She seemed surprised as she looked down at him. “What are you doing?”

He shrugged. “Giving you time and space and all my attention. No one is here to force you to do anything. Endelle might bluster and try to bully you, but common sense always wins with her in the end. Still, I think since Alison’s ascension she’s grown more capable of listening to reason. Not much more, but more. As for me, if I’m too possessive right now, I can’t take the full blame for that. Your scent clogs all my logic and most of my sensitivity.”

She released a deep sigh, so he knew he’d done the right thing for her. Space. Funny, it was the last thing he needed.

“So what happened?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

He glanced at his loosely clasped hands then met her gaze straight-on. Shit, he was going to ask the hard question, the one he’d never been able to answer. “I never knew what happened the day that Rith took you. Do you think you could talk about it? Tell me? Tell me how I screwed up?”

Her arms fell away from her chest. “How you screwed up?” The question didn’t seem to make sense to her.

“I was your guardian. I let some preternaturally powerful asshole drag you off and I didn’t even notice, not for half a minute.”

She took a step toward him. “So you really didn’t see me disappear?”

Talking about it brought the memory sweeping back in a slow flood of horror. He told her what it had been like for him, how he’d been talking on his phone to Thorne while he kept track of her from his peripheral vision, and that only after a while had he realized that she was standing too still—not even the breeze moving through the grove touched the hem of her sundress.

He talked for a ridiculously long time about the day of her abduction, how the warriors had all gathered at the villa, how the grounds had been searched and every building turned upside down to make sure she wasn’t somewhere on the property. He talked about his sleeplessness. He talked about the limoncello.

He’d meant to get her talking, and now he couldn’t stop the flow of his own words if his life depended on it.

By then she was kneeling beside him, her fingertips touching the circles beneath his eyes. He met her eyes, wet with tears. She leaned close and kissed him on the lips.

He held very still. He wanted to drag her into his arms but he was probably always going to feel like that. He had enough sense to know that this wasn’t the time for his male aggression to be at the fore. He sighed and kept his hands clasped tightly together.

She sat as he sat, with her ankles crossed and drawn close, her knees spread. She slipped off her shoes and set them next to her. Her white flowered dress draped in folds over the empty cradle of her lap. She put a hand on his knee and drew a deep breath.

Then she began to talk.

“The house was lovely. Rith’s house. It was made entirely of mahogany. It was a replica of an old British Colonial house. You didn’t see it, did you?”

He shook his head. “Only you flying through the dome of mist.” Her hand was warm on his bare knee. “The rest of the warriors saw the house, but not me. Maybe you and I should go back, look around.”

She shook her head. “Maybe, but not yet.”

He wanted to ask her a dozen questions. They piled up on his tongue and tried to break through his front teeth but he held them back.

Her nails scraped gently at his skin. She probably wasn’t aware she was doing it. “The same day that he brought me to his house, he pierced my mind until I was screaming. When I first arrived, I didn’t know what I was doing in that beautiful home or even who he was. He told me I wouldn’t be hurt if I did as I was told, and that Greaves had asked him to house me for a week or so. Yes, he said a week or so. What then? I had thought. What would happen after a week?

“He left me sitting on a bench beneath a tamarind tree. It was the most beautiful garden. No one has ever had such a lovely prison, but it was like being punished by having an endless number of cotton balls thrown at you. They might not hurt, but after awhile the craziness sets in, the despair.

“So I sat under that tree. I waited for hours, not knowing what to do. Finally, I went in search of him. I found three female Burmese servants who only glanced at me. I tried to speak with them, to ask them what I was supposed to do and where Rith had gone. None of them would respond.

“I eventually found him in his study. He didn’t even seem angry when he saw me. But he took me into a back bedroom and he must have enthralled me again because when I woke up or came to consciousness, I was bound to a very comfortable recliner, like a La-Z-Boy.

“Then he entered my head. It was like whirling knives. I screamed and screamed until I was hoarse.

“When he withdrew, he spoke five words: You do as I say. That’s all he said to me during that first day. The lesson, however, was complete.

“Looking back, life was simple after that. When I didn’t do something exactly the way he wanted it done, he put his hands on my arms, then shot his mind into mine. The pain was brutal. But it always started with the hands. That’s … that’s why I recoiled when you reached out to me like you did earlier, at the palace. I wanted you to understand.”

He nodded, taking deep breaths. The thought of Rith going mind-diving sent his protective instincts skyrocketing. But this wasn’t about him, or his reactions to what she was saying. This was about her. “So what happened at the dinner to put you back there, back in your prison?”

She shook her head and released another sigh. “The whole situation suddenly felt the same to me as being in Rith’s home. Go here, sit there, do this, obey. Nothing else is important.”

“Endelle, then. You know she can be a pain in the ass.”

“It’s not that. Did it ever occur to you that you’re all living in the same kind of prison? This is a beautiful villa, but Antony, you’ve been a warrior for thirteen hundred years and it appears to be without end. You don’t do anything except make war.”

“But I choose to serve Endelle.”

“Do you?”

Her expression was so earnest that he was taken aback. He thought for a long moment. “Life isn’t simple, Parisa. Not as an immortal, not as a vampire, not for anyone. There are worse things than what I endure as a warrior or what you’ve endured as a captive.”

He was afraid his words would be offensive to her, but she nodded. She leaned forward and stroked a hand along his back so that her fingers rippled over his scars. “Fiona has suffered more than I ever did,” she murmured. “Like I said, I had three months of being struck by cotton balls and all the while she was a D and R slave.”

He nodded. She didn’t seem quite so distressed.

“Thank you for not coddling me,” she said. “I don’t want to be coddled. I know I’m not strong like you, but I’m trying. I want to be stronger, Antony, I really do. I want to be of use, but I also know it’s going to take some time for me to adjust to everything.” She slid her hand over his shoulder and down his arm, all the way down. He shivered.

She turned his wrist to face her. “This freaked me out at dinner. This is what set me off.”

He leaned forward. “Damn, I’m so sorry but I thought you enjoyed it. In fact—”

“I did,” she cried. “I loved … taking your blood.” Color flooded her cheeks. Was she going to start weeping? “I don’t know if I can explain it but it just became so real while I was sitting next to you that I’d entered the world of the vampire. I guess I felt claustrophobic.”

At that he smiled. “In a building with ceilings fifty feet high, you felt claustrophobic?”

She squeezed his arm. “Yeah. I did.” Then she laughed, a long trill that warmed his heart. Afterward, she leaned forward and rested her head on his forearm.

He shifted slightly and stroked her lovely dark brown hair. It wasn’t fine but coarse. He’d pulled her onto his lap at the Ambassadors Festival, the night Havily had been abducted by Crace. He’d held her close then. She’d gone through so much during that time without being ascended yet. Then she’d lived for three months as a prisoner. Now she was here, ascended, bearing fangs, confused, distressed.

“I can really see how this must feel like just another prison to you.”

She released a heavy sigh. “Yes, it does, but thank you for understanding or trying to.”

“I do understand and you’re right, I sometimes feel like a prisoner of this war.”

“So what do we do?” She remained leaning on his knee.

He kept stroking her hair. He wanted to hold her, to kiss her, but he also didn’t want to disturb this time with her. “Well, I start training you to do battle, and after that, let’s bring Fiona home. I think that’s our first duty, Fiona and the rest of the D and R slaves.”

She lifted her head and looked up at him as though seeing him for the first time. “It is that simple, isn’t it. We take one step and then another—”

“—and we try not to let the horror catch up with us.”

“That’s it exactly. Yes, I felt exactly like that. I was sitting there and then I realized, Now I’m a vampire. It turned me upside down.”

He smiled because he’d just realized something himself. “You turned me upside down. I was going along splendidly, behaving myself, except at the Blood and Bite, of course, and the next thing I knew I was smelling tangerines in my villa. Just out of a shower, still dripping, and there you were. The most beautiful woman in the world standing in my kitchen.”

She smiled. “The most beautiful in the world?”

“Yeah.” His voice had dropped an octave again.

She met his gaze, and something flickered in those amethyst depths. “You dropped your towel.”

He nodded and shrugged. “I dropped my fucking towel. Have I apologized for that?”

“There was never a need for an apology, Antony.” Her voice had gotten very low as well. “I had never seen anything so beautiful. I thought I was looking at a god.”