Welcome to a parallel universe, Paradise thought.

Before she could stop herself, she snapped, “And here I just thought you were a drug addict. I didn’t know you were a misogynist as well.”

Peyton shook his head and got to his feet. “You know what, Parry? You and I really do need to take a break.”

“I totally agree.”

He looked down at her from his height. “Fuck me for thinking you’d need a friend in all this.”

“Someone who wants you to fail is not a friend.”

“I never said that. Never once.”

As he turned away, Paradise almost yelled after him, but she let him go. It wasn’t as if the talking was getting them anywhere. What was happening instead? Pretty much everyone on the bus was looking at them.

Man, things were getting off to such a great start.

One hour after dark, Marissa dematerialized to a thicket of forest on the far side of the Hudson River. The cold wind whistling through the pine boughs made her shiver, and she pulled her Burberry wool coat closer to her body. Breathing in, her sinuses hummed from the lack of humidity and the fantastically clean air of the Canadian high-pressure system that was blowing in from the north.

Looking around, she thought there was something fundamentally dead about November. The colorful leaves of Fall were down and rusted on the ground, the grass and underbrush were wilted and gray, and the cheerful, false-cozy of winter’s snowfalls had yet to blanket everything in white.

This was the vacant transition between one version of fabulous and the next.

This was nothing but cold and empty.

Pivoting around, her keen vision zeroed in on an utterly unremarkable concrete structure about fifty yards ahead. Single-storied, with no windows, and only one dark blue door, it looked like something that the city of Caldwell had built for water-treatment purposes and then abandoned.

As she took a step forward, a stick broke beneath her loafer—and she froze at the sound, wrenching around to make sure there was no one behind her. Damn it, she should have told Butch where she was going. He’d been so busy getting ready for the new recruits’ orientation, though, she hadn’t wanted to bother him.

It was okay, she told herself. There was always Last Meal.

She would talk to him then.

Crossing the distance to the door, her palms broke out into a sweat in her gloves, and her chest got so tight, she felt as if she were wearing a corset.

God, she hadn’t had one of them on in how long?

As she tried to do that math, she thought back to her life before she’d met Butch. She’d had all of the status and none of the position that anyone from the glymera could have asked for. As the unclaimed betrothed of Wrath, son of Wrath, she had been a cautionary tale, a beautiful curse who had been pitied and avoided at the aristocracy’s events and festivals.

Her brother had always watched over her, however, a largely silent and yet loyal source of comfort. He had hated that Wrath had always ignored her except when he’d needed to feed—and in the end, that hatred had driven her brother to try to kill the King.

One of many attempts on Wrath’s life, as it had turned out.

She had been suffering and limping along in her unhappy lot, expecting nothing more, but wanting a proper life for herself … when she had met Butch one night at Darius’s former house. Her destiny had changed forever as she had seen the then-human standing in that parlor, fate giving her the love she had always sought but never had. There had been repercussions, though. Perhaps as part of the Scribe Virgin’s dictate of balance, all of that goodness had come at a huge cost: Her brother had ended up kicking her out of his house and his life just moments before dawn one morning.

Which was what happened when you were a Founding Family’s daughter and you were dating what was then assumed to be a mere human.

It had turned out that there was a lot more to Butch, of course, but her brother hadn’t stuck around long enough to learn about all of that—and Marissa hadn’t cared. She would have taken her male any way he came to her.

Save for running into Havers at a Council meeting, she hadn’t really seen her brother since.

Until last night, that was.

Funny, she hadn’t spent any time looking back at what she’d once had, where she had been, how she had lived. She had cut herself loose from everything that had come before her mate, living only in the present and the future.

Now, though, as she walked up to the threshold of her brother’s new state-of-the-art clinic, she realized that the whole clean-break thing had been an illusion. Just because you moved on didn’t mean you shed your personal history like a suit of clothes.

Your past was the same as your skin: with you for life, both the proverbial beauty marks … and the scars.

Mostly the scars, in her case.

Okay, where was the bell? The check-in? Last night, they’d come in the ambulance to a different entrance—but Havers had told her to go here if she were dematerializing in.

“Are you here to meet with the doctor?” a disembodied female voice said over a speaker.

Jumping to attention, she pushed her hair back and tried to find the security camera. “Ah … actually, I don’t have an appointment. I’m here to see—”

“That’s all right, dear. Come inside.”

There was a thunk and a push bar was revealed on the door’s face. Giving it a shove, she emerged into an open space that was about twenty by twenty. With inset lights in the ceiling, and concrete walls that had been whitewashed, it was like a prison cell.