downplays their injuries. He doesn’t much care because boner but does have a few moments of offended propriety and has to “control his temper” when she remarks that she “saw more kinky sex tonight than when I lived with a gaggle of hookers.” What we saw was not very kinky but I’m sure she doesn’t know what kink is except to shame it.
Anyway, she can’t wait to get home to commence the sexing and he almost goes off the road as the blood leaves his brain. He tells her they’ll be back at the house in a little bit and she should put her seatbelt on, just like a good daddy would. There’s traffic on the street so he doesn’t want to pull over but she starts biting his neck like a vampire and begging him to fuck her.
Sigh.
So he pulls off into a magically appearing “dark, deserted side street,” they start with the sexing and she comes on like a porn actress really wanting to impress the director, and Wesley realizes he loves her. Oh, I think it’s just sunk cost fallacy at this point, but whatever lets you sleep at night.
And then we get another sex scene containing barely any foreplay, with two sentences that are so unclearly written I’m not sure if they’re a POV shift from Wesley to Azrael, where either she gives him cover for his lack of sexual expertise or he decides he knows she doesn’t need any foreplay and, in fact, “it’d only be torment.” How nice of you to decide that for her, Wesley. And the way he talks to her at this point regarding her taking off her jeans, is creepy but perfectly in keeping with the daddy-daughter subtext that has plagued this series. At least now we know for sure she wasn’t dressed for a rave either.
In keeping with Wesley’s preference for public sex, while they’re doing the sex in his car, “a porch light across the street came on.” I have no idea how they got from the abandoned department store to Morty’s to almost to Wesley’s house. The author is terrible at giving us an idea of the city’s geography. And its name, for that matter. Azrael doesn’t notice the porch light but he does, so that’s a flex on his superior situational awareness. After all, she’s just a woman and nothing matters to them but love and the sexual pleasure men use to control them in this series.
Anyway, they don’t get caught and it’s all overheated acceptance of his love for her and it’s a bunch of moaning, burying, releasing, and going soft. That’s Azrael going soft, by the way, not Wesley, even though he just had an orgasm, because no alpha male can ever be soft in any way. And we find out he thinks of her calling him “cop” as an insult. Well, to the other cops who actually do their jobs, it is.
Then he tells her to put her jeans and panties back on, she protests because they’ll be sexing again once they get to his house, and he insists on grounds of propriety—oh, pardon me, he can’t concentrate while he’s driving with her naked from the waist down. Then he says her “comfort with nudity turned him on.” Yeah, whenever he isn’t bitching mentally about her “coarse manners.” So he does a little thinking about how lucky he is and remembering that there’s still a “vampire” hanging out that he needs to deal with, but that can wait while he “takes advantage of his private time with Gaby.” I’m sure his future victims would agree that him getting laid is more important than their lives. The narrative certainly does..
And—chapter! Lori Foster is the worst writer I’ve ever read who’s managed to build a successful career. And her sex scenes are long-winded and perfunctory at the same time, which I didn’t think was possible. I would say more, but I’m just too irritated with this chapter so I’ll save it for the series summation in the final post for the series.
Next time, chapter 12, which is an extraordinarily short chapter for this series. Fabian does some villainy and Wesley and Azrael have some relationship time. It’s about as interesting as it sounds.
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