“She’s turned the corner, Harry,” Mel muttered, though his face had lost some color. “A vampire. Jesus Christ.” Jess kept her eyes on Harry. His avarice warred with something that might be conscience, but unfortunately she suspected it was just fear. And fear wasn’t enough.

Reluctantly, he drew his gun. “Best to end your suffering, darling,” he said gruffly. “I’m sorry for it.” Mel chuckled, a harsh sound, recovering some of his brass. “If I was going to defile it, I’d take a piss on her, love,” he said.

“Which I’m likely to do, once I bag up some of these baubles, because it was quite a hike getting here. It’s a goddamned miracle you made it, sick as you are.”

“You will leave here,” she retorted. “Or you will be eternally sorry.” When the air currents shifted behind her, she registered it a moment before the gazes of the two men did. In the space of one of her struggling heartbeats, the disbelief and lack of fear they had shown in the face of her meager threat transformed into something entirely different.

She didn’t look behind her. Instead, her gaze strayed to the fresh orchid in the vase, clung to it. Before all this happened, she’d been a brilliant student, with an exceptional mind. Her professors had told her so, but she’d realized a person didn’t know how brilliant she was until she endured things so horrible her mind was able to perform mitosis, splitting into two parts to survive. The academic side of her knew the psychology of that, just as her soul knew it wouldn’t survive the impact of bringing reality and fantasy back together to face what was behind her.

It was the final insult, and would snap a mind frayed for so long it should have completely unraveled by now. Maybe it had, as Mel had implied. There was comfort in that. Perhaps she was in a dream, and could turn it in the direction she wanted. She could die right now, never knowing, and go into oblivion clinging to what she’d wanted this moment to be.

As Harry’s eyes widened and Mel’s face went satisfyingly pale, Jessica felt her body shudder, caught between terror and heartbreak. One inch at a time, she forced herself to turn her head, until she was looking at what had stepped from the shadows.

Though illness had shriveled her to a hunched state in comparison, he was still a tall man. Every bit as beautiful as Farida had described him. A man with the soul of a desert tiger, shining through his preternatural amber eyes, and copper hair that shimmered like the cat’s hide in the firelight. Those eyes turned to her now. They made a thorough assessment of her expression, even the state of her body, in the space of a heartbeat. And she knew. Dear God, she knew.

He was a bloody, goddamned vampire.

5

“WHAT did you do to Dawud?” she rasped, turning back to Harry. The man was too busy assessing this new threat to answer, but Lord Mason did, in a velvet, dangerous voice that was a fluid blend of European and Arab accents, edged with an animal’s growl.

“They slit the boy’s throat when he tried to keep them from coming after you.” No. Oh God, no. Jessica’s knees gave out on her then, and she fell into the petals. Oddly, the impact of bony kneecaps on stone didn’t hurt, because he’d moved, putting his hand under her elbow to ease her down in a swift movement. The unexpected touch was gone before she could react to it. Mel rushed for the stranger. Harry was smarter, trying to scramble back up into the tunnel. It wouldn’t help. A human couldn’t escape a vampire.

Mel started firing, and the other torch dropped, dimming the chamber. Lord Mason leaped for him, but she was more concerned about the bullets. Lunging to her feet, she covered Farida, screamed in pain as one of the stray bullets punched into her. Don’t let her body be harmed. She’s perfect . . . Let her stay perfect.

Raithe had stolen her life, binding her to him with two marks. The first mark had allowed him to locate her wherever she was, and the second let him into her head, where he could read every thought she had, invade at any time to speak and command her there.

Despite that, she’d tried to escape, again and again. Failed every time, been punished every time. Eventually, she’d realized he let her try only to give himself the pleasure of extinguishing her hope, indulging his fascination with whether she had the fortitude to strike it back to life again.

When she was befriended by two women in his household, she thought she was being offered comfort from fellow inmates. They asked about her life before, about Jack, her fiancé. It was the last time she made the mistake of trusting anyone. At first she wondered why he didn’t lift the information from her mind, but later she realized it was more of his games, intended to underscore how alone she was now.

After her sixth escape attempt, Raithe told her she would not fully accept his ownership until she realized her old life was gone to her. So he found, captured and killed her fiancé in front of her. He broke Jack’s spine, crushed his rib cage so it punctured his lungs, his heart, then wouldn’t allow her to touch him as he wheezed his last. His uncomprehending eyes clung to her, his numb hand outstretched, trying to reach hers.

As Jack’s body had been dragged away, Raithe told her if she tried to kill herself, he’d find her family and do the same to each one of them, only make it last longer. When he deemed her training complete, her mind malleable enough, he intended to give her the third mark. As she curled in a ball of grief on the floor at his feet, he explained in a gentle, even tone that this would be a gift. An honor. She’d be his fully bonded servant then, with the privilege of an enhanced mortal life span, perhaps as much as three hundred years, give or take a decade.

So life went on. It took a while for her to be as malleable as he demanded. Then, the night he finally decided to do it, vampire hunters attacked. Before he could complete her third mark, one hunter wounded him severely, but Raithe managed to get away, dragging her with him. When they reached a narrow dark alley, he’d stumbled, fallen, overcome by his wounds. Since he was still grasping her wrist, refusing to let go, it drove her to her knees. Her hand landed on a sharpened survey stake, discarded with construction trash.

For so long, she’d been numb, her mind beaten into complete submission, a cringing dog who had no thoughts other than what her Master would next inflict upon her and how to endure or avoid it. In hindsight, she knew that had been her best protection, because deep down where neither Raithe nor even she could go, the part of her that had waited for this one rare moment of vulnerability had hovered, beyond his reach. When the roaring compulsion came slamming back into her body, she reacted on instinct.

Now.

She seized his hair, yanked him off the ground and drove the stake into him. Wounded and dazed as he was, he didn’t have a chance. There’d been countless times she’d huddled on the floor during his daylight sleep, chained to the foot of his bed, and felt her own ribs, figuring out exactly where the heart was located. Figuring out the angle she’d have to use, how strong she’d have to be. Whenever he heard such thoughts, the punishments were brutal, but that night, the knowledge came surging up, as if that unconscious part of her had been practicing, over and over. She did it as smoothly as a veteran vampire hunter, and his aborted third mark gave her the necessary surge of strength.

Divine intervention? Maybe. Or the luck of a dumb, savage animal who’d wanted to survive.

She’d stood in a frozen stupor for quite some time after, looking at his dead body. Only the sound of approaching feet stirred her.

She knew hunters enough to know they’d consider her his ally, and kill her. Even if they didn’t, they couldn’t protect her from the retribution that would follow her, as soon as the vampire world knew she was still alive. Which she knew was going to happen, because when she glimpsed Raithe’s second-marked servants coming to his aid, she was certain at least one of them saw her.

It was then she became aware something was happening to her, her strength deserting her, replaced by a flulike fever and aching that made it hard to stumble out of the alley and get away. The partially administered serum of his third mark had given her those few key moments to drive the stake in, but he hadn’t finished the process. She hadn’t drunk from his throat. If fully bonded, she would have died with him in the alley. Instead, she’d been given what she soon realized was a lingering, wasting death that transformed her physical appearance into that of a woman two decades older.

As if a human killing a vampire wasn’t impossible enough, she’d managed to avoid the vampires hunting her for months afterward, and not just because of her altered appearance. No one expected her to disappear in the Sahara region, where few vampires lived in the sun-soaked environment. Farida had been her salvation, in more ways than one.

Whereas Lord Mason’s true identity told her she was damned.

Farida’s heart had been stolen by a bloody vampire. Maybe she had been a young, starry-eyed girl who’d been taken advantage of by a monster. But a year’s worth of pages spoke of how Lord Mason cherished her, how he tried to protect her. Even the historical documents spoke of it.

And Farida had known. Jess knew it now. She’d known him for what he was, loved him anyway. The two women who’d tricked Jess had been committed to Raithe, too, an immoral devotion she hadn’t understood, reminding her of some bizarre, pitiable Stockholm syndrome.

Her brain ached, her skull pounded and her breath came in shorter bursts. She slid back down the side of the sarcophagus to the floor, all of it churning inside of her. She prayed it would split open her heart and leave it bleeding out its last life fluid, but she knew it wouldn’t happen until she was pushed far past the threshold of agony she was sure she could bear. Raithe had always preferred that, torturing her until she was mindlessly begging him for mercy, even knowing he’d have none for her until long after that point.

As Mel’s screams resounded through the cavern and a dead woman slept with a half smile on her face, the laughter came, bubbling out of Jess’s raw vocal cords like a witch’s cackle. She saw Mel’s startled glance, then his body thudded to the floor. Blood from his ripped throat pooled beneath him and began to ooze toward the circle of rocks, the petals scattered over them. She heard Harry’s cry to her for help, for mercy, then he, too, was silent. Human death filled the chamber, ironically perhaps for the first time.