“Dude, wake-up call. You went.”

“I know.”

She’s glowing again like she won some kind of prize instead of got picked by a class-A sociopath to be his disposable lube.

“Why him?” I don’t understand and I want to. I don’t want to feel like Jo’s a traitor. I lost Mac. I don’t want to lose Jo, too. “You know what he’s like!”

“He’s not a bad man, Dani.”

“Bullshit.”

“Everything isn’t black and white like you want it to be.”

Some things are, and Ryodan’s blacker than black. He’s one of the bad guys, period, end of subject. I’m pissed. She needs to wake up and smell the coffee burning before the whole fecking coffeemaker goes up in flames. “And when he comes to those stairs tomorrow and chooses someone else?” I say. “It’s only a matter of time, Jo. You know he will. You’ll be standing here looking all dreamy like you do right now and it’ll be the waitress next to you that he chooses and you’ll never go upstairs again because a dude like that don’t press the replay button. When he’s done he’s done. How are you going to feel then?”

She turns away.

I go after her, grab her elbow, make her stop. “Well? What do you think, Jo? That you’re special? That you’ll be the one that changes him? Give me a fecking break! You think you and him are going to go pick out china patterns together? Register for flatware?”

She inhales like she forgot to breathe, then when she remembered couldn’t get air fast enough. “I know what I’m doing, Dani.”

“Good, then you can explain it to me! ’Cause it sure looks like every shade of stupid from where I’m standing!”

She’s distant again, talking soft, like I’m not even here. Even with my superhearing I lean in to catch it.

“There are men you build a future with, Dani. And then there are men that you know, going in, that you’re only making a memory with. I know the difference.”

Doesn’t look like it to me.

“Some memories are worth the price. I’ll deal with it.”

But she won’t. I know she won’t. I know Jo. She’s brilliant and kind and has the heart of a warrior but she doesn’t have ice and razor blades inside where your soul is supposed to be. She loves. And she doesn’t know how to take it back when you have to, because sometimes you sure as feck have to. Got to grab it up with both hands and pull it back before somebody turns it into knives and uses it to cut you to pieces. She’s not going to be able to deal with it good at all. And I’m going to have to clean up the mess he made, and kill him. I suck in a breath. “You’re too stupid to live and I’m not talking to you anymore. You need to pull your head out.”

“You need to quit judging everyone.”

“You don’t know shit about me. And I’d rather judge people than be a pansy-ass that can’t make her mind up about anyone or anything and gets sucked into all kinds of stupid shit.”

“Dani, please don’t—”

“My ears are full. I can’t hear anymore!” I turn away and start to slip into freeze-frame. I have no idea what makes me look up. Kind of like a rubber-band feeling, like it’s fused into my gut, and like something at the top of the stairs is pulling at my opposite end.

Ryodan is standing at the top of the stairs looking down at me. And I think what Jo said about him being big and powerful and beautiful.

We lock eyes.

Mine say, “Don’t you ever choose her again. You leave her alone.”

His say something I don’t get at all. Then he does that ocular-shiver thing all over me and I get a real clear: “Go home, kid.”

He looks right past me at Jo.

And he nods.

SEVENTEEN

“These girls fall like dominoes”

We’re not so different, you and I, Cruce says as he moves inside me. Both born to lead.

I try desperately to wake myself. I’m in the Dreaming and he has me in his wings. The moment I fell asleep, he was there, waiting for me at the end of a white marble path in a garden of exquisite blood roses. He lays me on them, with a crush of velvet petals. I brace for the thorns.

You must not rue it, Kat. The sun does not rue that it rises.

He goes deep, filling me completely, making every nerve ending in my body vibrate with erotic ecstasy. I arch my back and hiss with pleasure.

We will rule the world and they will love us. We will save them.

“Dreaming of me, are you now, my sweet Kat?”

Like a dropped snow globe, my dream world shatters and I remember why I asked Sean to stay the night with me at the abbey. Why I slipped him around back and into my suite of rooms. To save me from Cruce. To ground me to the world I know and love.

I roll into Sean’s arms and press against him, shuddering with fear that I pretend is desire. We make love quick and hard and fast. He never knows I’m trying to erase someone else.

Someone that makes me come harder. Better. More.

Sean, my love, my childhood friend, teenage sweetheart, mate to my soul. I’ve never known life without him. We shared a playpen and went to our first day of school together. We got the measles the same week, swapped our first flu snuggled in blankets in front of the TV. We got pimples and got rid of them. He was there the night I started my period, and I was there the day his voice began to change. We know everything about each other. Our history is rich and long. I love his dark eyes, his black hair and fair Irish skin. I love the way he wears a fisherman’s sweater with faded jeans and always has a quick smile. I love how strong his arms are from years of pulling fishing nets, and the way his long-limbed body moves, how he looks when he’s lost in a good book, the way he feels moving inside me.

“Are you all right, love?” He brushes a tangle of hair from my face.

I lay my head on his chest and listen to his heart beating, solid and sure. Sometimes I think he has a touch of my sidhe-seer gift, he reads me so well. He’s known about my emotional empathy since we were children. Nothing about me disturbs him, a rare gift from those who fully understand what I do. Few can lie to me. I sense their inner conflict, unless they suffer no guilt or scruple about anything, and I’ve been blessed to encounter only a handful of those in my life—all of them in or near Chester’s, recently. I don’t know the truth, only that there is a lie. It takes a scrupulously honest man to love me. That’s my Sean. We learned to trust each other completely before we were old enough to have learned suspicion.