“I’ve heard about you, Lord Dillon. You don’t have any honor.” The man looked triumphant when he said the words.

The words cut deep, which only made Dillon more determined to walk away with a full purse.

“If I take this to the District Queen, your daughter will have to explain the ‘jest’ that was intended to lure me into her bed, and you know how a formal complaint can fuel gossip—especially when it’s not the first time a girl has been accused of this ‘jest,’” Dillon said.

The man looked at Dillon with equal measures of fear and hate, confirming the accusation. Then he called in another stack of silver marks and threw them on the desk.

So. The girl’s father had been hoping to bluff him into taking less to make all the unpleasantness go away.

Dillon picked up the second stack of silver marks and vanished both stacks.

“You got your payment, Lord Dillon. If I hear anything that smears my daughter’s reputation . . .”

“No one will hear anything from me.” And may the Darkness help the next fool who falls for your daughter’s game. “But I will say, sir, that I’ve heard you’re hoping your daughter marries into another aristo family of equal standing to yours. If that’s the case and is one of the reasons you’re trying to smear my reputation, I hope your daughter ends up with exactly the kind of man she deserves.”

The flicker of distress in the man’s eyes told Dillon he’d slipped the verbal knife into the right spot. If the daughter married the kind of man she deserved, her life would be a misery.

He walked out of the man’s study, walked out of the house, walked several blocks before hailing a horse-drawn cab to take him to the modest hotel that had been home for the past few weeks.

He kept his anger and his growing despair tightly reined during the ride to the hotel and for the few minutes when he was in view of other people. He bade acquaintances a good day, helped an elderly Lady and her granddaughter into the cab he’d just left, smiled at the clerk at the desk.

By this evening it would be all over town, although whispered behind hands, that the handfast had been a jest that he had taken seriously. There would be sympathy for someone who had fallen for the ruse, but every young man from a minor aristo family would breathe a sigh of relief when Dillon and his tarnished reputation left town.

No one wanted to sit at a table with a moral lesson.

Once he reached his room, Dillon locked the door and put an Opal shield around the room to assure he wouldn’t be disturbed.

He opened a bottle of brandy, settled in the room’s small sitting area, and drank straight from the bottle. Drank until he needed to breathe.

After making careful inquiries in a place that aristos didn’t frequent for honorable reasons, he had found a witch who could teach him the “if you loved me” spell—and didn’t want to know who he was or where he came from. It had cost him almost every mark he had, which made him wonder if the spell had become some kind of fashionable game among the wealthy Blood families because no one else could afford it, and bored aristos might think it amusing to see whom they could coerce into doing something otherwise unpalatable.

For a moment, as the brandy gave him a fuzzy kind of clarity, he wondered if he should report the use of this spell. He had the names of some of the men who had been damaged by Blyte’s use of it, but whom could he tell? If this was some fashionable aristo game, how could he be sure that whatever Queen granted him an audience wasn’t also playing? And if she was playing and didn’t want anyone to know—because, fashionable or not, it was a sordid game—would he live to see another sunrise?

The only thing he could do right now was use the spell on a girl before she used it on him. He’d been one step ahead this time. The girl had known what he’d done, but his Jewel was sufficiently darker than hers that she couldn’t resist him. Besides, if she’d said anything, he would have countered that she had tried the spell on him and it backfired. That would have opened up questions about her previous liaisons—something her father preferred to hide beneath substantial payoffs.

He could continue targeting aristo bitches whose fathers would pay him to disappear, but he was already tired of pretense, tired of lies. He wanted the chance at a real future, not a continuation of these games. He wanted honest work. He wanted a real handfast as a first step to proving he could be a good and faithful husband. He needed both those things to restore his reputation and remove the stain on his honor.

He wasn’t going to find either of those things in a Rihland city that catered to aristos. If he was going to be successful, he’d have to settle in some out-of-the-way place and find a girl who was sufficient to his needs and then use the spell for a little while—just long enough to make her love him.

TEN

Four pegs, each one as big around as the palm of his hand. A loop of leather went around each peg, one end of the leashes that were attached to the choke collar around his neck. He had to keep the leashes tight, so very tight, to protect the people he loved from what he was. It should have been all right. It had always been all right. Hadn’t it? But now, as the leashes tightened, so did the collar around his neck, choking him until he couldn’t breathe.

His heart pounded, pounded, pounded in a way that would damage it eventually. His lungs burned with the effort to draw a breath, but he had to keep the leashes tight because . . .

A hand slapped his shoulder hard enough to sting, and a voice said, “Kiss kiss.”

Gasping, Daemon looked at the witch now standing beside him. “Karla.”

“Prince Idiot.”

A flash of temper. One leash relaxed a little; the strangling collar loosened a little. He sucked in a breath and studied the witch who had been the Queen of Glacia—and one of Jaenelle Angelline’s closest friends.

She looked old. She looked the way he remembered her in the last years of her life. White hair, lined face, a body that was still straight-backed yet growing frail. But the ice-blue eyes had never changed. He hadn’t been the High Lord of Hell when she made the transition to demon-dead, but he’d known she had settled in Hell near the Gate that was closest to Glacia, in order to keep track of her adopted daughter—Della—and Della’s children and grandchildren.

“What are you doing here, Karla?”

“What am I doing here? What are you doing here? This is supposed to be my vision, my dream, my tangled web.” She looked at the pegs, at the leashes, at the collar that had bruised his neck. “Then again, you’re the one who’s in trouble. You need to loosen those leashes before you ruin yourself.”

“I have to stay in control,” Daemon protested.

“Not this much. You’ve never held the leashes this tight. No one could for long.”