―I did not intend it to be. Whether you wish to believe it or not, she mattered to me.‖
―I saw her body, you bastard!‖
His lids half dropped, his mouth tightened. ―As did I. It was not done by me or at my direction.‖
―She told me you were coming for her! That she was afraid you wouldn‘t let her out of the country! She wanted to come home!‖
His lids lifted. He looked startled. On a human face, I would have called his expression pained.
―She said that?‖
―She was crying on the phone, hiding from you!‖
―No.‖ He shook his head. ―Not from me, MacKayla. I do not believe she thought it was me. She knew me better than that. Yes, she‘d found me out. Discovered what I was. But she didn‘t fear me.‖
―Stop lying to me!‖ I lunged to my feet. He‘d killed her. I had to believe that. In the huge sea of unknowns that had become my existence, there was one certainty, and it was my life raft. The Lord Master was the bad guy. He‘d killed Alina. That was my absolute. My unwavering truth. I couldn‘t let go of it. I couldn‘t survive in a state of complete paranoia. He reached into his coat, took out a photo album, and tossed it on the couch. ―I expect you to give this back to me. It is mine. I came in peace today,‖ he said, ―and offered you one more chance at an alternative to war between us. The last time you refused me, you saw what I did. Three days, MacKayla. I will come for you in three days. Be ready. Be willing.‖ He glanced out the window. He reached into his coat again and this time pulled out the amulet on its thick gold chain. It glowed at his touch. He looked at it for a moment, then at me, as if debating testing it. I was a sidhe-seer and a Null, impervious to Fae magic. Would it work on me? Expect the unexpected, I reminded myself. I could make no assumptions.
―I will let you keep the child, today. She is a gift from me to you. I can give you many, many gifts. The next price I call due will not be … as you say … refundable.‖ He rapped sharply on the window and nodded.
The princes were gone.
Dani slumped into a puddle of mud.
The LM vanished.
―They made me throw away my sword, Mac,‖ Dani said, teeth chattering. I dabbed gently at the blood on her cheeks. ―I know, honey. You told me.‖ Seven times in the past three minutes. It was all she‘d said since I helped her up from the puddle, dug out a metal teapot, opened two bottles of water, heated it over the fire the LM had left burning, and began cleaning her up.
―Dunno how you survived,‖ she said, and began to cry.
I wiped at her cheeks some more, pushed at her hair, fretted and fussed like my mom and Alina had fretted over me whenever I wept.
She didn‘t cry pretty. She cried like a storm breaking loose, a storm that had been brewing for a long time. I suspected she was crying for things I knew nothing about and might never know. Dani was an intensely private person. She cried like her heart was breaking, like her soul was in those tears, and I held her, thinking how strange life was. I‘d thought I was fully engaged in life back in Ashford, Georgia, 100 percent invested.
I‘d had no idea what life or love was.
Life didn‘t explode in the sunshine and pretty places. Life took the strongest root with a little bit of rain and a whole lot of shit for fertilizer. Although love could grow in times of peace, it tempered in battle. Daddy told me once—when I‘d said something about how perfect his relationship with Mom was—that I should have seen the first five years of their marriage, that they‘d fought like hellions, crashed into each other like two giant stones. That eventually they‘d eroded each other into the perfect fit, become a single wall, nestled into each other‘s curves and hollows, her strengths chinking his weaknesses, her weaknesses reinforced by his strengths. I began telling Dani about my parents. About what life had been like growing up in a happy home in the Deep South. About magnolia-scented days and sultry heat, slow-paddling fans and pool parties. She stilled in my arms. After a while, she stopped crying and leaned back on the couch, staring at me like a stray cat with its nose pressed to the window of a restaurant. When she took off for the abbey, I carefully tucked the photo album the LM had tossed on the couch into my backpack, unopened. I knew without cracking the cover I was going to need time to pore over the pictures, a luxury I didn‘t have now.
I headed off into the gray drizzly day for Barrons Books and Baubles.
I detoured past Chester‘s on the way there, hoping the Gray Woman might be in the vicinity. I was going to spend a lot of time loitering in the streets outside Ryodan‘s club. “ Inside his club‖
might be under his protection, but that didn‘t mean the surrounding area wasn‘t free range. I walked quietly, tensed for battle, prepared to slam my palms into the hag: Null and stab her and do a victory dance on her gruesome body. But the only Unseelie I encountered on the way to the bookstore were Rhino-boys. Half a dozen of them. And what they were doing confounded me so thoroughly that I ended up walking down the cobbled street, spear sheathed, hands in my pockets, staring at them while they stared at me. I think we all had big what-the-fucks plastered all over our faces. It‘s kind of hard to tell with those beady eyes and tusks, but I know I did. They were rewiring the streetlamps and carefully resetting them in the sidewalks. They were sweeping up debris. They were replacing bulbs. They had brooms and jackhammers, wiring materials, wheelbarrows, and concrete.
I was supposed to kill them. That was what I did, what I was made for. But they were putting Dublin back to rights.
I wanted Dublin back to rights. Did this mean they were working to restore the power, too?
―Are you doing it to keep the Shades out?‖ I shook my head at the oddity of having just initiated a conversation with a Rhino-boy I would have wondered if my day could get any stranger, but my days always get stranger.
―Pigs,‖ one of them grunted, and the rest of them agreed, snorting. ―Eat everything. Leave nothing for the rest of us.‖
―I see.‖ I decided I would let them finish cleaning up the block first and kill them on my way back. Hands in my pockets, I resumed walking.
―Pretty girlie-girl, want to live forever?‖ one of them grunted at my back. They all snorted and snuffled as if at some inside joke. Like, duh, maybe eating them in exchange for sex really didn’t give you immortality, just some new, never-before-heard-of Fae STD. ―Got something you can suck on, girlie-girl.‖
Ew. ―Not a chance,‖ I said coolly.
They should have let me go. I would have let them go. But Rhino-boys aren‘t the brightest bulbs in the box. I heard hoofed feet shuffling, moving toward me. Their bribe hadn‘t worked, so they were switching tactics to brute force. They‘d picked the wrong woman to mess with. I hate Unseelie.
―Think twice,‖ I warned.
I suspect Rhino-boys have a hard enough time thinking once.
A few moments later, the six of them were dead and I was walking toward BB&B, thoroughly pissed that I‘d had to kill them before they finished wiring the lamps. The last look I‘d gotten at the bookstore was late in the afternoon on that hellish Halloween that would forever be burned into my memory as the second-worst night of my life. All the exterior lights had been broken out. I wasn‘t sure what to expect as I turned down the street I‘d once considered my ―way home.‖
I stopped, stared, and smiled faintly. Of course.
On a street of heavily damaged and looted buildings, BB&B alone stood untouched. The elegantly restored fa?ade of the Old World four-story brick building was immaculate. The spotlights mounted on the front, rear, and sides, which had been broken out last I saw it, were now replaced. The brightly painted shingle proclaiming BARRONS BOOKS AND BAUBLES
had been rehung perpendicular to the building, suspended over the sidewalk on an elaborate brass pole, and it creaked as it swung in the drizzly breeze. The sign in the old-fashioned greentinted windows glowed soft neon: CLOSED. Amber torches in brass sconces illuminated the deep limestone archway of the bookstore‘s grand alcoved entrance. Ornate cherry diamondpaned doors, nestled between limestone columns, gleamed in the light. I wondered if the bookstore meant something to him, that he‘d gone to such lengths. Did it hold sentimental value? Or was it merely his possession, his statement to the world in general that nothing and no one would ever take what was his?
I stepped into the alcove, tried the door. It was unlocked. I pushed it open. I never tire of my first glimpse of my shop. Once you get past the immediate sense of spatial distortion—as if you‘ve opened the door of an old-fashioned phone booth only to find the Library of Congress inside—you notice that luxury and comfort have never gone so effortlessly hand in hand.
The main room is about eighty feet long by sixty feet wide and vaults five stories to a muraled ceiling. On the second, third, fourth, and fifth floors, bookcases line each wall from base to cove molding. Behind elegant banisters, catwalks permit access, while ladders slide on oiled rollers from one section to the next.
But it‘s the first floor I spend so much time on, with its freestanding bookcases crammed with all the latest, greatest reads standing tall on polished wood floors scattered with plush rugs. Two seating cozies, fore and aft, boast opulent yet comfy chesterfield sofas and brocaded chairs topped by soft throws, centered around my beloved respite from the Dublin rain and cold—fancy enameled gas fireplaces.
I glanced at my well-stocked magazine rack (sadly out of date) and my cashier‘s counter. I smiled at the old-fashioned register with the tiny silver bell that tinkled whenever the drawer popped open.
I moved to the counter.
A note was propped on the register.
Welcome home, Ms. Lane.
―Arrogant, overconfident jackass.‖ Keys lay on the counter beside it. I wondered what car he‘d left me this time. I was reaching for the keys when, out of the blue, emotions bombarded me, intense and confusing. They were accompanied by a barrage of memories: the day I‘d stumbled into this place, my anxiety at being lost, meeting Barrons for the first time, my na?ve conviction that he was exactly the kind of man I would never date.
―And we haven’t dated.‖ I crushed the note in my fist. Just had completely uninhibited raw sex. Months of it.
I closed my eyes, more memories of this place crashing over me: the night I‘d seen the Gray Man devour a woman‘s beauty and had rushed here for answers, with no idea what was wrong with me but already suspecting it was permanent; the night I‘d accepted his offer of a fourthfloor bedroom overlooking the back alley and moved in; the day my daddy had come looking for me and I‘d realized I could never go home to Ashford until the madness in Dublin was over and I‘d either succeeded or didn‘t care because I‘d be going home the same way as Alina, in a box; the night I‘d given Barrons a birthday cake, then eaten it alone, after it had splatted from the ceiling.
I inhaled his scent. He was near, a few feet away. Lust nearly buckled my knees. He was a tireless lover. There was nothing off-limits with him.
―Ms. Lane.‖
I fisted my hands in my pockets and opened my eyes. He stood across the counter, eyes dark, features impassive.
―Barrons.‖
―It‘s a Hummer.‖
―Alpha?‖ I said hopefully.
His obsidian gaze mocked. Would I waste my time with anything less?
―Dani‘s moving in,‖ I told him.
―Dani‘s going back to the abbey.‖
―Then I am, too.‖
―I hear you‘re not welcome there.‖
―I will be soon. I have plans. And I need her.‖
―You need me,‖ he said flatly. ―I thought you‘d have figured that out by now.‖
I had. I kept getting knocked down. And I kept getting back up again, a little stronger each time. But I still wasn‘t strong enough. One day I would be. Until then, Barrons was the only one that scared all my enemies away. If IYD really would have worked on Halloween, he definitely guaranteed me the highest odds of survival. I was done hopping from swell to swell, trying to avoid the tidals. Right or wrong, good or bad, I‘d chosen: Barrons was my wave. But there was no way I was living alone with him. I needed a buffer, and my buffer needed a place to live, too.
―What‘s wrong with Dani staying here?‖
―She‘s in more danger at your side.‖