I raised a brow, waiting.

“Is that what you need to think of me? That I want to die? Must you dress me up in chivalry to find me palatable? Chivalry demands a suicidal bent. I don’t have one. I can’t get enough of life. I get off on waking up every day for infinity. I like being what I am. I got the best end of the deal. I’ll be here while it’s happening. I’ll be here when it ends. And I’ll stand up from the ashes and do it all over when it begins again.”

“You said somebody beat me to damning you.”

“Melodrama. Did it curry favor? You kissed me.”

“You don’t feel damned?”

“God said, Let there be light. I said, Say please.”

He was gone. No longer standing in front of me. The bookstore seemed empty and I looked around, wondering where he’d gone so quickly and why. Had he melted up against a bookcase, faded into a drape, wrapped himself around a pillar?

Suddenly there was a fist in my hair, behind me, pulling my head back, arching my spine up from the sofa.

He closed his mouth over mine and pushed his tongue in, forcing my teeth wide.

I grabbed his arm, but as sharply as he had my head pulled back, all I could do was steady myself.

He wrapped his other hand around my neck, forcing my chin higher, kissing me more deeply, harder, keeping me from resisting.

Not that I wanted to.

Heart slamming in my chest, my legs moved apart. There are different kinds of kisses. I’d thought I’d experienced them all, if not prior to coming to Dublin, certainly after months of being Pri-ya, in bed with this man.

This was a new one.

All I could do was hold on to his arm and survive.

“Kiss” wasn’t the right word at all.

He fused us together—my jaws so wide, I couldn’t even kiss him back. I could only take what he was doing to me. I felt the sharp slide of fangs over my tongue as he sucked it into his mouth.

I knew then—as he’d never let me see in our bed in that basement—that he was far more animal than man. Maybe he hadn’t always been, but he was now. Maybe, long ago, in the beginning, he’d missed being a man—if, in fact, he’d been one to begin with. But he didn’t anymore. He’d gone native.

I was kind of astonished by it: What a man he’d chosen to be! He could easily have gone feral. He was the strongest, fastest, smartest, most powerful creature I’d ever seen. He could kill everything and everyone, including Fae. He could never be killed. Yet he walked upright and lived in Dublin and he had a bookstore and great cars and collected rare things of beauty. He bitched when his rugs got burned and got pissy when somebody messed with his clothes. He took care of some people, whether he seemed to like doing it or not. And he had a sense of honor that wasn’t animal.

“Honor is animal. Animals are pure. People are fucked up. Quit fucking thinking.” He let go of my mouth long enough to speak, then I couldn’t breathe again.

I didn’t play nice. I wasn’t feeling nice. I was plastered at an awkward angle against the couch, completely in his control unless I wanted to try to break my own neck to get free. I wanted to know what spell he wanted, though, so I drew in on myself and volleyed into his head.

Crimson silk sheets.

I’m in her and she’s looking at me like I’m her world. The woman undoes me.

I flinch. I’m having sex with me, seeing myself from his eyes. I look incredible naked—is that how he sees me? He doesn’t see any of my flaws. I’ve never looked half as good to myself. I want to pull out. It feels perverse. I’m fascinated. But this was not what I was hunting for at all …

Where are the handcuffs? Ah, grab her fucking head, she’s going down on me again. She’ll make me come. Tie her up. Is she back? How much longer do I have?

He senses me there.

Get out of my HEAD!

I deepen the kiss, bite his tongue, and he is violent with lust. I take advantage, diving deep. There’s a thought he’s shielding. I want it.

Nobody home but She for Whom I Am the World. Can’t go on like this, can’t keep doing it.

Why couldn’t he go on? What couldn’t he keep doing? I’m having sex with him, any way he wants me, while I stare up at him with utter worship. Where was the problem there?

Weariness suddenly crashes over me. I’m in his body, and I’m coming beneath him, and I’m checking my eyes warily.

What the fuck am I doing here?

He knew what he was, what I was.

He knew we came from different worlds, didn’t belong together.

Yet for a few months there’d been no lines of demarcation between us. We’d existed in a place beyond definitions, where no rules had mattered, and I wasn’t the only one who’d reveled in it. But the entire time I’d been lost in sexual bliss, he’d been aware of time passing, of everything that was happening—that I was mindless, I wasn’t willing, and when I snapped out of it I’d blame him.

Keep hoping to see the light in her eyes. Even knowing it’ll mean she’s saying good-bye.

I had. Irrational or not, I’d held it against him. He’d seen me naked, body and soul, and I hadn’t seen him at all. I’d been blinded by helpless lust that hadn’t been for him. I had been lust, and he’d been there.

Just one time, he’s thinking as we watch my glazed eyes go even emptier.

One time, what? Instead of pushing, I try a stealth attack. I pretend to retreat, let him think he’s won, and at the last minute turn around. Instead of lunging for his thoughts, I stay very, very still and listen.

He pushes my hair out of my face. I look like an animal. There’s no sentience in my gaze. I’m a cavewoman, with a minuscule, prehistoric brain.

When you know who I am. Let me be your man.

He blasts me from his skull with such force that I nearly pass out. My ears ring and my head hurts.

I’m sucking air. He’s gone.

I walked through Temple Bar with a spring in my step. I’d woken early, taken one look at the sunshine shafting in through my bedroom window, dressed, and headed out to run errands.

The fridge was empty, I had two birthdays I was determined to celebrate before they got any more belated, and I was going to have to do some serious improvising with ingredients to bake a cake. Since Halloween, butter, eggs, and milk were a scarce commodity, but a Southern woman could do a lot with shortening, condensed milk, and powdered eggs. I was going to bake a chocolate cake with thick, creamy double-chocolate fudge icing if it was the last thing I did. Dani and I would watch movies and paint our fingernails. It would be like old times with Alina.

I turned my face up to the sun as I hurried down the street. After what seemed an interminable hiatus, spring had returned to Dublin.

The season of sunshine and rebirth was overdue for me. Though I’d managed to avoid miserable months of cold weather, busy in Faery or the Silvers, it had still been the longest winter of my life.

Spring didn’t look any different than winter, but you could feel it in the air—the kiss of warmth on the breeze, the scent blowing off the ocean that carried the promise of buds and blossoms, if not here, somewhere else in the world. I’d never thought I’d miss flies and insects, but I did. There wasn’t a single thing growing in Dublin—and that meant no moths, butterflies, birds, or bees. Not a single flower bloomed, no shoots pushed out from young limbs, not a blade of grass grew. The Shades had decimated the city on their way out, before slamming the door shut with a bang last Halloween. The soil was barren.

I was no horticulturalist, but I’d been doing some research. I was pretty sure if we reintroduced the right nutrients into the soil, in time, we’d be able to grow things again.

We had a lot to reclaim. Trees to remove and replace. Planters and flower boxes to fill. Parks to redesign. I planned to start small, haul dirt back from the abbey, grow a few daisies, buttercups, maybe some petunias and impatiens. Fill my bookstore with ferns and spider plants and begin taking back the night in my own space before spilling over onto the rooftop garden and beyond.