"It didn't happen. I got you out and brought you back. It all worked out in the end. You're tough to kill. I'm glad."

I'd bled out, according to Barrons, several times. Too much of my throat had been torn away for my body to repair me quickly enough. While I'd been dead-or at least no longer breathing-my body had continued repairing itself. I'd regain consciousness, only to bleed out again. Eventually enough of me had been restored that I'd remained conscious for the rest of the process. I was covered with blood, crusted with it.

Barrons picks me up and is carrying me again. We pass through luxurious rooms, down stairs and more stairs, and I realize there are more than three levels beneath his garage. He has a whole world down here. I usually hate being underground. But this is different. There's a sensation of expansiveness, of space not being quite what it seems. I suspect he has more Silvers in here, many ways in and out. It's the ultimate survivalist fantasy. The world could be nuked, and life would go on down here, or we could pass through to some other world. With Barrons, I suspect, no catastrophe is ever final. He always goes on.

Now, so will I.

I don't like that. I've been reprogrammed, changed in so many ways. This one is going to be the hardest to deal with. It makes me feel less human, and I was already feeling detached. Am I part of the Unseelie King, now nearly immortal? I wonder if this is a loop. Are we reborn over and over again, to repeat the same cycles?

"Would it be so bad?"

"Are you reading my mind?"

"You're thinking with your eyes." He smiles.

I touch his face, and the smile vanishes. "Do it again."

"Don't be a jackass."

I laugh. But there's no amusement left in his face. It was swiftly erased.

He looks at me with cold, hard eyes. I see what's in them now. To the rest of the world, they might seem empty. I remember thinking a few times myself that they were void of all humanity, but that's simply not true.

He feels. Rage. Pain. Lust. So much emotion, electric beneath his skin. So much volatility. Man and beast, always at war. I know now it's never easy for him. The battle he fights is nonstop. How does this man go on every day?

He stops and lowers me to my feet. He moves through the shadows, turns on a gas fire, and begins to light candles.

We are in his bedroom. It's like the Unseelie King's lair: opulent, luxurious, with an enormous bed, draped in black silk, black furs. I can't see past it. All I can see is myself there, naked with him.

I'm trembling.

I'm awed that I'm here. That he wants me.

He lights more candles near the bed. He picks up pillows and pushes them into a pile I remember from being Pri-ya Pri-ya.

In that long-ago basement, he mounded them beneath my hips. I sprawled over them with my head on the bed and my ass in the air. He would rub himself back and forth between my legs until I was begging, then push slowly into me from behind.

He places the last pillow on the pile, and looks at me. He jerks his head toward the pile of pillows.

"I watched you die. I need to fuck you, Mac."

The words slam into me like bullets, taking my knees out. I lean back against a piece of furniture-an armoire, I think. I really don't care. It holds me up. It wasn't a request. It was acknowledgment of a requirement to make it from this moment to the next, like I need a transfusion, my blood has been poisoned I need a transfusion, my blood has been poisoned.

"Do you want me to?" There is no purr, or coyness, or seduction in his voice. There is a question that needs an answer. Bare bones. That's what he's after. That's what he offers.

"Yes."

He strips his shirt over his head and I catch my breath, watching those long, hard muscles ripple. I know how his shoulders look, bunched, when he's on top of me, how his face gets tight with lust, as he eases inside me. "Who am I?"

"Jericho."

"Who are you?" He kicks off his boots, steps out of his pants. He's commando tonight.

My breath whooshes out of me in a run-on word: "Whogivesafuck?"

"Finally." The word is soft. The man is not.

"I need a shower."

His eyes glitter, his teeth flash in the darkness. "A little blood never bothers me." He glides toward me, in that way that barely displaces air. A velvet shadow in the darkness. He is the night. He always has been. I used to be a sunshine girl.

He circles me, looking me up and down.

I watch him, holding my breath. Jericho Barrons is walking naked circles around me, looking at me like he's going to eat me alive-in a good way, not like his son. As I watch him, emotion staggers me and I realize that I never completely thawed from what I'd done to myself back there on the cliff, when I'd believed he was dead. I'd stripped away so much of me in order to survive. When I'd realized he was alive, there were so many other things going on and I was angry because he hadn't told me, and I'd shoved the messy tangle away, refused to look at it. I'd walked through the past few months refusing to let any of what was happening really touch me. Refusing to accept the woman I'd become, denying that I'd even become it.

Now I thaw. Now I stand and look at him and realize why I never turned it all back on.

I would would have destroyed the world for him. have destroyed the world for him.

And I couldn't face that. Couldn't stand what it said about me.

I want to slow this moment down. Once before, I ended up in bed with him inside me, but I was Pri-ya Pri-ya-it happened so quickly and without conscious choice that it was over before it began. I want this to happen in slow motion. I want to live every second like it's my last. I've chosen this. It feels incredible. "Wait."

His demeanor changes instantly, his eyes haze with crimson. "I haven't waited long enough?" His chest rattles. His hands are at his sides, curling, flexing. He breathes hard and fast.

In the flickering light, his skin begins to darken.

I stare at him. Just like that, lust to fury. I think he might launch himself on me, take me down, shredding my clothes as we go, and shove inside me before we even hit the floor.

"I'd never take it." His eyes narrow. Crimson stains the white, bleeds into them with tiny rivers. Suddenly his eyes are black on red, no whites at all. "But I won't tell you I haven't thought about it."

I inhale deeply.

"You're here. In my bedroom. You have no fucking idea what that does to me. If a woman comes to this place, she dies. If I don't kill her, my men do."

"Has a woman ever come to this place?"

"Once."

"Did she find her own way in? Or did you bring her?"

"I brought her."

"And?"

"I made love to her."

I jerk, turning with him, staring into his eyes. That he says those words about another woman makes me feel like launching myself at him, tearing off my clothes, and slamming him home inside me before we reach the floor. Erasing her. He wants to fuck me. He made love to her.

He's watching me closely. He seems to like what he sees.

"And?"

"When I was done I killed her."

He says it without emotion, but I see more in his eyes. He hated himself for killing her. He believed he had no choice. He succumbed to a moment of wanting someone in his bed, in his home, in his world. He wanted to feel...normal for a night. And she paid for it with her life.

"I'm not the hero, Mac. Never have been. Never will be. Let us be perfectly clear: I'm not the antihero, either, so quit waiting to discover my hidden potential. There's nothing to redeem me."

I want him anyway.

It's what he wanted to know.

I exhale impatiently and shove hair from my face. "Are you going to talk me to death or fuck me, Jericho Barrons?"

"Say it again. The last part."

I do.

"They'll try to kill you."

"Good thing I'm hard to kill." Only one thing concerned me. "Will you?"

"Never. I'm the one who will always watch over you. Always be there to fuck you back to your senses when you need it, the one who will never let you die."

I pull my shirt over my head and kick off my shoes. "What more could a woman ask?" I skinny out of my jeans but get a foot tangled up trying to get out of my underwear. I stumble.

He's on me before I hit the floor.

Since the moment I laid eyes on Jericho Barrons, I wanted him. I wanted him to do things to me that pink and clueless MacKayla Lane was shocked and appalled and...okay, yeah, well, utterly fascinated to find herself thinking about.

I admitted none of it to myself. How could a peacock lust for a lion?

I'd been as fancy as one of the proud males, in my useless plumage. I'd strutted around, stealing glances at the king of the jungle, denying what I felt. I'd assessed my tail and his killing claws and understood that if the lion were ever to lay down with the peacock-it would only be on a nest of bloody feathers.

It hadn't stopped me from wanting him.

It made me grow claws.

As I fall to the floor beneath him, I think, here I am now: a featherless peacock with claws. My lovely tail lost, in one ordeal or the other. I look in the mirror and have no idea what I am. Don't care. Perhaps I'll grow a mane.

Relief floods me when his body slams into mine. Barrons moves like a sudden dark wind. He's not only on me but pushing in in me before we hit the floor. me before we hit the floor.

Oh, God, yes, finally finally! My head slams back into wood but I barely feel it. My neck and back arch, my legs spread. My ankles are on his shoulders and I suffer no conflicts. There is only need and the answer to it all shoving inside me-sleek, hard, animal dressed up in the skin of a man.

I look up at him and he's part beast. His face is mahogany, his fangs are out. His eyes are Barrons. The look in them isn't. It makes me wild. I can be whatever I want to be with him. No inhibitions. I feel him growing harder, longer inside me.

"You can do that that?" I gasp. The beast was bigger than the man.

He laughs, and it is definitely not not a human sound. a human sound.

I moan, I whimper, I writhe. It's incredible. He's filling me up, gliding deep and deliciously inside me where I've never felt a man before. Oh, God! I come. I explode. I hear someone roaring.

It's me. I laugh and keep coming. I think I scream. I use my claws and he bucks in me, sudden and rapid. He makes that sound in the back of his throat I'm so crazy about. I love that sound.

I'd walk through hell and back, smiling, as long as he was beside me. As long as I could glance over at him and our eyes would meet and we'd share one of those wordless looks.

"You haven't lost your feathers." His words are strange, guttural, forced out around fangs.

I'd snort, but then his tongue is in my mouth, my jaws are wide, and I can't breathe, and he's right. One day you do do meet a man who kisses you and you can't breathe around it and you realize you don't need air. Oxygen is trivial. Desire makes life happen. Makes it matter. Makes everything worth it. Desire meet a man who kisses you and you can't breathe around it and you realize you don't need air. Oxygen is trivial. Desire makes life happen. Makes it matter. Makes everything worth it. Desire is is life. Hunger to see the next sunrise or sunset, to touch the one you love, to try again. life. Hunger to see the next sunrise or sunset, to touch the one you love, to try again.

"Hell would be waking up and wanting nothing," he agrees. He knows what I'm thinking. Always. We're connected. The atoms between us ferry messages back and forth.

"Harder. Deeper. Come on, Barrons. More." I feel violent. I am unbreakable. I am elastic around him. Insatiable. His hand is on the side of my neck, around my throat, half cupping my face. His eyes bore into mine. He watches every nuance, every detail of every expression, as if his existence depends on it. He fucks with the single-minded devotion of a dying man hunting God.

As he fills me, I wonder if-in the same way that sex makes its own unique perfume-we don't really "make" love. As in create, manufacture, evoke an independent element in the air around us, and if enough of us did it really well, for real, not just for the hell of it, we could change the world. Because when he's in me, I feel the space around us changing, charging, and it seems to set off some kind of feedback loop, where the more he touches me, the more I need him to. Having sex with Barrons sates my need. Then feeds it. Sates, then feeds. It's a never-ending cycle. I get out of bed with him, frantic to be back in it again. And I- "-hated you for it," he says gently.

That was my line.

"I never get enough, Mac. Drives me bug-fuck. I should kill you for what you make me feel."

I understand perfectly. He is my vulnerability. I would become Shiva, the world-eater, for him.

He withdraws and I nearly scream from the emptiness.

Then he's lifting me into his arms and I'm on the bed, and he's spreading me over the mound of pillows, nudging my legs wide, and when he pushes into me from behind, I sob with relief. I'm whole, I'm alive, I'm- I close my eyes and ride the mindless bliss. It's all I can do. Be. Feel. Live.

I'm Pri-ya Pri-ya again. again.

I always will be with this man.

Much later, I look up at him. He's on top of me, barely inside me. I'm swollen, hot, and fiercely alive. My hands are over my head. He likes to tease, an inch, maybe two, until I'm crazy with need, then drive it home hard. It undoes me every time.

I know part of what turns me on so hard, makes me so violent with lust, is that he's dangerous. I fell for the bad guy. I'm crazy about the one who's trouble. The alpha that doesn't play well with others and doesn't take orders from anyone.

What else would I expect? It's possible I'm part of the ancient creator of the Unseelie race.

He's kissing me. V'lane's name is long gone from my tongue. There's only him, and he's right: No other man would fit.

"Maybe there's nothing wrong with you at all, Mac," he says. "Maybe you're exactly what you're supposed to be, and the only reason you feel so conflicted about it is that you keep trying to bat for the wrong team." He thrusts deep, rocks his hips forward with a muscle I'd be willing to bet no human man had.

I arch my back. "Are you saying you think I'm evil?"

"Evil isn't a state of being. It's a choice."

"I don't think-"

My mouth is suddenly busy. By the time I get around to finishing my sentence, I have no idea what I was going to say.