So she worked her ass off with Brian, cooperated fully with him and Gideon to get this under control. Obeyed Brian"s direction because she couldn"t handle the idea of hurting anyone. Big, bad Mistress, reduced to a cowering, insecure basement creature.

She couldn"t visit the club during opening hours yet. The types of energies that swamped a BDSM fetish club during open hours were definitely something she wasn"t yet stable enough to handle. She tried not to think about the fact she might never be able to handle it, might never again experience that rush of walking the floor during peak hours, except in her dreams.

Pushing that away, she focused on the man leaning in her bedroom door. The sight of him eased some of her irritation. He handled her tantrums, her short temper, understanding what they were, such that he even snarled back at her on more than one occasion, which actually made her feel better. Made her feel human, though she knew that phrase wasn"t necessarily applicable to her anymore.

A few days ago, she"d made him sit still for one of the Atlantis staff, Chantal, to trim his hair, rather than letting him hack it with scissors himself. She"d shortened the shoulder length, but cleverly kept his dark locks a little longish over the brow, the lengths uneven so it fell around his strong face and corded throat with unruly strands. It framed the midnight blue eyes, that devastatingly handsome Irish ancestry only enhanced by the smoother cut. He was dressed now, wearing his T-shirt and jeans, boots and battered leather jacket with a warrior"s grace on that lean, muscular body. He had about nine weapons cleverly concealed beneath the clothes, but she knew where they all were.

She"d had the pleasure of shoving him to her bed and stripping him, divesting him of every wooden and steel knife strapped to his calves or slipped into holsters under his arms and at the small of his back. She"d unbuckled the wrist gauntlets with their wooden arrows and taken away his jacket with the nine-millimeter. Tugged off the boots that held his toe blade.

She hadn"t been a vampire long, but it was impossible to ignore the dangerous, erotic undercurrents of it, her stripping him of his weapons against her, him allowing her to do so, his ravenous, predatory gaze telling her he"d fight her only to give her the pleasure of overpowering him.

The first time she"d stripped him that way, she"d used one of the knives, tracing the trinity mark he now bore on his chest, leaving a rivulet of blood she could lick away. It made his hands fist in her hair, his breath draw in, that male groan of need wrenching from his throat.

She"d reveled in his arousal at the stimulation of pain and pleasure both, even as she felt his emotional turmoil. He liked giving her blood, liked nourishing her, though he didn"t want to feel that way.

When he"d first darkened her door, he"d craved a Mistress almost as much as he hated the part of himself that did. It made him unpredictable, sometimes hazardous in his lusts, but on that they were now well matched. She took a steadying breath. Though there were many things about her life she wished she could change, having Gideon here wasn"t one of them.

“You called?” he repeated. “For a clueless, shortsighted male?” She scowled. “It was better when he didn"t have access to my mind. If I needed to be pissed off at him, but didn"t really want him to know every detail about it, he"d come home, because he wouldn"t really know how mad I was.”

Gideon raised a brow. “So you want him to come back and let you be mad at him in person, where he can suffer the in-person effect of your state of pissed-off-at-him-ness?”

“You can"t say that three times fast.”

“I wouldn"t try. The call didn"t go well?”

“I"ve had less impersonal conversations with convenience-store clerks.”

“Anwyn.”

She closed her eyes. “Oh, Gideon. Why won"t he come home?”

“You know why.” Sitting on the edge of the bed, he took over the massaging motion on her temples with his large hands. “He"s trying to take care of the Council"s European to-do list so they"ll give him what he wants. Time. Time for you to get past the transition, learn to manage it, before you have to appear before them for their validation bullshit.”

“Yeah, that"s all true. But I"m not wrong, either. He"s staying away.” Gideon paused in his ministrations. “Does he know this is still his home?” She looked up at him. “What does that mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

Yeah, she did. Never mind that someone within the Council had betrayed Daegan, betrayed his location, something he couldn"t have foreseen. Her life had been completely changed because he was a vampire, a vampire with enemies. For five years they"d been together, and he"d been the unthinkable, a vampire who had respected her wishes not to be marked as his servant, even though they"d been lovers all that time. Something she"d learned from Gideon was almost unprecedented. If he"d marked her, made her his servant, it would have protected her, perhaps even avoided this whole situation.

But she was a Mistress in her own right. Though she"d surrendered to Daegan, something in her responding to his superior Mastery over her, she hadn"t been able to take that leap of faith, surrender fully to a third mark that would have given him all of her. Still, he could have seduced her into it. Hell, she"d been so in love with him, there really wasn"t anything he couldn"t have persuaded her to do.

Sure. If he"d had no respect for her will, who she truly was. Goddess, listen to me. A lifetime of self-determination, fierce independence, and the moment she was turned to a vampire, viciously raped and had her life turned upside down, she was looking for someone to blame.

What a candyass.

She tilted her head back into Gideon"s hard abdomen, his fingers brushing her cheeks.

“You"re not supposed to be listening in.”

“You"re getting yourself worked up. I can feel it. So I decided to listen in. He understands, Anwyn. He"s giving you time to work it out in your own head.”

“Problem is, he understands too well. He thinks as long as I"m mad about it, he needs to stay away. I need him here.”

“To torture him?”

“Yes.” No. I just need you both here. I can’t explain it. Gideon was her left foot, Daegan her right, and she was hopping like some off-balance rabbit, waiting for wolves to notice her. On the days when her seizures would come up on her fast and unawares, sometimes so fast even Gideon couldn"t react to them quickly enough with his precognitive senses, it was worse. But the temperature checks and other measurements Brian had been taking were helping. As long as she stayed completely regimented, no deviations from her schedule, no stressors. At the first, she was relieved to have some predictability, but now she was starting to feel as if she were in a prison again.

Maybe she"d blame Daegan less if he wasn"t hiding from her behind some pathetic excuse of looking out for her best interests. If he was here, with her, the way he should be. But all of it

. . . He"d known she"d miss him. He"d known how badly she"d react to the choices he took away from her. Yet he"d done it anyway, to protect her, to care for her. To save her life and force her to want to live.

She was hating him for loving her.

The wry humor dissipated in that wave of despair that could come up and swamp her, make her limbs shake at the memory of what had passed, what she faced in the future. She knew enough about Daegan"s world to know a vampire had to be in control of herself at all times. If she became the weak member of the pack . . .

“Hey.” Gideon"s hands settled on her shoulders. “Neither Daegan nor I are going to let anything happen to you.”

“You know, I used to scoff at those biblical passages about „pride goeth before a fall."

There"s a fine line between confidence and dependence. I think somewhere along the way I went from being confident in my self-sufficiency to dependent on it, to define myself. And here I am, completely dependent on you, a man who doesn"t want to be a vampire"s servant; Lord Brian, who I didn"t even know three weeks ago, and his Dr. Frankenstein experiments; and Daegan, who . . . I can"t even think about without feeling so angry. While missing him makes it hurt to breathe.”

“Good thing you don"t have to breathe anymore.”

“Yeah, it"s all a fucking cosmic joke.” She surged up, away from his touch, scraping her hands through her hair. “Don"t look at me like that, like you"re gauging when I"m going to have a meltdown, like I"m some freaking mental patient. I just . . . Damn it . . .” Gideon was already moving toward her, that look on his face. He could anticipate the seizures sometimes as much as two or three minutes before they happened, sometimes five or ten, if they came upon her when she was calmed. He already had Brian"s restraints in his hands.

Though she was furious, she had enough control left to thrust out her wrists. Gideon latched them, then guided her to the floor so he could put on the ankle ones. She could roll around this way, thrash, destroy her clothes with vomit, but she couldn"t get free.

Tears she never could seem to hold back when this happened spilled out of her eyes. The other good thing about the restraints was Gideon didn"t have to leave her alone in the modified dungeon cell they"d used earlier. Sliding down the wall, he brought her into the shelter of his bent thighs, crossing his arms over her chest as she latched her fingers onto his forearms.

While there was some danger that she could break bones even with the strength in her fingers, he"d told her he was a third mark; he"d heal fast. No matter how angry she got, no matter what was happening before or after, he never denied her this when the seizures came to take her.

“Gideon.” She spoke between clenched teeth, straining against it. The cacophony of voices rose. They would suck her down into their particular hell and make her into one of them, a mindless monster who wanted only blood and death. Making her feel like she"d never emerge from it, or if she did, she"d wake up among the carnage she"d created. “Please . . . don"t let them . . .”