Later I roll over on my back and let her rock her world all over me. Fuck if she doesn’t.

She straddles me, ass to my face, reverse cowgirl, tangled hair swinging. And son of a bitch, the woman can ride. “Slow down.” I close my hands on her ass to keep her from jacking me off in seconds.

She pushes up, drops her head down into a wet dream of a naked crouch that doesn’t have one fucking ounce of inhibition, and shoots me a feral look between her legs, around my dick. “Stop holding me,” she snaps. “You’re a control freak. This turn is mine. Do what I tell you. If that means you come and get hard again, deal with it.” She arches a brow. “Unless I’m wearing you out.”

I smirk and say nothing. She knows by now that’s impossible.

“Don’t think this means I want to see you tomorrow.” She’s back at it and I’m about to explode.

“I suffer no such delusion. And ditto,” I say savagely. She knows exactly how to work me, sliding up to the point where I’m almost out of her, teasing the head of my cock with short, fast pops of her hips before slamming down and easing back out slow. Pretty, pink Barbie fucks hard and raw like an animal.

Her head is thrown back, spine arched, she’s oblivious to rules, to moral order, to all but inner imperatives.

And I wonder: could she live like she fucks?

My dick gets even harder.

I leave just before dawn.

At the door I turn back and look at her. And shake my head. Her back is to me. She’s wrapped a sheet around herself.

“Mac.”

She turns slowly and I say Fuck beneath my breath. Already she’s changing. It began when I started putting my clothes on. Now it’s nearly complete. Her eyes are different. Wary, guarded, tinged with that human emotion I despise the most: regret. I was wrong. She wasn’t ready. Not yet.

By noon she’ll hate me. By tonight she’ll have convinced herself I raped her. By tomorrow she’ll hate herself.

I cross the room, clamp a hand over her mouth and crush my arm across her chest, compressing her lungs so she can’t draw a breath. She lives at my discretion. I can take her breath. I can give it back.

I wonder, pushed to the wall, stripped of all defenses, tested beyond endurance, just who might MacKayla Lane become?

I press my mouth to her ear. My words are soft. “Go home, Ms. Lane. You don’t belong here. Drop it with the Gardai. Stop asking questions. Do not seek the Sinsar Dubh or you will die in Dublin. I haven’t been hunting it this long and gotten this close to let anyone get in my way and fuck things up. There are two kinds of people in this world: those who survive no matter the cost, and those who are walking victims.” I lick the vein fluttering in the side of her neck. Her heart is beating like a frightened rabbit. Fear doesn’t arouse me. Yet my dick is so hard again that it hurts. I should end it here. Rip out her throat, leave her dead in her dingy, small flat. Perhaps I’ll kill her tomorrow. Perhaps I’ll chain her in my bookstore for a time. I’ll give her a single chance to run. If she stays, I am absolved of responsibility for anything that befalls her. “You, Ms. Lane, are a victim, a lamb in a city of wolves. I’ll give you until nine P.M. tomorrow to get the bloody hell out of this country and out of my way.”

I let her go, and she crumples to the floor.

Then I bend over her, touch her face, whisper the ancient words of a druid spell, and when I am done the only memories she retains of this night are of conversation and threat. She will never know that tonight she was mine.

Don’t hide your mistakes,

’Cause they’ll find you, burn you

—“Get Out Alive” by Three Days Grace

Part I

Some of us are born more than once.

Some of us re-create ourselves many times.

Ryodan says adaptability is survivability.

Ryodan says a lot of stuff.

Sometimes I listen.

All I know is every time I open my eyes,

My brain kicks on, something wakes up deep in my belly

And I know I’ll do anything it takes.

To. Just. Keep. Breathing.

—From the journals of Danielle O’Malley

PROLOGUE

Fire to his ice, frost to her flame.

The Unseelie King stared down at the unconscious woman in his wings. She was his soul mate. He knew it the moment he found her. He’d been tortured by it every moment since he’d lost her.

In the brief time they’d shared together, he’d experienced the only true joy of his existence. Before that, darkness had ebbed and flowed in him as incessant as a stormy sea. He’d thought perhaps it was because he was young and in a quarter of a million years, give or take a few, the disquiet might ease.